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The Trump administration is vehemently disputing reporting about how diminished U.S. critical munition stockpiles have become due to the war in Iran. But their denials fail to square with the fact that many experts believed the military wasn’t prepared for a war with a peer adversary such as China, even before the conflict began.
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The U.S. military touted that it hit more than 13,000 targets around the April ceasefire, and the war has continued for months. The department no longer shares how many targets U.S. forces have hit. President Donald Trump said Thursday that the United States has “massive amounts” of munitions, while “large amounts are being manufactured and shipped to the U.S. as needed,” and “defense companies are building the largest number of plants and factories in our country’s history.”
His comments, which echo those of spokespeople for the White House and Pentagon, came in response to reporting by the Washington Post that Trump was frustrated during a meeting at Camp David, where he allegedly demanded that War Secretary Pete Hegseth explain why he had apparently been misled by him about the stockpile’s shortfalls. Later on Thursday, Trump posted on social media again, saying he is “extremely happy with the job that Pete Hegseth is doing.”
As Trump said in his first post, the Pentagon has made several framework deals in recent weeks to expand production capacity for critical munitions. But it will likely take years to get the stockpiles back to where they were before the war, depending on the specific system, and even longer to expand capacity beyond those levels as it intends.
Many but not all of the primary munitions the U.S. military has relied on for the war in Iran, including long-range ground attack munitions and air and missile defense, may be used in a future war against China, potentially over Taiwan.
There are “sizable overlaps” in the systems the military would rely on in a potential conflict against China over the island of Taiwan, Joe Costa, a former Pentagon official now with the Atlantic Council, told the Washington Examiner. He served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for plans and posture in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy during the end of the Biden administration.
“Our entire concept is denial,” Costa said. “China has to go by sea and by air over a body of water to try and land on Taiwan, and that’s their goal. We would want to deny that from happening, and ideally deter it from happening. And the way we would do that is with a sizable number of naval assets, and what we’re using” in Iran.
China’s military is widely viewed among experts as the most likely peer to the U.S. armed forces due to its recent modernization push, though it hasn’t fought in a real conflict in decades.
According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s 2026 threat assessment, China is “intent on modernizing, diversifying and expanding its nuclear posture for strategic rivalry with the U.S.,” described as the “the most active and persistent cyber threat to U.S. government, private-sector and critical infrastructure networks,” while its “rapid deployment of space capabilities positions it to use space to advance its foreign policy goals, challenge U.S. military and technological superiority in space, and project power on a global scale.”
Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Examiner, “It’ll take one to five years for the systems, the seven systems, to get back to where they were prewar, and you have to keep in mind that prewar, most analysts believe that level was too low.”
The Tomahawk Land Attack Missile is a long-range missile that’s fired from sea at ground targets — the Navy reportedly fired more than 850 of them during the first month of the Iran war alone, according to the Washington Post. It reportedly held slightly more than 3,000 Tomahawks in its inventory prior to the war, per a CSIS estimate. U.S. forces have also used more than 1,100 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles, an air-launched, long-range missile that carries a 1,000-pound payload, the New York Times reported in April. The military had more than 4,000 JASSM prior to the start of the conflict.
The military had very few Precision Strike Missiles prior to the war because deliveries only began in 2023, and they made their combat debut during this conflict. Lockheed Martin said last year it hoped to produce 400 units annually, but the Trump administration’s fiscal 2027 budget request called for a funding increase of nearly four times the amount allocated last year.
The TLAM, JASSM, and PrSM are all offensive weapons, but that’s only half the battle. The U.S. will also need to expand its capacity for air and missile defense munitions to keep U.S. and coalition troops safe in the Pacific Ocean during a time of conflict. The high cost of these interceptors makes them suitable for intercepting other sophisticated missiles but not drones, due to their cost, scarcity, and the time it takes to replace them.
The four primary interceptors the U.S. military has used and would need in a war with China are the Standard Missile 3, Standard Missile 6, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors, and the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement.
The U.S. military had approximately 2,330 Patriot missile interceptors before the war, and that total is now down to between 759 and 827, according to a CSIS report. They had approximately 452 THAAD interceptors prior to the war, had between 232 and 262 at the start of the April ceasefire, and have since replenished some inventory to roughly 234 to 278 interceptors. A CNN report earlier this week said the U.S. had used nearly 80% of its THAAD inventory. Hegseth strongly pushed back on that figure.
In 2024, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party participated in a bipartisan simulation run by the CSIS to demonstrate how the U.S. would fare in a hypothetical conflict with China. In the simulation, the U.S. military ran through Indo-Pacific Command’s expected 2028 inventory of 440 Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles within three to seven days; would run out of Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range within about 30 days; and Taiwan would expend all of its 600 anti-ship cruise missiles inventory within a week.
Readiness for a conflict with China goes beyond critical munitions to include the sustainment and maintenance of heavy equipment.
“In a China scenario, we would want carriers, we would want destroyers, we would want arm commutes,” Costa said. “All of those are being used and readiness depleted in Iran today. We would want fighter aircraft of the exact kind that are being used in Iran today, our F-18s, F-15s, F-35s. We would certainly want to have air defense interceptors because it would be under a scenario where very likely we would have to defend our own forces, whether it’s in Guam, whether it’s in Diego Garcia, Korea, Japan. All of these scenarios where we imagine China would most likely consider striking back, we would want our Patriots, our THAADs.”
Tom Karako, the director of the CSIS Missile Defense Project, said, “You look at China, they are the real winner here from what I can tell because the real worry is they’re going to look around and they’re like, ‘Well, there’s no missile defenses left on Guam, there’s probably fewer on Okinawa, wouldn’t this be a good time?’ It would be tempting for them to jump through the proverbial ‘Davidson window.'”
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The effort to expand the production of critical munition stockpiles predates the Trump administration, though Hegseth has leaned further into growing the defense industrial base and increasing defense spending.
Trump has approved military operations in Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, and Venezuela, which have exacerbated those needs. Experts point to the decision to reduce the Pentagon budget and the industrial base’s production in the 1990s following the collapse of the Cold War. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, strategists believed the U.S. would fight short, regional wars, so there wouldn’t be a need for large inventories.
