The Iran War Is Draining America's Missile Stockpiles — And China Is Watching

The United States has poured enormous military resources into Operation Epic Fury, its joint campaign with Israel against Iran. While the operation has demonstrated American firepower in the Middle East, it has also exposed a vulnerability that extends far beyond the Persian Gulf: the astonishing rate at which precision munitions are being consumed, and the implications for deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.

According to The Washington Post, American Navy vessels fired more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles at targets across Iran during the opening weeks of the campaign, making it the largest single expenditure of Tomahawk missiles in history. With total U.S. Tomahawk stockpiles estimated at roughly 3,000 rounds, a single regional conflict has consumed nearly a third of the entire inventory. The Pentagon has moved swiftly to address the shortfall, striking expanded production agreements with RTX, the manufacturer, to increase annual Tomahawk output to more than 1,000 per year, along with ramping up production of SM-6 interceptors to over 500 annually and AMRAAM air-to-air missiles to at least 1,900.

The strain on missile defense interceptors is equally concerning. During the 12-day war between Iran, Israel, and the United States last summer, CNN reported that the U.S. military expended between 100 and 150 upper-tier, terminal-phase missile interceptors — roughly 25 percent of the total American stockpile — in less than two weeks of fighting. At current production rates, that represents approximately 150 percent of annual global output. Lockheed Martin has since signed agreements with the Department of War to expand THAAD interceptor production, but industrial capacity cannot be wished into existence overnight.

These figures take on a far more alarming dimension when considered against the backdrop of a potential conflict with China in the Western Pacific. According to modelling from the Stimson Center, the United States would likely exhaust its entire inventory of Patriot and upper-tier terminal-phase interceptors within the first 24 hours of a military confrontation with China. The problem is not merely one of absolute numbers but of cost asymmetry: Chinese military planners have invested heavily in massed, low-cost missile and drone systems that can overwhelm defenders through sheer volume, forcing the expenditure of interceptors costing tens of millions of dollars each against threats that are 10 to 100 times cheaper to produce.

Recognizing this imbalance, the United States and its Indo-Pacific allies have begun exploring coalition-based air and missile defense architectures that could multiply effectiveness through coordination rather than sheer procurement. In June 2025, the United States Studies Centre convened a tabletop exercise in Hawaii with participants from Japan, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States to test the feasibility of quintilateral air and missile defense integration. The exercise asked teams to develop emplacement and procurement recommendations that would have a better-than-even chance of actual implementation under current political conditions — a constraint that forced difficult tradeoffs between military-technical optimality and political reality.

The challenges are formidable. The geography of the Indo-Pacific imposes extreme distances between potential defense partners. Bilateral relations among key U.S. allies remain complicated — the historical rupture between South Korea and Japan on intelligence sharing, though partially repaired, continues to cast a shadow over trilateral cooperation. Diverging risk tolerances toward China further complicate matters. Not every partner state is willing to host forward-deployed sensors or interceptor batteries that would be perceived as directly targeting Beijing.

Meanwhile, the Army is pursuing its own parallel track of expanding offensive strike capacity. The 2027 budget request includes procurement of 1,134 Precision Strike Missiles, or PrSM, at a total cost of approximately $1.9 billion. Built by Lockheed Martin and fired from HIMARS and M270 launchers, the PrSM boasts a range exceeding 499 kilometers and made its combat debut during Operation Epic Fury. The Defense Department has awarded Lockheed Martin nearly $5 billion in framework agreements to quadruple PrSM production. The missile containers are designed to be outwardly identical to standard HIMARS munitions packages, concealing their long-range nature from adversary observation — a nod to the operational realities of a potential Pacific conflict where distributed, concealed launchers would be essential for survival against Chinese strikes.

The production picture extends beyond missiles. America's two warship builders, Huntington Ingalls Industries and Newport News Shipbuilding, are already struggling to meet submarine production quotas for the Virginia-class and the upcoming Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. The AUKUS agreement with Australia and the United Kingdom adds further obligations, requiring construction of SSN-AUKUS submarines that will be critical to maintaining undersea superiority in the Pacific. Industrial bottlenecks in shipbuilding translate directly into timeline risks for the overall Indo-Pacific force posture.

The economic dimension of Indo-Pacific deterrence is also drawing attention in Washington. The Department of War acknowledged this week that mounting economic strain in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory north of Guam along critical Western Pacific sea lanes, could undermine the strategic infrastructure needed to support military operations across the region. Assistant Secretary of War for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs John Noh wrote to CNMI's congressional delegate that the department recognizes the economic headwinds facing the territory and considers it key to reinforcing the American military presence in the Indo-Pacific. CNMI leaders have warned of irreversible economic damage without federal intervention, citing falling tourist arrivals, business closures, and reduced air connectivity since the pandemic.

Australia, for its part, has dispatched naval vessels to maintain presence in the Indo-Pacific precisely because enormous U.S. military capacity has been redirected to the Gulf. The Australian government has reiterated it will not join the Iran conflict, but the gap left by redeployed American assets underscores a structural vulnerability: the United States remains a global power with global commitments, and surging forces to one theater inevitably creates risk in others.

The strategic lesson emerging from the current moment is clear. Operation Epic Fury has been a live-fire stress test of the American defense industrial base, and the results are sobering. Precision munitions that took years to stockpile have been consumed in weeks. Interceptor inventories are dangerously thin. Production ramp-ups are underway but will take years to rebuild reserves. In the Indo-Pacific, where China's massed missile arsenal presents a threat of an entirely different magnitude, these shortfalls represent a genuine deterrence gap that no single ally can close alone. Coalition defense integration, expanded industrial capacity, and creative approaches to cost asymmetry will all be necessary — and none of them will come quickly enough without sustained political will and funding commitment from Washington and its partners.