After Epic Fury: Replenishing America’s Arsenal Won’t Be Easy

Josh Rogin/Kendrick Frankel

Washington Post 

 

 

The Iran war burned through America’s most critical missile stocks at a rate the defense industrial base cannot replace. The race to rearm is just beginning.

Key Takeaways

• In roughly six weeks of combat, the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran, known as Operation Epic Fury, consumed what independent analysts estimate to be several years’ worth of America’s production in various types of missiles, missile interceptors and other munitions. This has created shortages in Ukraine and increased delays in supplies promised in the Pacific, and the wait times for replenishment could stretch several years.
• The Pentagon and the White House have publicly maintained that U.S. stockpiles remained adequate throughout the conflict. But recently, the administration acknowledged the crisis through its actions — invoking the Defense Production Act, summoning defense industry CEOs to the White House and transmitting an $87.6 billion emergency supplemental request that includes $21 billion specifically for munitions replenishment.
• The defense industrial base faces structural constraints that spending alone cannot resolve on any near-term timeline. Supply chain constraints, insufficient manufacturing capability, workforce shortfalls and dependence on highly complex and expensive designs are challenges that cannot be solved by simply throwing money at the problem.
• • The more consequential debate now underway concerns not just how much to spend on replenishment, but what to build. Will the costly lessons of the Iran war translate into serious investment in lower-cost, more producible systems? Or will the defense industrial base continue largely on its current path?

  Introduction: Decades of munitions spent in weeks

  During the major combat operations in the Iran war, the Navy’s destroyers and submarines fired so many Tomahawk cruise missiles that the United States had expended more than it produced in a last decade, according to an independent analysis in May by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. A new report released by CSIS Monday shows that Patriot interceptors and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile interceptors, both of which are in demand across the world, were expended at a rate that has left about half of the prewar U.S. inventory of each munition depleted. 

   

  

  
   

  The Pentagon’s official and consistent stance has been to downplay the stockpile concerns raised by lawmakers, analysts and experts. “The munitions issue has been foolishly and unhelpfully overstated,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a House Appropriations subcommittee in May. “We have all the munitions needed to execute what we need to execute.” At a reporter roundtable on the sidelines of a Center for a New American Security event in June, Michael Cadenazzi, assistant secretary of war for industrial base policy, pushed back on the premise that current stockpiles could not sustain large-scale combat operations. “I think that’s fundamentally flawed,” he said. “I don’t think that’s based in fact.”

  In an interview with WP Intelligence, Rep. Pat Ryan (D-New York), a West Point graduate and Iraq War veteran who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, alleged the administration is hiding the extent of the problem. Ryan co-chairs the bipartisan House Defense Modernization Caucus, and he has in several hearings pressed Pentagon officials and combatant commanders for a detailed accounting of what the war has consumed.

  “There is still not a single classified or unclassified accounting that has been shared with the committee, despite multiple requests from members of both parties,” Ryan said. “And how do we fix this if we don’t understand what our current situation is?”

   

  

  
   

  The May CSIS analysis is among the most rigorous public assessments available, based on unclassified Defense Department budget documents, news releases and other public reporting. CSIS estimated that Patriot interceptor stocks won’t be replenished until mid 2029, THAAD interceptors stocks will not reach pre-war levels until mid to late 2029, and Tomahawk missiles stocks won’t return to pre-war levels until late 2030 or early 2031. Similar production gaps face other missile replenishment efforts.

   

  

  
   

  Since major combat operations with Iran have ended, the Trump administration has taken several steps on replenishment, even while denying the scope of the problem. On June 24, the Office of Management and Budget transmitted an $87.6 billion emergency supplemental request to Congress, of which $21 billion is designated for munitions replenishment. That same day, the Pentagon awarded Lockheed Martin a seven-year, up-to-$35.3 billion contract to quadruple production for an anti-ballistic missile weapon known as THAAD interceptor from 96 to 400 units per year.

  On June 24, the White House also convened a second meeting with defense company executives that, according to a source cited by Reuters, opened with a blunt message to the CEOs: “You’re not doing enough.” By the end, officials were calling for the companies to “get on a war footing.”

  The question now is not whether a large-scale replenishment effort will occur. The harder questions are what will be built, who beyond the established primes will be positioned to build it, and whether an industrial base that took three decades to hollow out can reconstitute and reform itself at the same time.

  “These munitions were designed in the 1970s and 1980s. They were built all about performance. They were not built to be mass produced. They’re very exquisite,” said Jerry McGinn, director of the CSIS Center for the Industrial Base. “So it’s really hard to scale them.”

  Analysis: The administration is active but the progress is slow

  Well before the first strikes on Feb. 28, the Trump administration had been working to restructure the defense industrial base and expand the roster of companies supplying weapons to the U.S. military. The administration has also taken some steps to increase munitions production, tacitly acknowledging the scale and scope of the challenge.

