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SM-class, Patriot, and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile interceptors don’t grow on trees. Due to underinvestment in industrial capacity and a decline in skilled workers, stocks of these crucial air defense munitions won’t return to basic adequacy until 2029 at the earliest. This is good news for China, because Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping has told his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027.
But the shortfall also bears relevance for another topical reason: It means that any U.S. military action to end Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s regime in Iran — rather than, as is likely necessary, simply use force to further blunt Iran’s nuclear program — would further weaken America’s ability to defeat China in a century-defining war over Taiwan, perhaps decisively.
But don’t take my word for it. Listen to the two top military officials most responsible for confronting the China war contingency.
It was widely reported this week that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, has raised concerns over our depleted munitions stockpiles. In 2024, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s Adm. Sam Paparo said air defense munition expenditures in Ukraine “inherently impose costs on the readiness of America to respond in the Indo-Pacific region, which is the most stressing theater for the quantity and quality of munitions, because [China] is the most capable potential adversary in the world. … It’s a time for straight talk.”
Patriot, SM-class, and the highest-value THAAD interceptors were further depleted in 2025.
Those calling for regime-change action too casually minimize these trade-offs. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, for example, argued on Tuesday that “too many in Washington are using American weapons shortfalls as an excuse to constrain the U.S. from defending its interests.” Noting the newly developed Extended Range Attack Munition air-to-ground munition, the Wall Street Journal argues that “the ERAM is a reminder that the world’s most dynamic economy can still make the choice and muster the ingenuity to defend itself and its allies if it wants to.”
The ERAM does indeed represent a rare military production success. The ERAM testifies to a theory of ingenuity and speed that should be injected without anesthesia into the heart of the defense industrial complex. The problem is that it’s far easier to develop and surge build a weapon designed to hit static ground targets than it is to develop and surge build a weapon that intercepts extremely fast-moving air targets, some of which have extensive countermeasures. And until we have an ERAM-style air defense munition capable of bringing down new-generation cruise and ballistic missiles, as well as drones, the central question of air defense munition shortages will hold. Caine and Paparo recognize as much.
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Or take Foundation for the Defense of Democracies CEO Mark Dubowitz. He criticized my recent call for an improved nuclear agreement instead of using military force against Iran. I respect his position — after all, America’s diplomatic history with Iran isn’t exactly a testament to statecraft. Neither, however, is air power “a military magic pill.” Still, Dubowitz says that President Donald Trump “should seek the removal of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his son, other possible successors, and the senior leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to eliminate the repressive apparatus that slaughtered thousands of Iranian protesters in January.”
It’s true that those of us who oppose regime-change military action should admit the countercosts. Indeed, allowing the Islamic revolutionaries to remain in power would very likely require repeat strikes against Iran’s nuclear program. But those who support the use of force to remove Khamenei’s regime also need to be more honest about the costs involved.
For a start, a regime-change action would cause Iran to fight back harder than it has previously. It would also endanger U.S. lives and Middle Eastern stability. And even in the best-case scenario, it would require the deployment of hundreds of CIA paramilitary officers and 1,000-10,000 U.S. special operations forces into bloody ground combat operations inside Iran. Supporters of regime-change action do not like to mention this.
The security forces and political establishment have remained consolidated in support of Khamenei. Gutting the regime would mean establishing intelligence networks at the local level and conducting short-notice strikes. Even Israel’s intelligence apparatus could not do this, and its military certainly couldn’t.
And again, all of this would significantly degrade stocks of weapons systems that would be crucial to defending American forces at sea and on Guam, Okinawa, and perhaps the Philippines against saturated Chinese missile attacks.
It’s not just the munitions. America’s warships, fighter squadrons, and forward-deployed military personnel are overworked. As with the USS Gerald R. Ford’s current toilet troubles, things are increasingly breaking down under the pressure. Long deployments mean even longer and more complicated maintenance delays on the horizon. Action today in one place must be assessed with great scrutiny, in that it will degrade readiness for action elsewhere tomorrow.
This is not 2016. The Chinese military is a potent rival to the U.S. military. Recognition of trade-offs isn’t the mark of an appeaser.
Interviewed on Hugh Hewitt’s show this week, retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior director, expertly documented the flexibility that Iran-related U.S. military deployments now afford the president. But Montgomery failed to mention how these deployments and possible combat operations come at the expense of future capability.
Yes, the desire to see the Iranian regime vanquished into the history books is obvious. This evil regime has the blood of hundreds of Americans on its hands. It seeks to destabilize U.S. allies from Amman to Riyadh to Jerusalem. It seeks to kill Jews from Buenos Aires to Bulgaria. It restrains democratic progress and sectarian cooperation in Baghdad and Beirut. Nevertheless, Trump has a responsibility to balance America’s great but limited military power against the entire threat ledger. Today, that ledger suggests that U.S. regime-change operations against Iran are only justifiable from the Israeli security perspective.
Israel’s perspective is wholly understandable. Iran is run by fanatical antisemites who would view the prospect of a second nuclear-edged Holocaust as spring cleaning for the return of the Mahdi, an ordained servant of the Prophet Mohammed. But Iran presently lacks the near-term means to carry out such an attack. The U.S. could ensure Iran remains unable to effect that second Holocaust by using military force. From a U.S. interest perspective, Iran’s threat can today be best managed by a mix of diplomacy, aggressive CIA action, and occasional military strikes.
In contrast, China poses an immediately profound and systemic threat to America. Comparing Iran’s threat to China is like comparing the threat of a black rat snake to that of a black mamba. Beijing is surging its production of advanced warships and missile systems that rival or even overmatch the smaller number of similar U.S. capabilities.
And, though paranoid, Xi views the conquest of Taiwan and America’s expulsion from the Western Pacific as a prerequisite for his and the CCP’s shared destiny. Xi’s military, now utterly subjugated under his singular authority, possesses the credible means of defeating the U.S. military in full-scale war. Indeed, the risk of scaled U.S. Navy deployments such as those currently underway in Iran is that China could blockade or otherwise attack Taiwan before the U.S. military could deploy. The Chinese military is working hard to shrink the so-called “warning time” that the United States would have to anticipate an imminent Chinese attack.
China’s military power makes Iran’s look ludicrous. Xi has thousands of drones and ballistic and cruise missiles at his fingertips. He has sixth-generation combat aircraft, undersea forces strengthened by years of Russian naval instruction, and space-based systems designed to overwhelm both their U.S. military and civilian counterparts. China also has the capacity to smash U.S. utilities networks on American soil. Put simply, a China war would be the likes of which Americans have not seen since 1945. That parallel applies equally to the stakes involved.
Should Taiwan fall, China would seize control over the South and East China Sea trade routes. Control over these waters would allow China to extract political obedience from treaty U.S. allies in Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, all the way down to Australia. The U.S. would also lose its global credibility as the world’s superpower, as nations from the United Kingdom to Uganda to Uruguay chose to defer to Beijing’s economic and political demands. In return for continued trade, nations would close their eyes to China’s varied and perverse epidemics of economic dumping, industrial espionage and technology capture, overfishing, human rights abuses, and military intimidation. China would steamroll its way to 21st-century dominion.
This would be a world in which America and our allies would be poorer and less free. A world in which the Chinese Communist Party is increasingly able to treat the rest of us as it treats its own oppressed and brutalized people. It’s a world worth resisting.
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The Islamic Republic of Iran is a nest of pests that must be contained and, when necessary, stamped out. Communist China is a den of apex predators that requires unceasing, absolute priority attention.
The latter threat must not be allowed to triumph.
