By Mohammad Molaei
The sheer scale of munitions consumed during the Third Imposed War is without modern precedent in American warfare. As reported by The New York Times, within just the first two days of the military aggression that began on February 28, an estimated $5.6 billion worth of precision-guided munitions were expended, a sum that exceeds the annual military budgets of most countries in the world.
Over the full 40-day war leading up to the fragile ceasefire in early April, US forces struck more than 13,000 targets, many of which required multiple munitions each. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the cost of the air campaign alone reached between $11.3 billion in its first six days and $16.5 billion by day twelve.
The total cost over 40 days of full-scale military aggression, followed by subsequent hostilities in the Persian Gulf region, amounts to a far greater sum. While the Pentagon has estimated the figure at around $25 billion, independent assessments place the cost closer to $100 billion.
These figures do not reflect a campaign defined by restraint or resource discipline. Rather, they reveal a military establishment that bet its most advanced precision arsenal on a war it expected to win quickly – only to find itself mired in a quagmire of its own making.
JASSM-ER: Draining the Pacific’s first line of strike
No single weapons system reveals the strategic recklessness of so-called “Operation Epic Fury” more precisely than the AGM-158B Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile Extended Range, known in Pentagon parlance as the JASSM-ER.
This is not a conventional cruise missile. It is a stealthy, air-launched precision strike weapon with a range exceeding 600 miles, purpose-built to penetrate the most sophisticated integrated air defense systems in the world.
Its operational logic is explicitly tied to high-end war scenarios – specifically, a potential confrontation with China in the Western Pacific, where the People’s Liberation Army has constructed the most elaborate anti-access/area-denial architecture in history. The JASSM-ER is the weapon Washington designed for its most serious adversary. And it is largely gone.
At the outset of the war of aggression launched on February 28, the United States held a JASSM-ER inventory of approximately 2,300 missiles. According to Bloomberg, citing a source with direct knowledge of the matter, US forces consumed more than 1,000 JASSM-ERs in the first four weeks of the campaign alone.
The New York Times, drawing on Department of War sources, placed total JASSM-ER expenditure over the full campaign at approximately 1,100 missiles. An additional 47 were fired in a separate operation to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
The order to drain Pacific stockpiles for the Iran campaign, stripping missiles from US facilities across the continental US and repositioning them to CENTCOM bases and RAF Fairford in the United Kingdom, was issued at the end of March, according to Bloomberg.
The arithmetic is unambiguous and brutal. Of a prewar JASSM-ER inventory of 2,300, approximately 425 remain available for the rest of the world, roughly 18 percent of the prewar total. In the shorter-range baseline JASSM variant, approximately two-thirds of total stocks across both versions were committed to the Iran campaign, according to Bloomberg.
CSIS calculates that around 25 percent of the total combined JASSM inventory was expended in just 40 days of combat.
The unit cost of the JASSM-ER is $1.1 million per missile. The JASSM baseline variant costs $2.6 million per unit at current procurement figures. The roughly 1,100 JASSM-ERs fired in the recent war, therefore, represent approximately $1.2 billion in precision strike munitions, consumed in a campaign that failed to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile infrastructure, did not fracture its command structure, and did not alter the strategic balance in West Asia.
Replenishment will not be swift, as per experts. The US Air Force has procured JASSM variants at an average rate of nearly 500 per year over the past decade, and existing orders in the pipeline mean that JASSM inventories will recover more quickly than other systems; CSIS estimates “several months to a year” for baseline replacement.
However, this timeline assumes no new wars, no additional campaign consumption, and full US Congressional funding of the FY 2027 military procurement request, which has not yet been appropriated.
Tomahawk: A thousand missiles in the 40-day war
The BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) is the oldest and most combat-proven precision strike weapon in the US Navy’s inventory, having been used in every major American military operation since Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
Its versatility, fired from surface ships and submarines, capable of loitering and retargeting in flight, with a range of approximately 1,000 miles, makes it the Navy’s primary instrument of long-range power projection.
The war against Iran consumed it on a historically unprecedented scale.
The Washington Post reported that US naval assets fired more than 850 Tomahawks in the first month of the third imposed war. The Wall Street Journal subsequently updated that figure to more than 1,000 over the full pre-ceasefire campaign period.
CSIS’s analysis of the first six days alone identified 319 TLAMs expended, representing approximately 10 percent of the prewar inventory in less than a week.
The prewar Tomahawk inventory stood at approximately 3,200 missiles. The expenditure of over 1,000, therefore, represents roughly 31 percent of the prewar total consumed in 40 days, more than ten times the annual procurement rate.
The Pentagon ordered just 190 new Tomahawks in 2026, a figure barely more than half the number fired in the first six days of the war. The US Navy has requested 785 Tomahawks in the FY 2027 budget, a substantial increase from prior years, but CSIS projects these will not begin arriving in US inventories until March 2030, after 34 months of production lead time.
US Tomahawk inventories will not return to prewar levels until late 2030 at the earliest.
The cost consequences compound the strategic ones. Each Tomahawk Block V costs approximately $1.87 million. The 1,000-plus Tomahawks fired in the recent war, therefore, represent approximately $1.9 billion in naval strike capability, consumed against a country that, at the ceasefire, retained its ballistic missile launch capacity, its underground missile production infrastructure, and its ability to control shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
The allied dimension of the Tomahawk shortage adds a further layer of strategic damage. Japan, which recently completed modifications on a destroyer to fire TLAMs and had purchased 400 missiles as part of its historic shift toward a more robust conventional deterrent posture against Chinese pressure, has reportedly been told that its deliveries may be delayed indefinitely because the United States must prioritize refilling its own depleted stockpiles.
