Running on Empty

The war with Iran is no longer hypothetical. American forces are engaged. Missiles are being launched. Interceptors are being expended. Precision munitions are striking targets across a widening battle space. And with every salvo, one uncomfortable reality becomes clearer: The United States does not look like it can sustain protracted, high-intensity conflict with a near-peer adversary.

This is not a budget debate. It is not an academic exercise in force planning. It is a real-time stress test of the American arsenal, and the early results are troubling. The United States entered this conflict with inventories already strained from years of high operational tempo and insufficient industrial replenishment. Now, as Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors are fired to blunt Iranian missile attacks and long-range cruise missiles are launched in sustained strike operations, the depth of America’s magazines is being measured in the only way that ultimately matters, in combat.

Meanwhile, in Beijing and Moscow, analysts are watching closely. Neither China nor Russia needs to fire a shot to learn from this war. They are observing production rates, consumption rates, congressional politics, and the elasticity of the US defense industrial base. They are calculating whether the United States can sustain a prolonged, high-intensity conflict while maintaining deterrence in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. At present, we cannot. War has a way of exposing illusions. One illusion now shattered is the notion that America can rely on small inventories of exquisite, ultra-expensive weapons to carry the day.

The Tyranny of the Exquisite

This is not the first time the United States has tried to fit its strategy to a shrinking budget and paid for it in blood. After World War II, the Truman administration imposed rigid defense spending ceilings, roughly $10 to $15 billion annually, even as the strategic environment deteriorated sharply. The Soviet coup in Prague in 1948, the Berlin blockade beginning that same year, and the Soviet atomic test and Communist victory in China, both in 1949, all signaled that the postwar order was under severe and growing pressure. But the budget ceilings held. The military was forced to make do: Units were hollowed out, equipment was deferred, and force structure was cut to fit the fiscal constraints rather than the threat. Strategy became a function of what the budget would allow, not what the world demanded.

The result was Task Force Smith, an understrength, under-equipped Army unit rushed to South Korea in July 1950 to blunt the North Korean invasion. It was overrun. The early months of the Korean War were defined by shortage: insufficient ammunition, outdated equipment, and units unable to sustain combat operations at the intensity the enemy imposed. The United States had not lost its technological edge. It had lost depth, the capacity to fight and keep fighting.

The message was clear: Merge or be left behind. The industry obliged.

The parallels to the present are uncomfortable. After the Cold War, the Pentagon actively encouraged the consolidation of the defense industry. In 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and his deputy, William Perry, hosted a now-infamous dinner with the heads of the major defense contractors and told them bluntly that the post–Cold War budget would not sustain them all. The message was clear: Merge or be left behind. The industry obliged. Dozens of firms collapsed into a handful of prime contractors. The dinner became known as “the Last Supper,” and its legacy is the narrow, concentrated industrial base the United States is now trying to surge in wartime. Then came the Budget Control Act of 2011, which imposed automatic spending caps on the federal budget, resulting in defense cuts, as part of a deficit-reduction deal in Congress. Even after the caps were partially lifted in subsequent years, the damage to procurement pipelines, production lines, and inventory depth persisted. The combination of industrial consolidation and fiscal austerity produced the same trade-off the Truman-era Pentagon had made: fewer, more expensive systems and the assumption that wars would be short enough that depth would not matter. Now, as in 1950, a real war is exposing the consequences.

The logic behind that trade-off was not irrational. Precision, stealth, networking, and cutting-edge technology give the American military decisive advantages in short campaigns. The assumption was that the United States would fight brief wars, dominate quickly, and rely on technological overmatch to compensate for smaller inventories. But high-end capability without industrial depth is a fragile foundation for fighting an actual war. When a single interceptor costs millions of dollars and requires long lead times to produce, replenishment becomes a multiyear effort. When cruise missiles are built in limited quantities optimized for peacetime budgets rather than wartime demand, stockpiles evaporate quickly under sustained fire. When the industrial base has consolidated to a handful of suppliers with narrow surge capacity, scaling production becomes an exercise in wishful thinking.

The war with Iran is demonstrating that quantity and attrition still matter. Adversaries understand this well. Iran’s strategy is not to outmatch the United States technologically. It is to impose costs, stretch supplies, and exhaust American magazines beyond our ability to reconstitute them. In a broader strategic sense, China’s military modernization emphasizes mass production of missiles and drones precisely because China understands that sustained combat favors the side that can regenerate combat power quickly. Ukraine and Russia have learned the same lesson in their own war: Modern conflict demands weapons built at the nexus of quality and quantity. The United States must internalize this reality.

The Case for Scalable Lethality

Pursuing quantity does not mean abandoning high-end systems. What the American military accomplished on the opening night of Operation Epic Fury was remarkable. The precision, coordination, and lethality of the initial strikes demonstrated capabilities no other military on earth can match. But opening nights give way to long campaigns. Days turn to weeks, and weeks turn to months. The question is no longer whether the United States can hit its targets. It is whether it can keep hitting them.

What the Pentagon must do is rebalance its portfolio. America needs more weapons that are cheaper per unit, easier to produce at scale, designed with surge manufacturing in mind, and built with supply-chain resilience. In practical terms, that means expanding production of lower-cost precision munitions, loitering drones, and modular missile systems that can be manufactured in higher volumes. It means diversifying suppliers rather than relying on the same small set of primes. It means embracing open architectures and designs that allow multiple producers to compete and increase their output.

