| | | U.S. NAVY/PLANET PIX/ZUMA PRESS | | Good morning. Five months into the Iran War, the U.S. military has fired a large number of missiles. | | Missiles are used offensively, to hit targets, and defensively, to intercept Iranian attacks. War requires a lot of both kinds. | | | | It can take between three and five years to make a new missile, depending on the missile, according to the Center for Strategic & International Studies. The White House and the Pentagon are pressing defense contractors to speed up this process, but there’s only so much that can be done. Making a missile is a lot more complicated than making a lawn mower. | | The government doesn’t want to reveal how many missiles it has left as is doesn’t want to telegraph to Iran (or Russia, or China or North Korea, for that matter), that the U.S. might have vulnerabilities. To be clear, these are numbers the government never wants to release, even during peacetime. Munitions stockpiles are closely guarded. (In a sign of the era we are in, if you ask high-profile AI platforms to estimate the remaining stockpile of U.S. missiles, you will get an answer. Of course, this isn’t the government’s actual data set). | | President Trump, for his part, has said the U.S. has more than enough missiles. Still, there is tremendous concern within U.S. government that if the Iran war picks up precipitously, which it easily could, this strain could become even more acute. That’s why, with the U.S. at a new inflection point in the Iran standoff, officials are wrestling with how to proceed, even if they won’t reveal the specific numbers underlying this tension. |
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