Australia has also purchased more than 200 Tomahawks, and the Netherlands has purchased 175. All of these allied orders now sit in a queue behind American replenishment needs, weakening the combined deterrent posture of the US alliance network in the Western Pacific at precisely the moment that network is under the greatest pressure.
The defensive arsenal: Patriot, THAAD, and interceptor crisis
While the consumption of offensive strike missiles has drawn significant analytical attention, the depletion of America’s missile defense interceptor inventory may carry even more severe long-term strategic consequences.
These systems, including the much-hyped Patriot PAC-3 MSE, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), and the Standard Missiles SM-3 and SM-6, are not interchangeable with cheaper alternatives. They are the irreplaceable components of layered missile defense architecture, designed to defeat the ballistic and cruise missile threats posed by peer and near-peer adversaries.
In the Pacific scenario, they are the systems that would need to protect US forward bases, carrier strike groups, and allied territory from Chinese ballistic missile salvos in the opening hours of any war. Instead, they are being consumed in the Persian Gulf.
The Patriot PAC-3 MSE interceptor, at approximately $4 million per unit, was among the most heavily used anti-missile systems in the recent war imposed on Iran.
The New York Times reported that over 1,200 Patriot interceptors were fired during the aggression. CSIS estimates that Patriot usage, combined with the ongoing supply of interceptors to Ukraine, has left prewar PAC-3 inventory at critically reduced levels.
The Army’s FY 2027 budget requests 3,203 Patriot missiles, a procurement figure that reflects the scale of the shortfall, but CSIS projects these will not begin delivery until May 2029, with full replenishment of prewar levels taking three or more years from the present.
Current Patriot production stands at approximately 650 interceptors per year, with roughly half going to allied orders. Lockheed Martin intends to surge production to 2,000 per year, but achieving this capacity requires years of facility and tooling expansion.
In the interim, the United States faces a set of allocation decisions with no good options: prioritize replenishment of its own depleted stocks, continue supplying Ukraine, or fulfill the orders of the 17 other countries that operate the Patriot system and are now watching their own deliveries pushed back indefinitely.
Swiss authorities have already threatened to cancel their Patriot purchase and seek an alternative supplier after being informed of delivery delays. The bilateral friction this production shortfall is generating with allied governments has been explicitly acknowledged by CSIS and represents a tangible erosion of alliance cohesion at a moment of acute strategic uncertainty.
The THAAD situation is, by CSIS’s assessment, the most critical of all. THAAD is the upper-tier component of the US missile defense architecture, designed to intercept ballistic missiles at higher altitudes and longer ranges than Patriot.
Its interceptors are expensive, scarce, and – as of the ongoing fragile ceasefire – severely depleted. CSIS estimates that between 52 and 81 percent of the prewar THAAD interceptor inventory was expended in the recent war and related offensives, building on roughly 150 THAAD interceptors already consumed during the 12-day war in June 2025.
There have been no new deliveries of THAAD interceptors since August 2023. Deliveries are not scheduled to resume until April 2027 at the earliest. The US Army’s FY 2027 budget requests 857 THAAD interceptors, which CSIS projects will not complete the replacement of the usage during the recent war against Iran until the end of calendar year 2029.
Compounding the interceptor shortage is the damage or possible destruction of multiple AN/TPY-2 radar systems – the targeting backbone of THAAD batteries – during Iranian retaliatory strikes on US facilities in the region.
Only 13 AN/TPY-2 radars have been delivered to the United States in total. The loss or degradation of even two or three of these systems represents a qualitative capability gap that cannot be papered over by procurement requests. The US has also maintained only eight THAAD batteries in total, a number that was considered inadequate for simultaneous deployment in multiple theaters even before the war on Iran consumed the interceptors from those batteries at a rate far exceeding production capacity to replace them.
The ship-launched Standard Missiles present a somewhat less acute but still serious picture. CSIS estimates that SM-3 expenditure in the recent war ranged from 31 to 60 percent of prewar inventory, while SM-6 consumption ran between 16 and 32 percent.
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The cost ledger: What was spent and what was not gained
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The principal expenditures, based on CSIS data and DOD reporting, break down as follows. Over 1,100 JASSM-ER missiles at $1.1 million each account for approximately $1.21 billion. More than 1,000 Tomahawk missiles at $1.87 million each represent approximately $1.87 billion. Over 1,200 Patriot PAC-3 MSE interceptors at $4 million each amount to approximately $4.8 billion. More than 1,000 Precision Strike Missiles and ATACMS, at between $500,000 and $1.5 million each, add a further $500 million to $1.5 billion.
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The combined picture across all seven critical munitions categories is that the US will not return to prewar inventory levels for any of its most critical systems before 2028 at the earliest, with Tomahawk, THAAD, and Patriot taking three or more years from the present.
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The production constraint: Why money cannot buy time
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The Trump administration has responded to the munitions crisis with a series of framework agreements with major contractors – Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing – committing to expand production capacity across the full range of critical munitions.
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Manufacturing lead time for advanced missile systems – the period between contract award and first delivery – runs between 34 and 39 months for the most critical systems. Building new production facilities, qualifying new supply chains, training additional skilled labor, and resolving bottlenecks in specialized components such as guidance systems and rocket motors are processes measured in years, not quarters.
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(Photo credit: CNN)
(Photo credit: REUTERS/AMMAR AWAD)
