The Dangerous Munitions Mismatch Between America and Iran

The United States has only so many expensive missiles to send after Iran’s cheap and plentiful arms.

The American air campaign against Iran would seem to be a tactical and an operational success. The United States has struck 1,700 targets in Iran and apparently suffered only six fatalities. The Iranian leadership has been disrupted and dozens of senior figures killed, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But a price must be paid for these short-term successes, and it makes the bigger, strategic picture far less clear. The United States, Israel, and their Gulf allies are using up scarce and costly munitions at an astounding rate. These losses can’t be replenished nearly quickly enough to avoid possible global repercussions, as far more formidable adversaries than Iran—Russia and China—assess the war-fighting capacity that America holds in reserve. If they conclude that the West has burned through too many interceptors to defend itself, Russia might pursue aggressive action against NATO, or China could move against Taiwan.

Two kinds of missiles are in hot demand on the battlefield. Interceptors, such as Patriot missiles, are designed to shoot down other missiles and drones. Offensive weapons, such as Tomahawk cruise missiles, are meant to destroy targets on the ground. Both are in short supply, but the situation with interceptors is particularly dire.

The American interceptors in greatest demand are Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missiles, which are best for defense against short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, and Patriots, which are somewhat less expensive and more numerous than THAADs. Last summer, during the 12-day war, the U.S. expended roughly a quarter of its THAAD missiles in defending Israel from the Iranian barrage. Each THAAD missile costs more than $12.8 million, and American defense contractors produce only 96 a year. The Trump administration has allocated funds to increase their production to 400 a year, but this could take up to seven years. That the U.S. will use up in just the next few weeks more than a third of the THAADs that it has stockpiled over the past year is entirely imaginable.

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The situation with Patriots is somewhat similar. In 2023, the United States was making approximately 370 Patriot missiles a year. Production of these fell short of demand for many years, and then the demand spiked with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. ramped up manufacturing: Approximately 500 Patriots were produced in 2024, and roughly 650 a year are expected by 2027. Each missile costs approximately $5 million. But even with the increase in production, according to The Guardian, the United States estimated last year that it had only 25 percent of the Patriots that the Pentagon’s planning required.

Iranian missiles and drones, by contrast, are cheaper and quite numerous. Israeli sources estimate that Iran began the current conflict with approximately 2,500 ballistic missiles on hand and may be producing “hundreds” more each month, with a goal of increasing the production rate to something close to 1,000. The New York Times estimates output at “dozens” a month, but even this lower-end estimate outstrips current U.S. THAAD production by a significant margin. By one expert’s estimate, each Iranian ballistic missile costs about $1 million to $2 million to produce. Consider that in many cases, two or three Patriots are needed to down a single one of them.

Together with Russia, meanwhile, Iran has been producing Shahed-136 so-called suicide drones at a rate of about 5,000 to 6,000 a month, mostly for Russia’s use in Ukraine, at a cost as low as $50,000 a copy. These are the majority of the munitions that Iran has launched against the United States and its allies in recent days. They serve to saturate air defenses and drain supplies of interceptor munitions.

Thus, the U.S. is expending scarce resources to destroy targets that cost less and take less time to produce than the weapons used to destroy them. Iran simply has less to lose by swarming its weapons: It fired 550 ballistic missiles and launched more than 1,000 drones against Israel during the 12-day war last year. In the first 48 hours of the current conflict, it sent 186 missiles and 812 drones into the United Arab Emirates alone, while also targeting nine other countries in the region.

American planners are well aware that this is an unsustainable rate of trade, which is why both Israel and the United States have made destroying ballistic-missile launchers a top priority. The logic is that you don’t have to use a THAAD or a Patriot against a missile that cannot launch. According to the Times, Israeli officials estimate that they have destroyed 50 percent of Iran’s missile launchers. This certainly helps slow Iran’s launch rate, which in turn stanches its ability to swamp air defenses—but it does little to cut down the total number of ballistic missiles that Iran still has in its inventory and will eventually deploy.

So that’s the interceptor problem. America’s traditional long-range, precision-guided munitions, including the Tomahawk and others, cost about $2.2 million apiece and are produced in relatively small quantities. They are designed for conflict with an adversary whose air-defense systems are much more modern, functional, and densely integrated than Iran’s. In this sense, their use in the current theater is wasted: Lesser munitions could easily get through Iran’s air defenses, which have been starved by sanctions and physically battered into submission. However, early reports suggest that U.S. warships initiated the campaign with a wave of Tomahawks.

One American answer to the resource mismatch in this regard is a Shahed-136 knockoff  called the Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System, which comes in at about $35,000 to $40,000 a drone. However, its production is still ramping up, and the drones are primarily land-based (firing them from the helicopter deck of a Navy ship is technically possible but not efficient). For this reason, the Navy still relies on Tomahawks.

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President Trump has said that combat operations could go on for a month or longer. At the current rate of fire, according to Bloomberg, U.S. interceptors could run low within days. Another source claimed that Qatar could run out in as little as four days. Gulf allies are urgently seeking additional military support from the United States. Some reports suggest that the U.S. has been “stonewalling” such requests because it has urgent needs of its own. Iran’s missile-and-drone volleys are tapering off somewhat as launchers are destroyed and inventories expended, but Shaheds are so simple that Iran will likely be able to keep manufacturing and firing them in small numbers nearly indefinitely.

For the United States, nearly every action in this campaign comes with an opportunity cost in the form of what it can no longer do because it has depleted its missile stockpile. The most significant loss is deterrence. Russia and China are watching the United States spend down its missiles and are factoring that into decisions about possible offensive actions against NATO allies or Taiwan.

This is not idle speculation: The Department of Defense has warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping is preparing his military to be ready to successfully invade Taiwan by 2027. In pursuit of this goal, China has doubled its inventory of ballistic-missile launchers and almost tripled its number of missiles available since 2020. American and Japanese forces throughout the region will be subject to attack if the United States chooses to defend Taiwan. China will be keeping close tabs on U.S. munitions expenditures as it calculates whether (and if so, when) it will have enough of an advantage to assure victory. The war in Iran is likely advancing that timeline and increasing the odds that China will invade.

The draining of U.S. missile stockpiles poses a serious problem for national security. In choosing this conflict with Iran, the United States privileged likely ephemeral gains against an adversary that was a marginal threat over deterrence of peer and near-peer adversaries that have the will and the means to profoundly endanger global stability.