How long can the weapons stockpiles of the US, Israel, and Gulf allies sustain the continuation of hostilities? Is what President Donald Trump said, that “we have unlimited ammunition”, actually true? To Vima reached out to the US Sixth Fleet asking about weapons stockpiles for the aircraft carrier Ford’s fighter jets. The response: “We cannot comment on the status of weapons stockpiles.” Understandable — you don’t signal to Iran through the press how much longer you can hold out.
The Critical Weapons
Jerry McGinn, director of the Center for Defense Industry at the CSIS think tank, told the New York Times that “if this continues for months… we will start facing real challenges.” However, the US is not sitting idly by. On March 6, Lockheed Martin reached an agreement with the US Department of Defense for Patriot missile production and more. The deal includes ramping up output to 2,000 units per year by 2030, up from roughly 600 annually today.
At the same time, the Pentagon announced a separate agreement with the same company on April 1 to accelerate production of Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM), combining a previous contract worth nearly $5 billion with the new one, and projecting a fourfold increase in output. Lockheed also manufactures the well-known THAAD systems, many of which the US has transferred to the Gulf from the Indo-Pacific region. In January the company announced plans to quadruple their production to 400 units annually over the next seven years, up from 96 today.
As for the Tomahawks, of which nearly 1,000 have been used in the war with Iran, Mackenzie Eaglen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Post that before Operation Epic Fury the Navy had between 4,000 and 4,500 Tomahawk missiles. Raytheon, their manufacturer, is another company the White House has pressured for immediate results, and it has committed to raising production to 1,000 missiles per year by 2033.
According to the British think tank RUSI, however, it appears that “while the defense industry produces most of these munitions, it is extremely complex and difficult to scale up production quickly, meaning it will likely take at least five years to replenish the Tomahawk stockpile.”
Production Ramp-Up
Another key weapons system is the Standard Missiles used by the US Navy. Here too Raytheon is central — the US, unlike Europe, does not have as fragmented a defense industry. The company announced it will increase SM-6 (and SM-2, SM-3) missile production to more than 500 per year, a roughly 300% increase from the current 125 per year. Together with the Patriot, these are considered among the most reliable air defense systems against aircraft, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles in their terminal phase. Complicating matters is that China controls over 90% of the rare earth materials needed to manufacture all of these systems. The topic is expected to come up during Trump’s upcoming visit to Beijing on May 14–15.
US military officials are urgently pushing for increased production of these and other systems, primarily because they want to build up reserves, above all for high-intensity operations, such as a potential conflict with China, which would require vast stocks of missiles capable of hitting land, sea, and air targets, as well as robust air defenses against Chinese missile threats. The American Enterprise Institute noted in a report: “The first step in rebuilding an arsenal is re-examining our assumptions about modern warfare. Conflicts may be regional, but they will be prolonged. They will consume munitions at rates that far exceed peacetime planning assumptions. They will test… industrial capacity and the resilience of global supply chains.”
American Anxieties
This is precisely the worry for American analysts responsible for logistics at a time when the US may be called upon to confront one or multiple adversaries of lesser or equal (in the worst-case China scenario) strength. Over the past month they have been repeatedly called upon to transfer critical systems to the Middle East from sensitive regions such as South Korea, Japan, Ukraine, Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and others. Will they have these systems available if China, for example, decides the time is ripe to annex Taiwan? That is a question that has preoccupied American planners since 2011, when the decision was made to pivot to the Indo-Pacific, and it remains unanswered.
