Pentagon denies shortages as analysts warn of years-long replenishment gap
Allied and adversary governments are increasingly questioning whether the United States retains the capacity to enforce its security commitments across Europe, the Middle East and Asia simultaneously, following the depletion of U.S. weapons stockpiles during the inconclusive war against Iran, The Wall Street Journal reported. The concerns, shared by officials in Washington, center on what Atlantic Council senior fellow Matthew Kroenig, who served in the Pentagon during the first Trump administration, described as a shift in the deterrence equation from credibility to capability. “If you think about deterrence, it’s about capability and credibility,” Kroenig said. “The question used to be credibility—will the United States really do it? But capability is an important part of this equation. And, with all the reporting about how the U.S. is expending munitions, it’s just logical that adversaries would assume that the U.S. is less capable now than it was several months, or several years, before.”
The Center for Strategic and International Studies has estimated that the United States has consumed roughly half of its prewar stocks of missile interceptors, including Patriot and Thaad systems, and one-third of its arsenal of Tomahawk and JASSM long-range missiles during the Iran conflict, the Journal reported. CSIS estimated that approximately 800 Patriot missiles remain in the U.S. arsenal. Lockheed Martin said it delivered 620 PAC-3 MSE interceptors last year, an increase of more than 20% from the prior year.
A Council on Foreign Relations expert study released this month concluded that “the U.S. weapons arsenal has been depleted and no longer has the capacity to deter a Chinese attack against Taiwan.” The study added that Washington must immediately place mass production of precision missiles on a wartime footing because “waiting until conflict begins will be too late.” Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington, said U.S. denials of missile shortages are predictable but may not persuade adversaries. “America will never acknowledge that we don’t have enough ammunition,” Sun said. “It will assert that it has the ability to walk and chew gum.” Sun added: “But deterrence is in the eye of the beholder. What if Taiwan perceives that you don’t have the capacity and the will to defend it, and that its best option is to be coerced by China and to start negotiations over unification?”
The Pentagon and the White House have rejected the shortage assessments. In a statement provided to the Journal, chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said: “Claims of U.S. munitions shortages are false. America’s military remains the most powerful fighting force on earth. We have everything required to strike at the time and place of the President’s choosing.” Deputy White House press secretary Anna Kelly said: “The United States Military has more than enough munitions, ammo and stockpiles to serve all of President Trump’s strategic goals and beyond, and Operation Epic Fury has exposed what happens when you mess with the United States. Even still, the President has urged our defense contractors to constantly produce more made-in-America weapons, which are the best in the world.”
The Trump administration has shifted key military assets from Asia to address the Middle East crisis. Missile defense batteries and the sole U.S. aircraft carrier still deployed in the Pacific have been moved to the region, according to the Journal. The shifts come alongside a monthslong drive to accommodate China, including a freeze on $14 billion in U.S. military sales to Taiwan—a reversal of Trump’s first-term priorities. Trump has also scaled back military exercises with South Korea and described North Korea’s dictatorship as “unthreatening and respectful,” the Journal reported, even as Pyongyang deploys ballistic missiles and troops to Europe as part of its alliance with Russia.
In Europe, officials expressed deeper concerns. Retired colonel Roderich Kiesewetter, a lawmaker from Germany’s ruling party, told the Journal: “Unofficially, we all know that they won’t risk their security for the sake of the Baltic states, or for the sake of Germany. The American nuclear umbrella is gone.” Nico Lange, a former senior German defense official who now heads the Iris think tank, warned that the situation creates opportunities for Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Iran is increasingly humiliating the United States in front of everybody, while the U.S. is creating uncertainty about their commitment to European security, and the Europeans aren’t showing any will to deter Russia,” Lange said. “All this creates an opportunity structure for Putin that is extremely dangerous.”
