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Iran war taking toll on U.S. missile stockpile, analysis finds 93%
4/23/2026, 12:20:41 AM
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Today is day 54 in the war with Iran and a new analysis finds the conflict is taking a toll on the Pentagon's munition stockpile.
Let's look at the Tomahawk missile, a long-range offensive weapon.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the US had more than 3,000 of these in its pre-war inventory.
So far it's used 850.
These missiles cost $2.6 million per unit and it takes nearly 4 years to deliver.
What about defensive capabilities?
Before the war, the US had more than 2,000 Patriot missiles on hand.
Those missiles are designed to stop incoming strikes.
So far about half of the stockpile has been used.
Patriot missiles have a price tag of $3.9 million.
Let's bring in Mark Cancian.
He's a senior advisor with the Defense and Security Department at CSIS.
So, you still say the US can continue fighting this war long-term.
Why is that?
Well, we can fight this war.
At first, of course, we're in a ceasefire, so we all hope that the war doesn't ignite again and use any more munitions, but even if it began again, uh the usage of these munitions was way down from the first couple of days.
Uh for the ground attack systems uh came down because the United States established air dominance and therefore was able to use much shorter range and much cheaper munitions.
And the Iranian uh ballistic missile and drone attacks were down about 90%.
So, because the demand had come way down, we should be able to sustain that in this conflict if it should reignite.
The problem is in a future conflict, particularly against China.
How concerning is that risk?
Well, that's quite concerning because most of analysts had assessed that the United States didn't have enough munitions even before this war began.
There've been a lot of war gaming, some of which CSIS had done, some of uh which came from experiences in Ukraine showed that the usage of munitions would be very high in a conflict with China.
We didn't have enough to start with and of course now we're further behind.
It will take years to rebuild those uh inventories and to build up to where we need to be and that produces a will window of vulnerability.
Are there low-cost alternatives that the US can pursue?
I mean, aren't drones like 50K a pop?
There are some uh low-cost alternatives and for a ground attack, we have a system called Lucas, a low-cost combat aircraft, a drone that's a copy of the Iranian Shahed drone.
Uh and we've started using that.
We can use uh they're much less expensive.
They cost about $40,000 a piece and they can substitute for some of these long-range expensive systems in a high-low mix because there are some targets that the high high the expensive systems need to take out.
And then against drones, we have some counter-drone systems.
Some of them are called Coyote and Roadrunner.
We didn't have enough uh and uh we can build more of those.
Again, they're not going to be uh effective against ballistic missiles.
There you really need specialized expensive countermeasures like Patriot and another one called uh THAAD, but there are some low-cost systems that are coming online.
We need to get more of them.
Mark Cancian, thank you.
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