Four days into war with Iran, at least one of the United States’ Gulf allies is already running low on crucial interceptor munitions used to defend against Iranian missile and drone attacks, two sources told CNN.
“It’s not panic yet, but the sooner they get here the better,” one regional source told CNN, referring to a request their government made to the US for more interceptors.
That mirrors concern across the region, including in Israel, about the stockpile of weapons needed to defend against Iranian attacks, especially as President Donald Trump has floated an extended timeline for the campaign. Speaking at the White House on Monday, Trump said the war was initially “projected” to last “four to five weeks” but added the US military has the “capability to go far longer than that.”
Qatar has enough interceptors for a long period of time but is still in touch with the US military’s Central Command in case the Qataris need to ask for more interceptors, a Qatari source told CNN, declining to specify what that time period was.
Before the war began, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine and other military leaders warned Trump that a protracted military campaign could impact US weapons stockpiles – particularly those that support Israel and Ukraine, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
The US has been “burning” through long-range precision-guided missiles over the last several days, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Now that the war is expanding, it’s a numbers game: How many interceptors will the US and its regional allies need to continuously shoot down Iranian missiles and how many, if any, of those weapons will need to be redirected from other stockpiles earmarked for US forces in the Pacific? US rivals like China will be watching closely.
“Each intercept represents hundreds of hours of training, readiness, and technology all coming together to work as designed,” Caine said at a press briefing on Monday on the US-Israel military operation against Iran.
Later that day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Iran is “producing, by some estimates, over 100 of these missiles a month. Compare that to the six or seven interceptors that can be built a month.” He added that destroying Iran’s missile capacity is the goal of the US campaign.
In a post on Truth Social Monday night, Trump appeared to respond to concerns over dwindling stockpiles. He wrote that US munitions stockpiles “at the medium and upper medium grade” have “never been higher or better,” adding that the US has a “virtually unlimited supply of these weapons.”
“Wars can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully, using just these supplies,” Trump continued. He didn’t specify exactly which munitions he was referring to.
“At the highest end, we have a good supply, but are not where we want to be,” Trump said. He then criticized President Joe Biden for “giving” away “so much of the high end” to Ukraine in support of the country’s defense against Russian attacks. Biden administration officials often cited concern over depleting US stockpiles as a reason for their initial hesitancy in providing Ukraine with certain long-range air defense and strike munitions.
Trump told Politico in an interview Tuesday that “The defense companies are on a rapid tear to build the various things we need. They’re under emergency orders.”
Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of US Central Command, released a video statement on Tuesday evening, saying in part that the US military had struck nearly 2,000 Iranian targets with more than 2,000 munitions.
“We have severely degraded Iran’s air defenses and destroyed hundreds of Iran’s ballistic missiles, launchers and drones,” Cooper added.
He acknowledged that the Iranian military had launched more than 500 ballistic missiles and over 2,000 drones in response to the US and Israeli attacks.
“We are seeing Iran’s ability to hit us and our partners is declining, while our combat power, on the other hand, is building,” Cooper claimed.
On Capitol Hill, Democrats are growing increasingly uneasy about the amount of munitions that have already been used and what it could mean for US defense in the Middle East and beyond.
“The Iranians do have the ability to make a lot of Shahed drones, ballistic missiles, medium range, short range and they’ve got a huge stockpile,” said Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. “So at some point … this becomes a math problem and how can we resupply air defense munitions. Where are they going to come from?”
Democrats believe the ongoing conflict raises the stakes that sooner rather than later, the administration will need to come to Congress to ask for supplemental funding.
Defensive supplies for Gulf allies
The immediate concern is the stock of defensive weapons held by Gulf allies, not the US.
In the war’s early days, Gulf countries such as Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have in general tried to shoot down every missile or drone from Iran. Still, some have gotten through. An Iranian drone struck a high-rise residential building in Bahrain, causing a fiery explosion. Other Iranian drone strikes damaged two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE.
The munitions crunch might force a change in tactics for Gulf countries, according to Becca Wasser, defense lead for Bloomberg Economics, who said that eventually they may have to become “more selective” in what they target, potentially focusing on shooting down things like large swarms of drones or short-range ballistic missiles.