Some analysts cautioned against overstating the U.S. decline. Michael Fullilove, executive director of the Lowy Institute in Australia, said adversaries should not test American weakness. “When people say America is weak, Vladimir Putin would love to be as weak as America,” Fullilove said. “Xi Jinping would love for China to be as weak as America.” He added: “I don’t want to be Pollyannish, but when I squint my eyes I see American strength more than American weakness.” Singaporean political analyst Bilahari Kausikan, the city-state’s former ambassador to the United Nations, said the Asia outlook is less alarming. “People will worry, of course, but these munitions will be restocked. And in the meantime, there is really very little probability of a major conflict breaking out in East Asia,” Kausikan said. “The Chinese have a huge number of domestic problems to deal with first, and with Taiwan in particular, they are not gamblers. In all the potential flashpoints in Asia, nobody thinks that a big conflict is imminent.”
The critical shortage of ballistic-missile interceptors, particularly the Patriot PAC-3 MSE, has emerged as the central vulnerability, according to the Journal. Russia alone produces more than 100 ballistic missiles per month, plus a similar number of cruise missiles, according to intelligence estimates cited by the Journal. Combined production by what the Journal characterized as an axis of adversaries—Russia, China, North Korea and Iran—outmatches Western interceptor manufacturing by several times, particularly given that intercepting a single ballistic missile often requires two or three interceptors.
The Pentagon has announced contracts intended to close the gap. A $59 billion deal announced last month with Lockheed Martin would triple Patriot PAC-3 production by the end of 2030, and a $35 billion seven-year contract would quadruple Thaad interceptor production, the Journal reported. Both contracts have yet to be fully funded. A senior European defense official described the broader industrial disparity to the Journal: “This is the existential problem: our foes think they are at war, while we pretend that we are not.” Lange added: “We in the West have made a strategic planning mistake in not calculating interceptors against ballistic missiles that are produced. We have a problem in ballistic missile-defense production, but they don’t have a problem in ballistic missile production—not in Russia, not in China, not in North Korea.”
The consequences are already visible in Ukraine, which has been left largely defenseless against Russian ballistic-missile barrages as Trump has declined Kyiv’s repeated requests for additional Patriots, the Journal reported. The shortfall has bolstered Putin’s determination to continue the war, with Moscow counting on missile strikes to destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure ahead of winter and force capitulation. In the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia and other states have opposed a resumption of full-scale U.S. operations against Iran because their own interceptor stocks are too low to protect vital infrastructure against renewed Iranian missile barrages. European nations, while developing their own missile-defense projects, remain years away from credible protection against Russian or Iranian missiles.
John Bew, who served as foreign-policy adviser to British prime ministers from 2019 to 2024 and is now a professor at the War Studies Department of King’s College London, told the Journal: “There is now a risk of an acute crisis across different theaters brought about by the shortage of interceptors and missile defense. This has immediate implications for the Gulf, of course, but is increasingly understood as a major shortfall in European defense and has potentially major consequences in Asia, too.”
The shortage reflects a technological shift in ballistic missiles. Previous generations were so costly and imprecise that they were largely confined to nuclear contexts, the Journal reported. A Cold War-era treaty that limited antiballistic missile systems—before the United States withdrew following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks—had maintained strategic equilibrium. Iran has now developed precision ballistic-missile capabilities that inflicted serious damage on U.S. military bases in the Gulf and Jordan, as well as energy and industry targets in Gulf nations and Israel. Though Israeli and American bombing has degraded Iran’s missile forces, they have not been fully suppressed. Fabian Hoffman, a senior fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, told the Journal that ballistic-missile defense has been exposed as inadequate. “In the environment of major interstate war, even substantially weaker adversaries have enough capability to hurt, enough capability to launch these ballistic missiles,” Hoffman said. “And even the United States, with all of its financial and industrial power, is not able to keep up structurally. Ballistic missile defense, as it was conceived, has just been exposed as something that doesn’t work that way in practice.”
Ludovic Hood, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who served in senior State Department positions until earlier this year, told the Journal that the shortage exposed in the Iran conflict may prove useful. “The wake-up call was necessary,” Hood said. “It’s been very easy for Western powers in recent decades to be lulled into a sense of false security. As unpleasant as it is to have to go to war, it can actually be a useful forcing function to make sure that we’ll be prepared for something much more strategically challenging in the future.”