When the last Tomahawk cruise missile left its launcher during the final wave of strikes against Iran, it did not just hit a target. It deepened a hole in America’s weapons inventory that the Pentagon now admits it cannot fill for at least three years. A new analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, reported by the Associated Press, concludes that U.S. stockpiles of Tomahawk cruise missiles, Patriot PAC-3 MSE interceptors, and THAAD missile defense rounds were drawn down so heavily during the Iran conflict that current production lines cannot restore them to pre-war levels before 2029 at the earliest.
The shortfall is not theoretical. It is already forcing the Pentagon to ration what remains across three combatant commands, delaying deliveries to allied buyers, and handing adversaries in Beijing and Moscow a real-time window into how thin American magazines have become.
What the CSIS assessment actually says
CSIS, one of Washington’s most established defense policy institutions, built its estimate by measuring wartime consumption against known production capacity for each of the three weapon systems. The Tomahawk, a subsonic land-attack cruise missile manufactured by RTX (formerly Raytheon), has been in production for decades, but its assembly line was never designed for wartime surge rates. The Patriot PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhanced (MSE), jointly produced by RTX and Lockheed Martin, is the U.S. military’s primary air and missile defense interceptor. The THAAD interceptor, built by Lockheed Martin, is a hit-to-kill weapon that destroys incoming ballistic missiles in the upper atmosphere and relies on specialized components with lead times measured in years, not months.
The think tank’s headline finding, a minimum three-year replenishment window, assumes that production holds at current rates and that no new large-scale conflict forces another drawdown. CSIS has not published its full dataset or methodology, so independent analysts cannot yet determine whether the estimate is conservative or optimistic. But the figure has not been publicly disputed by the Department of Defense, and it aligns with what defense industrial base experts have warned about since the Ukraine-era drawdowns first exposed how slowly the U.S. replaces precision munitions once they are expended in volume.
Congress sounds the alarm
The political fallout arrived quickly. During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in May 2026, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a Democrat and former Navy combat pilot, pressed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on the munitions burn rate. Kelly, whose office published a summary of the exchange, challenged Hegseth on how fast weapons were consumed, how the administration plans to pay for replacements, and whether the current defense budget proposal accounts for the gap.
Hegseth acknowledged that stocks are under strain but did not offer specific inventory figures or a detailed replenishment schedule. That combination of concession and vagueness frustrated lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Appropriators on the committee signaled they will demand production timelines before approving new spending, setting up a confrontation over the fiscal year 2027 defense budget markup that could determine whether the three-year window shrinks or stretches.
The hearing also underscored a lesson the Pentagon learned during the effort to backfill weapons sent to Ukraine starting in 2022: money alone does not solve production bottlenecks. Solid rocket motor manufacturing, specialized seeker electronics, and the skilled labor needed to assemble interceptors all impose physical limits that emergency funding cannot instantly overcome. Congress can authorize multi-year procurement contracts and invest in supplier capacity, but factories do not scale overnight.
Allies are already paying the price
The inventory crisis has crossed the Atlantic. In mid-May 2026, the United States formally notified Switzerland that deliveries of Patriot air defense systems would be delayed and that prices would increase, according to Reuters. Switzerland had signed on for Patriots as part of a major modernization of its air defenses, and the notification forced Bern to recalculate both its budget and its timeline.
The Swiss case matters beyond Switzerland. If Patriot production is being redirected to refill American magazines first, every other country in the foreign military sales queue faces the same risk. NATO members in Eastern Europe that accelerated Patriot orders after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Indo-Pacific partners watching China’s military buildup, will want to know where they stand. The Pentagon has not publicly addressed how it is prioritizing domestic replenishment against allied deliveries, leaving partner nations to guess whether Switzerland is an outlier or the first visible case in a broader reprioritization.
For Washington, the credibility stakes are high. The United States has spent years urging allies to increase defense spending and buy American-made systems. Telling those same allies to wait longer and pay more undercuts the sales pitch at exactly the moment when demand for air and missile defense is surging worldwide.
What we still do not know
Several critical pieces of the picture remain classified or simply undisclosed as of late May 2026:
- Exact expenditure numbers. How many Tomahawks, PAC-3 MSEs, and THAAD interceptors were fired during the Iran conflict has not appeared in any unclassified document. Without those figures, no one outside the Pentagon can independently verify the three-year estimate.
- Current production rates. Monthly output for each weapon system is classified. Senator Kelly’s questioning pointed toward official data, but the hearing transcript does not include unit-per-month figures.
- Surge capacity. Whether RTX and Lockheed Martin have received surge orders, activated reserve production lines, or identified bottlenecks they can break with additional investment has not been confirmed in open sources.
- Theater allocation. Commanders in Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Gulf must decide how to distribute a smaller pool of interceptors. No public planning documents reveal how those trade-offs are being made or how thin forward-deployed stocks have become.
- Broader allied impact. Beyond Switzerland, no other country has publicly confirmed receiving delay or price-increase notifications, though defense procurement officials in several NATO capitals have privately expressed concern to reporters.
Why the next six months will be decisive
The fiscal year 2027 defense appropriations markup, expected to move through committee in the coming months, will be the clearest signal of how seriously Congress treats the shortfall. Lawmakers can fund accelerated production, mandate quarterly inventory reporting, or lock in multi-year contracts that give manufacturers the certainty they need to expand capacity. If appropriators treat the gap as a manageable inconvenience, the three-year window could easily stretch longer, especially if supply chain disruptions or a new crisis intervene.
Adversaries are watching the same calendar. China’s People’s Liberation Army and Russia’s General Staff both study American munitions production as a factor in their own war planning. A prolonged period of depleted U.S. missile stocks does not necessarily invite aggression, but it narrows the margin of deterrence in exactly the theaters where Washington can least afford it: the Taiwan Strait, the Korean Peninsula, and NATO’s eastern flank.
For now, the United States is not defenseless. The military retains enough capability to protect deployed forces and honor treaty commitments. But “enough” is a thinner margin than it was before the Iran conflict, and rebuilding it will require sustained political will, industrial investment, and honest accounting with allies who are counting on American weapons to arrive on time. The three-year hole is real. The question is whether Washington treats it as an emergency or lets it quietly widen.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