The potential strain on Gulf countries’ defenses is prompting other US allies to step in.
The UK is flying aircraft from Cyprus and Qatar to intercept drones and missiles, a senior British official told CNN this week. The stock of missiles, launchers and interceptors will be a critical factor determining the length of this war, the official added.
Even a relatively short war can significantly deplete the American missile supplies: The US blew through about a quarter of its supply of high-end Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, missile interceptors during Israel’s 12-day war with Iran last June, thwarting attacks at a rate that vastly outpaces production, CNN previously reported. The American-made THAAD mobile antimissile system launches from a vehicle, with eight interceptors per launcher vehicle.
The Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, estimated that in 2025, the US fired up to 20% of the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) interceptors it was expected to have on hand, and between 20% to 50% of THAAD missiles.
The report added that THAAD expenditures were “concerning,” as delivery data suggests that the US is firing THAAD missiles at a higher rate without increasing production to match.
‘Ahead of the problem’
Before launching the attack on Iran over the weekend, one of the Trump administration’s biggest reckonings with the limits of US munition stockpiles involved Ukraine. Last July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth paused a weapons shipment to Ukraine amid a US review of military aid. Hegseth was acting on a memo from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, who has previously pushed to preserve more of the US stockpiles for a potential future war with China.
Colby, during a hearing with lawmakers Tuesday, responded to concerns about depleting weapons stockpiles for other potential conflicts. “I think we need to work hard on the defense-industrial complex, but nobody should get the wrong impression – we’re ahead of the problem,” Colby said.
Any potential sustained US war with China faces daunting math. A study released in January by the Heritage Foundation, another think tank, found that the “initial stock” of US munitions would run out within 25 days of a high-intensity conflict with China.
“U.S. forces will almost certainly be forced to enter the main phase of combat around Day 30 in a logistically degraded state, ultimately leading to systemic operational failure as platform losses, fuel bottlenecks, and munitions demand converge,” the report says.
But now that the US has air superiority in its conflict with Iran, “There’s not quite such a need for the higher end, very high-end long-range standoff weapons,” said retired Col. Mark Gunzinger, the director of future concepts and capability assessments at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies think tank and a former bomber pilot.
“We can use JDAMs, Joint Direct Attack Munitions, against targets from much shorter ranges,” Gunzinger said. “We have a much, much larger stockpile – tens of thousands certainly – of JDAMs and small diameter bombs.” The precision-guided munitions have a range of up to 40 miles.
Gunzinger said there was greater concern for air-defense munitions running low because they have been “under-resourced for decades.”
“Do we have enough? I think we do,” Gunzinger said of the conflict with Iran. “But I would be more concerned with some of our inventories of Patriot missiles, THAADs and others.”
Gunzinger added that ongoing offensive operations by the US could continue to limit Iran’s ability to fire its own missiles, and therefore, reduce the tax on air defense munitions.
The US and its allies could also save some of their more high-end air defense munitions by taking down Iranian drones with less expensive alternatives, Gunzinger said.
Frank Kendall, the Air Force secretary under Biden, said that, in general, he wasn’t yet worried about depleting US munitions in the current conflict with Iran.
“We can throttle which weapons we use to try to keep the ones that are more critical to us in the Pacific in suitable quantities,” Kendall told CNN. “The Pentagon will monitor all that and they’ll limit what gets used because of other considerations.”
But Kendall said concerns about US munitions could mount if the war drags on or involves American troops on the ground – an option that Trump wouldn’t rule out on Monday.
Longer-range precision weapons can be effective in a war like the one with Iran, Kendall said.
“These are the more expensive sophisticated weapons we don’t have as large a stockpile of,” he added. “Drawing these down substantially would increase risk in other theaters.”
The current conflict follows American military operations against the Houthis and Iran last year. Taken together, the bombing campaigns are taking a toll on the arsenal of US munitions.
The effort to build up supplies of interceptors for air defenses – known in Pentagon speak as “US magazine depth” – is “a nascent effort only just now getting underway,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “There will be a few quick wins, but for the most part, the effort to arrest the overall decline in munitions and rebuild stocks faster than they’re being expended in global operations will take one to three years.”