  For example, the Pentagon announced plans to triple Patriot production with Lockheed on Jan. 6 and to triple Patriot interceptor seeker production with Boeing on April 1. The first White House meeting with defense CEOs on the subject took place on March 6 and the second occurred last month. With administration support, L3Harris announced on April 15 a more than $1 billion Virginia facility expansion to boost solid rocket motor production, and a week later the Department of Defense agreed to invest $1 billion in L3Harris’s Missile Solutions business. 

  Significantly, on May 13, the Defense Department launched the Low Cost Containerized Munitions Program (LCCMP), which aims to produce 10,000 low-cost cruise missiles with Anduril, CoAspire, Leidos and Zone 5 Technologies. That same day, the Pentagon announced it reached a parallel framework agreement with Castelion to scale its low-cost hypersonic missiles, agreeing to purchase a minimum of 500 Blackbeard missiles annually for two years, with the goal of trying to acquire 12,000 over five years. Lockheed broke ground on a new THAAD interceptor plant on May 22. On June 3, the Pentagon published a memo on Project Patriot Pipeline, a program to speed workforce development for the defense industrial base.

  On June 11, the Defense Production Act was invoked, giving the Pentagon legal cover to convene competing munitions manufacturers in the same room to coordinate on shared bottlenecks without running afoul of antitrust law. The Pentagon’s notice stated that the U.S. military faces “systemic constraints in the munitions industrial base, including limited production capacity, fragile supply chains, long-lead dependencies, and related production bottlenecks” that “may impair the ability of the United States to produce, sustain, and expand the availability of munitions, missiles, and equipment required for the national defense.”

  Ryan gave the administration measured credit for several of these steps. He said the Pentagon’s convening of the Munitions Acceleration Council to coordinate action “makes a ton of sense,” and he called the LCCMP “a step in the right direction.” But his skepticism runs deeper than any individual program. “The inability to move from prototype to production on innovative capabilities is still the sticking point,” Ryan said. He also flagged a compounding factor that defense companies have been reluctant to acknowledge publicly.

  “Tariffs have skyrocketed costs of everything in all the supply chains, but all the defense companies are so afraid to say that publicly, for fear of [President Donald] Trump’s retribution or cutting contracts,” he said.

  The Pentagon’s industrial base chief explains the strategy.

  On June 16, Cadenazzi appeared at a Center for a New American Security event and met with a small group of reporters on the sidelines. He shed light on the Pentagon’s strategy for the Defense Production Act’s voluntary agreement authority, its thinking on the government’s first equity stake in a defense contractor, L3Harris, and his view of the bottlenecks slowing missile production.

  Cadenazzi was direct about one big challenge to missile production: the shortage of manufacturing capability for solid rocket motors, which power many of these systems. “L3Harris is the only qualified rocket motor provider for eight of our 11 [major] munitions,” he said. “That is not a choice.”

  He also claimed progress on the solid rocket motor backlog, saying it had shrunk from 22,000 undelivered rocket motors to below 2,000, with a projected full clearance by early 2027. On the production flexibility front, he described a new generation of manufacturers capable of switching between motor chemistries with minimal retooling.

  By invoking the DPA, he said, the administration is trying to create legal space for a growing roster of solid rocket motor producers — roughly 10 to 12 companies — to coordinate and share information in ways that otherwise would not be possible. “These conversations can’t happen across companies unless we provide the framework for it,” he said. “This provides that framework.”

  Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, pushed back on the timeline. “It takes time to build production lines, to expand them, to build out the supply chains that feed into these weapons. Those are things that take years to unfold,” she said. “We’re not going to see real improvements from the investments made in the next year before the end of Trump’s term.”

  The stockpile crisis is also bad for America’s allies.

  The munitions crunch has created a production waiting line and America’s allies are at the back of it. According to the CSIS missile inventory analysis, allies have purchased nearly 1,900 Patriot Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) interceptors and more than 700 earlier variants since 2020, all of them drawing from the same production lines racing to refill U.S. stocks.

  Japan’s order of 400 Tomahawks was reportedly pushed back as the Pentagon prioritized domestic replenishment. Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao directly linked the munitions situation stemming from the Iran war to the Pentagon’s inability to fulfill congressionally mandated commitments to Taiwan on specific munitions and capabilities. He later walked back the statement.

  Ukraine’s Patriot interceptor shortage became undeniable on Monday, when Ukrainian air defenses failed to shoot down a single Russian ballistic missile. Ukraine air force spokesman Col. Yurii Ihnat confirmed the failure was attributable to a critical shortfall in interceptors, noting the shortage “is not limited to Ukraine but is a global issue.”

