During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing this spring, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona pulled up the Pentagon’s own budget numbers and pressed defense officials with a blunt question: does the money you’re asking for actually match what we fired? The exchange, captured in a committee video and transcript, cut to the core of a problem the Pentagon has not yet solved. The war with Iran consumed Tomahawk cruise missiles, Patriot interceptors, and THAAD rounds at a rate that far outstripped what American factories can produce, and the resulting shortfall will take at least three years to close.
That timeline comes from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which assessed that restoring inventories of all three systems to pre-conflict levels will require three years or more based on current and projected production rates. The FY2027 defense budget request confirms the math: missile procurement funding is spread across multiple fiscal years, and nothing in the submission accelerates production lines fast enough to refill magazines before 2029 at the earliest.
Until then, combatant commanders will plan operations with fewer precision weapons than the Pentagon considers adequate for a second major conflict.
The burn rate versus the build rate
The mismatch is straightforward. U.S. forces launched large salvos of Tomahawks against Iranian targets, expended Patriot PAC-3 interceptors defending bases and allied territory, and fired THAAD rounds against ballistic missile threats. Each of those weapons costs millions of dollars and takes months to assemble, test, and deliver. Tomahawk production at RTX (formerly Raytheon) and THAAD interceptor manufacturing at Lockheed Martin both depend on specialized components, limited supplier networks, and production lines that were already running below wartime demand before the first shots were fired.
Exact expenditure figures remain classified. The Pentagon has not released an unclassified after-action accounting of how many rounds were used, and current on-hand inventory levels are treated as operationally sensitive. Independent analysts are left estimating the depth of the hole by subtracting reported strike volumes from pre-war baseline estimates, a method that introduces real uncertainty. The CSIS three-year figure should be understood as an informed projection, not a hard deadline.
What is not uncertain is the direction. Every public indicator points the same way: down.
Allies are already feeling the squeeze
The supply crunch has moved beyond Pentagon spreadsheets and into the foreign policy arena. In mid-May 2026, the United States formally notified Switzerland that a scheduled Patriot delivery would be delayed and would cost more than the original agreement, according to Reuters. Switzerland is a NATO-aligned buyer that had already committed funds. The notification signals that Washington is prioritizing domestic replenishment over foreign military sales, forcing a choice between refilling its own magazines and honoring export contracts.
That choice will be watched closely by every country holding a letter of offer and acceptance for U.S. air and missile defense systems. Each slipped delivery date or price increase nudges buyers toward European or Asian alternatives. For Washington, the risk is not just commercial. Security relationships built on shared equipment, interoperable logistics, and joint training erode when the supplier cannot deliver on time.
Japan, which co-produces certain Patriot components under license, represents one potential relief valve. But scaling allied production to meaningfully offset the U.S. shortfall would require new agreements, additional investment, and time that the current gap does not offer.
Why the budget doesn’t close the gap
Kelly’s hearing-room challenge reflected a concern shared across party lines: the administration’s budget request may be built on peacetime production assumptions that no longer apply. The FY2027 submission funds missile procurement at rates that represent a ramp-up from prior years, but not a surge. Multi-year contracts and capital investments in new production capacity could shorten the timeline modestly, yet neither RTX nor Lockheed Martin has announced binding commitments tied to specific delivery dates in connection with this budget cycle.
Congress could add money above the president’s request. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have signaled interest in plus-ups to missile procurement accounts during the markup process. But as of late May 2026, no committee report or markup language had been finalized. Until appropriators act, the budget request functions as a ceiling on production funding, not a floor.
There is also a bottleneck problem that money alone cannot fix. Solid rocket motors, guidance electronics, and seeker assemblies depend on a small number of sub-tier suppliers. Even with unlimited funding, those suppliers need time to hire workers, qualify new facilities, and ramp output. The defense industrial base was not designed for the kind of rapid replenishment that a high-intensity conflict demands, a structural weakness that the Ukraine-era drawdowns had already exposed before the Iran war compounded it.
What this means for deterrence
U.S. military doctrine depends on the ability to launch large volumes of precision-guided munitions early in a conflict. Tomahawks suppress enemy air defenses and strike command nodes. Patriots and THAAD batteries protect forward bases and allied population centers. Running a multi-year shortfall in all three systems limits that playbook in concrete ways.
In a crisis involving a peer adversary, commanders would face harder trade-offs: which targets to strike first, how much missile defense coverage to allocate to allies versus U.S. forces, and whether to hold weapons in reserve for a second wave that might never come. Those are not hypothetical dilemmas. They are the planning realities that combatant commands are working through right now with constrained inventories.
The political dimension is equally sharp. The gap exposes a tension between fiscal discipline and credible deterrence. Every dollar routed to missile replenishment is a dollar not spent on shipbuilding, nuclear modernization, or personnel. If Congress ultimately funds higher production rates, it will amount to an admission that pre-war assumptions about industrial base responsiveness were too optimistic, and that the cost of the Iran campaign extends well beyond the munitions that were fired.
The milestones that will tell the real story
Three developments over the next 12 months will determine whether the three-year estimate holds, shrinks, or stretches further.
First, the congressional markup of the FY2027 defense bill. If appropriators add significant funding to Tomahawk, Patriot, and THAAD production lines above the president’s request, it will signal a bipartisan judgment that the deficit is strategically unacceptable. If they do not, the current timeline stands.
Second, industry action. Multi-year procurement contracts, capital investment announcements, or new sub-tier supplier agreements from RTX and Lockheed Martin would indicate that the production base is expanding. Silence, or reports of workforce shortages and supply-chain delays, would suggest the opposite.
Third, operational demand. Every unplanned salvo of interceptors or cruise missiles, whether in a new crisis or an escalation of existing tensions, resets the replenishment clock. Production must not only replace what was used in the Iran war but also keep pace with whatever comes next.
For now, the public record supports a clear if uncomfortable conclusion: the United States burned through key missile stocks faster than it can rebuild them, the official budget does not close the gap quickly, and allies are already absorbing the consequences. The precise inventory numbers remain behind classification walls. But the combination of budget documents, congressional pressure, and real-world delivery delays all point in the same direction. American planners and American partners will be operating with a thinner margin of precision firepower than U.S. strategy has long taken for granted, and that margin will not recover before the end of the decade.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
