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America’s depleted arsenal of premier offensive and defensive weapons stockpiles is undermining President Trump’s leverage with Iran.
The military’s supply of its premium long-range missiles and interceptors for key missile defense systems is nearly exhausted after more than five months of airstrikes against Iran, recent news reports revealed, constraining Trump in authorizing major combat operations against the Islamic Republic.
Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta characterized the shortage of munition stockpiles as “poor planning” by the Pentagon at a time when not only is there is a real chance of renewed attacks against Iran if diplomatic talks fail, but also when there are potential threats from Russia and China — particularly should Beijing decide to invade Taiwan.
“So, this is a dangerous moment for the United States to have these reduced stockpiles of key weapons at a time when these threats are all real,” Panetta, who was also the CIA director under former President Obama, said Friday on CNN.
The U.S. Army has used up “virtually all” of its surface-to-surface munitions, known as army tactical missile systems (ATACMS) and precision strike missiles (PrSM), Reuters reported Tuesday, highlighting worries about the U.S.’s readiness to wage warfare if more conflicts emerge in other parts of the world.
ATACMS, produced by Lockheed Martin, can be launched from highly mobile artillery rocket system (HIMARS) mobile launchers and strike targets nearly 200 miles away, carrying close to a 400-pound payload.
PrSM, also manufactured by Lockheed Martin and envisioned to replace ATACMS, are long-range missiles with a range north of 300 miles, and can be launched from HIMARS and M270 multiple launch rocket system (MLRS) launchers.
PrSM is a newer munition and was limited even before the Iran war, with the U.S. having around 90 of the missiles prior to the Feb. 28 U.S.-Israeli strikes on Tehran, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report from April.
If Trump were to greenlight an expanded airstrike campaign against Iran, the dwindling quantity of these munitions could force the U.S. military to lean more on piloted bombing missions.
Additionally, the U.S. has expended nearly 80 percent of its terminal high altitude area defense (THAAD) missile arsenal and about 50 percent of its Patriot interceptors since the Iran war started, CNN reported Tuesday.
The Pentagon had around 2,200 Patriot missiles and about 450 THAAD missiles before the Iran conflict. As of late July, U.S. forces were left with between 234 and 278 THAADs, a recent CSIS report said.
Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have vigorously defended the quantity of the U.S. weapons stockpiles, and the president warned that those leaking sensitive information regarding the number of munitions are “being hunted down.”
Experts argued that while leaks may specify the number of depleted U.S. munitions, they were never necessary to know the extent of the problem, as information about stockpiles is available in unclassified sources.
Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, said that Iran has “likely” known for some time that U.S. munitions stockpile limits would be a constraint on the military’s kinetic options.
“This likely affected their strategy: to draw out the war and simply outlast the United States. But the public coverage of this information is unlikely to have affected Iranian decisionmaking for the simple fact that it was already known,” Kavanagh told The Hill on Friday. “Do the shortages affect U.S. leverage? Definitely. Does coverage of them have any further impact? No, because Iran already knows about them.”
Ari Cicurel, the associate director of foreign policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, said Iran seeing the American reluctance to escalate militarily “gives it leverage at the negotiating table, and Beijing draws the same lesson about how long Washington could sustain a fight over Taiwan.”
“Years of procrastination across multiple administrations of both parties left U.S. magazines too shallow before the war, and closing the gap now demands sustained multiyear appropriations and expanded production capacity,” Cicurel told The Hill on Friday.
“That requires Congress to fund the multiyear munitions contracts, the Pentagon to break supply chain bottlenecks and buy cheaper munitions in bulk, and both investing in the workers who build these weapons,” he said.
Despite defense firms speeding up production of munitions, industry experts have told The Hill and other news outlets that it will take a few years at minimum for the U.S. to replenish its stockpile to pre-Iran war levels.
The dwindling supply of munitions has reportedly played a role in Trump’s decision to forgo an expanded airstrike campaign against Iran. The president has threatened such action at least five times in recent months but has not followed through.
Oman and Iran have been negotiating over the potential reopening of the Strait of Hormuz as the Trump administration has pressed Tehran to make concessions to end the conflict that has stretched for almost six months.
Vice President Vance said Saturday that the U.S. had made progress in talks with Iran but warned that Washington and Tehran are in the “middle of the game.”
“I do think that we’ve made some progress over the last few days,” Vance said on Fox News.
Iran’s top national security officials outlined a series of demands the U.S. needs to meet before the strait — through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas flow through — could be reopened.
In a statement reported by Iranian state media, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr said the U.S. naval blockade and sanctions need to be lifted. The U.S. military has to withdraw from Iran’s vicinity, Iran’s frozen assets need to be freed, and Tehran must be paid war reparations — all demands that are unlikely to be accepted by the Trump administration.
The issue of munitions stockpiles has been a recent point of contention between Trump and Hegseth. The president demanded answers from the Pentagon chief during the July 31 meeting at Camp David on why he was misled about the extent of the shortage, The Washington Post reported — coverage that the Pentagon and the White House denied.
The commander in chief defended Hegseth, saying he is “extremely happy” with the job Hegseth is doing at the Pentagon and called the reporting “fake news.”
“Pete is highly respected within the Military, and has made tremendous improvements, including getting rid of DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion], and increasing recruitment to historic levels,” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social.
Kavanagh, of Defense Priorities, said she believes the Pentagon included information about U.S. military stockpiles and the risks the war with Iran would pose when presenting options to Trump.
“However, there’s lots of evidence he expected the war to be quick with limited retaliation, so he may not have taken those warnings seriously or understood their scope and implications once the war dragged on for months,” she said.
Tom Sauer, a former Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal Officer, said part of the reason Trump has not reauthorized bombing Iran is that the U.S. military is looking to replenish some of the stockpiles.
“To give you an idea, a Columbia-class submarine has 16,000 different suppliers in their supply chain. So, like, that’s really the bigger question. And as we reindustrialize, it’s tying into your earlier story and the next story here,” Sauer, who is now a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, said during his Saturday appearance on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends.”
“But really, President Trump has the capacity to inflict tremendous damage. But if he can have peace, he’d prefer to have peace,” he added.
The Pentagon has worked on boosting weapons supply. The department said it struck a framework agreement with Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to bolster production of THAAD missiles and Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3), a surface-to-air guided missile interceptor used in the Patriot air defense system. Lockheed Martin was given a nearly $59 billion contract to triple the production of PAC-3s by 2030.
But experts warned that congressional funding is necessary to make these agreements translate into production.
“The bad news is that when you read the fine print, you very quickly realize that these are not contracts; they are agreements to agree,” Tom Karako, the director of the Missile Defense Project at CSIS, wrote in a social media post on Tuesday. “I’m seeing a lot of cheerleading and a lot of premature celebration and until we get appropriations, none of it’s real.”
The Pentagon has pushed defense contractors to speed up their production and delivery of weapons. In a Wednesday memo, reported by The Washington Post on Saturday, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg said defense leaders have up to three weeks to send over plans to “drive significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules and/or increased production for critical capabilities.”
Sean Parnell, the Pentagon chief spokesperson, confirmed the validity of the memo to The Hill, adding it will “inform the fiscal year 2028 budget submitted to Congress for funding, and it is entirely consistent with our ongoing push to rebuild the defense industrial base.”
“The fiscal year 2027 budget currently being considered on Capitol Hill could supercharge this effort today,” Parnell said in a statement.
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