The United States must move away from a procurement philosophy that prizes small numbers of exquisite systems at the expense of depth.

Most importantly, it means planning for long wars, not short demonstrations of force. The United States must move away from a procurement philosophy that prizes small numbers of exquisite systems at the expense of depth. In an era of drone swarms, missile salvos, and sustained strike campaigns, capacity is combat power.

The $450 Billion Imperative

This is why the proposed $450 billion reconciliation package moving through Congress is a strategic necessity, not just another political talking point. If funded and structured correctly, the defense industrial base can rebuild depleted missile and interceptor stocks, expand production lines for scalable munitions, incentivize second- and third-source suppliers, harden supply chains against disruption, and shift procurement toward volume and resilience.

There is a precise historical precedent for this moment. In 1950, NSC-68, a sweeping National Security Council strategy document, laid out the case for a massive rearmament of the United States to meet the Soviet threat. It called for dramatically higher defense spending, expanded industrial capacity, and a posture built for sustained great-power competition rather than austerity. The analysis was sound. The logic was clear. But the political will to fund it did not exist until the Korean War began. It took the shock of Task Force Smith, the near collapse of the Pusan Perimeter, and the visible inadequacy of American combat power to unlock the spending that NSC-68 had argued was already overdue.

Like with NSC-68, the diagnosis exists. What has been missing is the political catalyst to act on it. This war must be that catalyst.

The munitions shortfall in Operation Epic Fury is this generation’s version of that shock. The defense policy community has warned for years that American stockpiles are insufficient for high-intensity conflict, that production lines are too narrow, and that the industrial base cannot surge to meet wartime demand. Those arguments have been made in think tank reports, congressional testimony, and Pentagon assessments. Like with NSC-68, the diagnosis exists. What has been missing is the political catalyst to act on it. This war must be that catalyst. The $450 billion reconciliation package is not just a response to the current fight. It is the belated funding of a strategic necessity that was identified long before the first missile was fired.

But speed matters. Every week of delay is another week of depletion without replenishment at scale. The industrial base cannot be turned on like a light switch. Contracts, tooling, workforce expansion, and supply-chain adjustments all take time. And time is precisely what an active war compresses.

The timeline for rebuilding is not short. Expanding a missile production line can take years from contract award to meaningful output increases. Workforce training, supplier qualification, and tooling investments all sit on the critical path. During the Korean War, it took nearly 18 months before wartime mobilization translated into matériel reaching the front in sufficient quantities, and that was with an industrial base far broader and less consolidated than the one the United States has today. Starting after a war begins means accepting a long period of fighting from a position of shortage.

But the investment has a strategic return beyond the immediate fight. If the United States can demonstrate that it is rebuilding genuine production depth, not just placing orders but standing up lines, qualifying new suppliers, and generating output at scale, that visible capacity will become a deterrent in its own right. Adversaries watch production the way they watch carrier deployments. A country that can regenerate combat power quickly is a country that is dangerous to fight over time. A country that visibly cannot is one that invites probing. The $450 billion reconciliation package should be understood as a down payment, not the final bill. It is the starter investment that gets lines open, suppliers qualified, and workforce pipelines moving. Sustaining industrial deterrence over the long term will require follow-through across multiple budget cycles. But none of that is possible without the initial commitment, and every month that commitment is delayed is a month the current fight draws down stockpiles that are not being replaced.

Preparing for Long Wars

The war in Iran is regional, but the broader strategic shifts that are underway globally cannot be ignored. China is evaluating America’s staying power in the Indo-Pacific. Russia is assessing whether US support for European security can remain robust if Middle Eastern commitments intensify. Neither adversary benefits from direct confrontation today, but both benefit from observing US strain. If the perception takes hold that America’s arsenal is finite and slow to regenerate, deterrence will weaken and the probability of opportunistic aggression will rise. We should not underestimate how much protection our allies, and the United States itself, receive from the promise of a devastating American response to any attack. The United States cannot afford to send a different signal.

Conflicts may be regional, but they will be prolonged.

The first step of rebuilding is revisiting our assumptions about modern warfare. The central strategic failure of the post–Cold War era was assuming that major wars would be short, decisive, and rare. The emerging global order suggests otherwise. Conflicts may be regional, but they will be prolonged. They will consume munitions at rates far exceeding peacetime planning assumptions. They will test not only battlefield performance but industrial endurance and the resilience of global supply chains.

Preparing for long wars starts with budgeting for the world we live in. It means measuring readiness by not just platforms fielded but magazines filled. It means aligning procurement with wartime demand curves rather than peacetime politics. The war with Iran is the wake-up call. The depletion of American stockpiles is not merely a logistics problem. It is a strategic vulnerability. The administration must push aggressively for immediate funding while simultaneously reforming acquisition toward scalable, affordable, producible systems.

No president, regardless of party, should ever face the prospect of curtailing combat operations because the United States is running out of bullets.

John G. Ferrari is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. A retired US Army major general, he previously served as director of program analysis and evaluation for the service.

Dillon Prochnicki is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.