US military used up nearly half of Patriot missiles during Iran war: Analysis

The U.S. military has used up nearly half of its stockpile of Patriot air defense interceptor missiles and heavily expended six other key missile stockpiles during its seven-week strike campaign against Iran, according to a new analysis from the Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

The U.S. fired almost 50 percent of its Patriot missile stockpile; more than half of Terminal High Altitude Area Defenses (THAADs), which are used to protect against short, medium and intermediate-range missiles; and over 45 percent of its Precision Strike Missiles (PrSMs) stockpiles during the air and missile campaign in Iran, CSIS said in its Tuesday report.

Rebuilding the stockpiles of the missiles, including Tomahawks and JASSMs, precision-guided cruise missiles, to pre-Operation Epic Fury levels will take one to four years and these munitions will be critical for a potential conflict in the Western Pacific, according to CSIS.

“Even before the Iran war, stockpiles were deemed insufficient for a peer competitor fight. That shortfall is now even more acute and building stockpiles to levels adequate for a war with China will take additional time,” the report’s authors wrote.

Still, the U.S. likely still has enough missiles and bombs to keep striking and defending against Iran, but the number of leftover munitions is not enough to match up against an adversary such as China, the CSIS report said.

In early March, President Trump held a meeting with major defense contractors and later said that they agreed to quadruple the production of “exquisite class” weaponry.

The U.S. military has also used up more than 20 percent of JASSMs, over 30 percent of SM-3s and at least 10 percent of SM-6 missiles during Operation Epic Fury, according to CSIS.

When asked about the report, Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, told The Hill on Tuesday that the U.S. military is the most “powerful in the world and has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the President’s choosing.”

“As Secretary [Pete] Hegseth has highlighted numerous times, it took less than ten percent of American naval power to control the traffic going in and out of the Strait of Hormuz. Since President Trump took office, we have executed multiple successful operations across combatant commands while ensuring the U.S. military possesses a deep arsenal of capabilities to protect our people and our interests,” Parnell said in a statement. “Attempts to alarm Americans over the Department’s magazine depth are both ill-informed and dishonorable.”

Pentagon’s comptroller Jules ‘Jay’ Hurst told reporters on Tuesday that defense officials plan to expand multi-year contracts for munitions, up to seven years, to “provide stability and incentivize long-term investment across the supply chain,” as part of Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget request.

“Once Operation Epic Fury ends, the naval assets sent to the Middle East will return to the Pacific. Munitions inventories will start to recover, but restoring depleted stockpiles and then achieving the desired inventory levels will take many years,” the report’s authors, Mark F. Cancian, a senior adviser with CSIS’s Defense and Security Department and Chris H. Park, a research associate for the CSIS’s Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy, wrote.

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