How the U.S. Can Restore Its Arsenal

The Trump Administration has done what no previous administration attempted in directly confronting Iran. American and Israeli forces destroyed the Iranian Air Force and Navy, killed the supreme leader and dozens of senior IRGC commanders, struck over 13,000 targets across 26 provinces, and drove Iran’s ballistic missile launch rate down by more than 90%. B-52 Stratofortresses now fly unchallenged in Iranian airspace, carrying out bombing runs with impunity over a country whose integrated air defense system ceased functioning within the campaign’s first week. This pressure culminated in a ceasefire framework brokered through Pakistani mediation, representing the first serious diplomatic movement since the war began.

Though these are historic achievements, they do not resolve the structural question my previous essay raised regarding the alarming state of the U.S. arsenal. Whether Operation Epic Fury ends next week, next month, or next year, and whether it ends through negotiation, stalemate, or escalation, the United States will emerge from it with an arsenal depleted at rates that would have been unimaginable 18 months ago. The question is no longer whether the arsenal is exhausted—the question now is how the U.S. rebuilds it, and whether its political and military leadership addresses the structural failures that produced the deficit or merely writes larger checks to keep funding the existing system.

That question has a finite timeline because China and the United States Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) are watching. Every interceptor fired in the Gulf is one that cannot be fired in the Taiwan Strait. The choices Congress and the Trump Administration make in the next 12 months will determine whether the United States enters the Pacific contingency with a rebuilt arsenal or with an accounting fiction.

The Numbers Are Clear

Through the first five weeks of combat in Iran, American forces fired approximately 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles, which is roughly 25% of the entire national inventory. To put that into perspective, pre-war production stood at around 60 missiles per year, with each Tomahawk taking up to two years to build because of specialized supply chains, single-source components, and solid rocket motor shortages. Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) analyst Mark Cancian argues that replacing the missiles already expended alone will take two to three years at fully accelerated production rates.