World War III has arrived, and we’re almost out of missiles

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marked the beginning of the world’s first truly global strategic conflict since 1945, and the U.S. confrontation with Iran, watched closely by China, now threatens to fuse those overlapping rivalries into the broadest international war of the modern era.

The trigger is that modern high-intensity warfare consumes key weapons far faster than the United States and Europe can manufacture replacements. The most acute bottlenecks are sophisticated systems: Patriot interceptors and other air-defense missiles, long-range precision weapons, and some naval air-defense missiles. The Ukraine and Iran theaters literally compete for some of the same finite inventories.