America’s Military Is Focused on Iran. Its Biggest Challenge Is China.
Trump’s war in the Middle East is the latest campaign that has drained missile stockpiles and stretched American forces thin
March 7, 2026 The Wall Street Journal
The next year, more batteries and hundreds of soldiers followed—73 planeloads on large C-17 aircraft. Crews from South Korea and Japan, otherwise training to fight China and North Korea, found themselves in Qatar in June, firing round after round of interceptors—the single largest Patriot engagement in U.S. history. They returned to Asia in late October.
The U.S. military sees China as its toughest challenge, but Washington has struggled to pick its battles. President Trump’s war against Iran is the latest example.
The escalating conflict, which could rage on for weeks, has drawn U.S. warships and aircraft from ports and bases around the world. American forces have expended enormous firepower already—more than 2,000 munitions against nearly as many targets in the first 100 hours of the conflict, according to Central Command, or Centcom, which oversees operations in the region. That includes bombs that are plentiful and easy to replace, but also high-end missiles that aren’t.
Soldiers are burning through air-defense interceptors to fend off Iranian missile and drone attacks. U.S. Navy destroyers have fired volleys of Tomahawk missiles, which can hit targets more than 1,000 miles away.
“It has been a recurring pattern that Centcom uses the long-range missiles that Indo-Pacom is going to need on a bad day,” said Tom Karako, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We have enough munitions to defeat Iran. The problem is how it begins to cut into our need to deter China.”
China is a formidable rival, with one of the world’s biggest missile arsenals, a large naval fleet and unrivaled manufacturing might. It aims to absorb Taiwan and hasn’t ruled out the use of force to do so—a contingency America’s military and defense industrial base are struggling to prepare for.
If Beijing ordered an invasion and America decided to fight, U.S. troops would need mountains of munitions to strike Chinese ships crossing the Taiwan Strait and shoot down Chinese barrages.
China’s capabilities are “an order of magnitude more challenging” than Iran’s, said Michael Horowitz, who served as U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Biden administration. “Think everything Iran has at the lower end plus a huge quantity of higher-end weapons as well that would require even more substantial air defenses to defeat.”
U.S. stockpiles, however, have been under strain from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Asked about that in 2024, Indo-Pacific Commander Adm. Samuel Paparo said the use of high-end missiles was eating into stocks. Drawing from a common pool for conflicts in other parts of the world “inherently imposes costs on the ability of America to respond in the Indo-Pacific region,” he said, calling it the “most stressing theater.”
“We should replenish those stocks, and then some,” he said.
That hasn’t happened. Instead, the U.S. has continued to use up missiles, in some cases at a faster rate than they are being produced. During the 12-day war with Iran last year, it moved two Thaad air-defense systems to Israel and fired more than 150 missiles to shoot down Iranian ballistic missiles—nearly a quarter of the interceptors ever purchased by the Pentagon.
When assets assigned to his region were sent for months to the Middle East last year, Paparo said he was watching closely for “warnings and indications” in the Indo-Pacific that could require those forces to be rushed back for “a crisis with greater exigence.”
For years, the U.S. has said it would shift its attention to Asia, but has remained bogged down elsewhere. Many defense strategists now in the administration took office last year arguing America was spread too thin and needed to focus sharply on China.
Elbridge Colby, now undersecretary of war for policy, criticized the Biden administration for sending munitions to Ukraine. In a 2024 post on X, he argued that being active and dominant everywhere has hidden costs, including overusing the U.S. military and stretching limited stockpiles.
“An overstretched military is not as ready for a Chinese attack in the Western Pacific,” he said.
Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday, Colby said the Iran campaign had the “reasonable and attainable” objectives of degrading and destroying the country’s ability to project military power. On Asia, he said the U.S. was committed to denying aggression along the first island chain, which includes Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines.
Tony Hu, who worked on Asia-Pacific security affairs at the Pentagon and as a representative in Taiwan for the U.S. defense company Raytheon—which is now known as RTX—said he was concerned the U.S. could reach for war reserves not only from its Middle East and Europe inventories but also stocks in the continental U.S.
“Those are also intended to support contingencies in Asia,” he said. “Are we letting the pursuit of this short-term tactical success affect our ability to sustain strategic deterrence against China?”
Asia and the western Pacific is home to two of the U.S. military’s eight operational Thaad batteries—one in South Korea, and the other in Guam—each made up of six truck-mounted launchers that can be loaded with a total of 48 interceptors. U.S. forces in South Korea also maintain two Patriot battalions, in addition to the one in Japan. A battalion typically operates four batteries, each carrying as many as 128 interceptors.
The South Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese militaries also have their own Patriot batteries, but they are competing with U.S. missile defense units for supplies of interceptors. Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which manufactures Patriot interceptors under license from Lockheed Martin for use by Japan’s military, has been exporting some production to the U.S. to replenish drained American stockpiles.
The Pentagon is scrambling to reload. In January, it signed deals with Lockheed Martin to dramatically expand annual production capacity for interceptors, from 96 to 400 for Thaad and from 600 to 2,000 for Patriot systems. The increase is expected to happen over seven years.
It isn’t just missile defense. As tensions with Iran rose mid-January, the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and its strike group, which had been conducting routine exercises in the South China Sea, was directed to sail to the Middle East. Another carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, was likewise ordered from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East last summer during the previous flare-up with Iran.
The deployment of the Navy’s largest warship, the USS Gerald R. Ford, has twice been extended as it pingpongs between operations. It was redirected from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean in October, when Trump was trying to build pressure on Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. Earlier this year, it was moved back across the Atlantic Ocean to support operations against Iran.
“There’s going to be wear and tear on the Navy that’s going to be difficult to recover from very quickly,” said Thomas Shugart, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. With American shipyards overstretched, the Navy’s maintenance readiness is already a problem, he said.
“None of this is going to make that any easier,” Shugart said.
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