  Elias Yousif, fellow and acting director of the Conventional Defense Program at the Stimson Center, said the long term damage from these delays is mounting. “We have planted the seed now of encouraging partners to think more critically about whether or not it is wise to depend on the United States for security if the United States is so insistent on being more erratic, more extractive, more transactional,” he said.

  The response from many allies, Yousif said, will be to accelerate indigenous production, pursue new bilateral defense agreements with each other and hedge against dependence on U.S. supply chains. The Trump administration often asks partners to build their own capacity, but that creates a catch: Washington retains less leverage over how they then build it and with whom.

  Congress will have its say, one way or the other.

  The money to replenish America’s arsenals exists on paper. Getting it into law is a different problem. Take the June 24 $87.6 billion emergency supplemental budget request from OMB to Congress with $21 billion for munitions. House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma) and Rep. Ken Calvert (R-California), who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee on defense, called replenishment a “constitutional obligation” and pledged to work through the details. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) called the request an attempt to have taxpayers “clean up” the administration’s own mess, and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) said she would not “rubber-stamp tens of billions more for this disastrous war of choice.”

  The administration parked the bulk of its most critical munitions and drone funding — including nearly all of the Army’s munitions request and the $53.6 billion drone program known as the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group — inside a separate $350 billion reconciliation package. Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) has said reconciliation may not pass until after the November midterms, if at all. Ryan called that sequencing “a huge miscalculation by the administration” that will have “devastating military consequences.”

  Both the House and Senate versions of the fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act address munitions production directly, though through different mechanisms and with different levels of urgency. The House bill authorized roughly $1.15 trillion in base-budget defense spending and directed the Pentagon to require a second-source manufacturer for solid rocket motors. The Senate version directs the Pentagon to report by Oct. 1 on the feasibility of increasing Patriot interceptor deliveries to Ukraine. Both chambers included language requiring the Pentagon to consider lower-cost alternative munitions designs when setting requirements for major weapons programs.

  Congress is also moving to restrict defense contractors from repurchasing their own stock, a measure meant to force them to reinvest profits in research and manufacturing rather than rewarding shareholders. On the Senate side, a bipartisan provision by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) would prohibit defense contractors from buying back their own stock if they are not meeting Pentagon performance standards. On the House side, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennesse.) introduced a companion bill, and Reps. Chris Deluzio (D-Pennsylvania) and John Garamendi (D-California) separately filed an NDAA amendment with a similar restriction during the House Armed Services Committee markup, but it was later withdrawn over a jurisdictional technicality.

  The business community mobilized quickly against both measures. A June 26 letter to the House Rules Committee, signed by 20 industry associations and led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, argued the Deluzio-Garamendi amendment “would create two classes of defense contractors: publicly traded firms that would be prohibited from returning profits to Main Street investors, and privately-owned contractors that can allocate profits without similar restrictions.” The Aerospace Industries Association warned it would “undermine our shared priority of accelerating defense production.”

  McGinn characterized the administration’s overall posture as distinct from its predecessors due to more government investment, loan authority, long-term demand signals, and a willingness to take equity stakes in critical single-source suppliers. “This administration has decided to really scale the effort,” he said. Whether that scale is sufficient to close a gap that took 30 years to open is another question. As Kavanagh put it, the administration’s budget request amounts to “the first payment. It’s not the whole payment.”

  Recommendations

  1. Treat the funding as uncertain until it’s obligated. The $87.6 billion supplemental and the $350 billion reconciliation package look large on paper. In practice, the coalition to pass reconciliation is fragile, the midterms are approaching, and the history of defense supplementals is that they move slower than the crises that prompt them. Companies that have made commitments tied to these budgets should understand the money might come months late or be restructured by political maneuvering.

  2. The shift to low-cost munitions is real and presents a real opportunity. New Defense Department programs like the Low Cost Containerized Munitions Program, the Family of Affordable Mass Missiles, the Drone Dominance Program and the Navy’s MACE program represent a turn away from exquisite, expensive munitions toward cheaper, faster-to-produce systems that can be expended at scale. The volumes are real and growing. The procurement model of fixed-price contracts, commercial manufacturing methods and faster qualification timelines is designed to welcome new commercial players.

  3. The ally queue is a growing business risk. There is a new structural condition in which U.S. military replenishment will take priority over allied customers for the foreseeable future. Companies with significant foreign military sales revenue should be anticipating longer lead times, potential contract renegotiations, and allies beginning to seriously diversify their supplier base. The ally queue problem is not a temporary one.

  4. Money alone can’t fix the supply chain. Even if all the money comes through, dependence on foreign supply chains — many running through China — will remain for years. For businesses, production commitments made on the basis of incoming funding need to be cross-checked against input availability. The binding constraint over the next two to three years is not capital, it takes materials, qualified suppliers and skilled workers to make it all happen.