Press TV

The US military is facing a “historic challenge” as it attempts to counter Iran’s vast arsenal of “low-cost” drones and ballistic missiles, says a new report.

Nearly two weeks into the US aggression against the Islamic Republic, Tehran has managed to significantly strain American military inventories, Bloomberg reported, citing military experts and Pentagon officials.

The American publication wrote that US forces have been forced to dig deep into inventories of expensive, hard-to-replace interceptors to counter the Iranian barrage.

It stated that the US and its Persian Gulf allies have fired over 1,000 Patriot PAC-3 interceptors—nearly double the annual production capacity of these weapons.

“The United States led the long-range precision strike revolution, and this is the first war where we’re seeing the adversary have that kind of capability,” Bloomberg quoted Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center.

“It’s putting stress on the system that we haven’t seen before,” Grieco added.

Iranian armed forces have been carrying out retaliatory attacks on US military assets in regional countries since the US started an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran on February 28.

Just after the US-Israeli airstrikes began, Iran launched more than 300 ballistic missiles at US assets around the Persian Gulf, “along with streams of Shahed one-way attack weapons,” according to the report.

The analysis highlighted a staggering cost imbalance. While each Iranian Shahed drone costs between $20,000 and $50,000, the Patriot missiles used to down them cost approximately $4 million each.

Furthermore, a radar for the $300 million THAAD air-defense system—the most advanced US ground-based defense—was damaged in Jordan by an Iranian missile strike.

The report said the destruction of at least seven MQ-9 Reaper drones by Iran’s 358 missiles has challenged the US “air supremacy” seen in previous wars.

It said the Pentagon spent $5.6 billion on munitions alone in just the first two days of the war.

Experts now warn that replacing these “high-demand, low-density” precision weapons could take years for the Pentagon due to limited manufacturing capacity.

“It’s a race to see will our inventories get low before the Iranian missile inventories get low,” said Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Ankit Panda of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace stated that the Trump administration “appears to have underestimated Iran’s tolerance for pain and its ability to inflict it in return.”

The report concludes by citing experts who warn that the continued depletion of US advanced interceptors remains a critical concern for Washington’s long-term military readiness as the war rages toward its third week.

Commander of the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, Major General Ali Abdollahi said on Sunday that the US and Israeli regime have always made miscalculations regarding Iran.

Abdollahi stated that the Islamic Republic is in possession of advanced weapons with high precision, which are beyond the enemy’s assessment of the country’s military power.

The general reiterated that Iran will keep the war on with the US and Israel until they regret launching the aggression against the Islamic Republic.