In the first four weeks of the Iran war, U.S. Navy warships and submarines fired more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles, according to a Washington Post investigation published in March 2026. That single month of combat consumed roughly half the military’s pre-war Tomahawk inventory, by Pentagon estimates, a burn rate without precedent in the missile’s 35-year operational history.
Now, with a ceasefire holding and the scale of the depletion laid bare, the Defense Department has moved to sign production contracts targeting 10,000 new cruise missiles over the next three years. If executed at that pace, the effort would represent the largest missile manufacturing surge since the Cold War and a dramatic test of whether America’s defense industrial base can keep up with the demands of modern warfare.
A stockpile drained in weeks
The Tomahawk Block V, a subsonic land-attack cruise missile built by RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies) at its factory in Tucson, Arizona, has been the U.S. military’s go-to weapon for opening salvos since the 1991 Gulf War. But no previous conflict came close to the consumption rate seen in Iran. During the 2003 Iraq invasion, the Navy launched roughly 800 Tomahawks over the course of the entire campaign. In Iran, that number was exceeded in the first month alone.
Senior defense officials have acknowledged that the pace of strikes against Iranian air defenses, command bunkers, and missile production sites outstripped the military’s ability to resupply ships at sea. Planners faced a stark tradeoff: continue the bombardment or preserve reserves earmarked for a potential conflict in the Western Pacific, where China’s growing missile arsenal has made Taiwan Strait contingencies the Pentagon’s top planning priority.
“The Iran war did what decades of war games warned us about,” said Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It showed that our munitions depth is not sized for a sustained, high-intensity fight.” CSIS published a detailed assessment of key munitions categories shortly after the ceasefire, warning that several classes of precision-guided weapons had reached what the think tank called “last rounds” territory.
The production push
Before the Iran war, annual Tomahawk production ran in the low hundreds. The Pentagon’s new contracts call for output closer to 3,300 cruise missiles per year across multiple variants, a tenfold increase that would strain every link in the supply chain.
RTX’s Tucson plant, the sole final-assembly site for Tomahawks, would need to add shifts, floor space, and workers. But the bottlenecks extend far beyond one factory. Tomahawk production depends on turbofan engines from Williams International in Michigan, guidance electronics from multiple subcontractors, and specialty warhead components sourced from government-owned ammunition plants. Defense industry analysts have warned for years that single-source suppliers and a shrinking pool of skilled machinists could choke any rapid scale-up.
The contracts are also expected to cover variants beyond the Tomahawk. The Pentagon has signaled interest in accelerating production of the AGM-158B JASSM-ER, a stealthy air-launched cruise missile built by Lockheed Martin that saw heavy use by Air Force bombers during the Iran campaign. Expanding both lines simultaneously would compound the industrial challenge but also diversify the stockpile, reducing the risk that a future conflict drains any single weapon type as fast as Iran drained Tomahawks.
Cost estimates for a 10,000-missile surge have not been officially released, but defense budget analysts place the likely price tag between $18 billion and $25 billion over three years, depending on the variant mix and how quickly production ramps. Congress would need to appropriate those funds through supplemental spending bills or adjustments to the fiscal year 2027 and 2028 defense budgets, a process that as of June 2026 remains in its early stages on Capitol Hill.
What remains unclear
Several important details have not been confirmed through official Pentagon contract announcements or congressional budget documents. The exact size of the pre-war Tomahawk stockpile is classified, which means the “roughly half” depletion figure, while consistent with multiple informed estimates, cannot be independently verified against a hard baseline. Nor is it clear whether the 10,000-missile target reflects firm signed orders, planned option years, or a combination of both. Defense procurement routinely uses multi-year contracts with built-in ramp rates, and the distinction between aspirational targets and binding commitments matters enormously for whether factories actually reach full capacity.
Whether U.S. allies can help fill the gap is another open question. The United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia all operate or have ordered Tomahawk variants, and allied purchases could help sustain production lines even if Pentagon orders fluctuate. But allied inventories are small by comparison, and no formal burden-sharing arrangement for missile production has been announced.
Why the numbers matter beyond Iran
The urgency behind the production push is not really about Iran. It is about what comes next. Pentagon war games simulating a conflict over Taiwan have consistently shown that U.S. forces would expend thousands of long-range cruise missiles in the opening days, targeting Chinese naval vessels, airfields, and anti-access systems spread across a theater far larger than the Persian Gulf. A military that burned through half its Tomahawk inventory against a mid-tier adversary would face a far deeper deficit against a peer competitor with the world’s largest navy and a dense, layered air defense network.
China’s own missile buildup sharpens the problem. The People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force fields an estimated 2,500 ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles capable of striking U.S. bases in Japan, Guam, and the Philippines, according to Pentagon estimates in the 2025 China Military Power Report. Deterring Beijing depends in part on convincing Chinese planners that the U.S. can absorb a first strike and still deliver a punishing response. A visibly depleted cruise missile stockpile undermines that message.
The Iran war also exposed a subtler vulnerability: over-reliance on a single weapon type. Tomahawks are effective against fixed, known targets, but they are subsonic and increasingly vulnerable to modern air defenses. A more resilient stockpile would include a deeper bench of stealthy, longer-range, and faster missiles. The Pentagon’s interest in hypersonic weapons and the JASSM-ER reflects that logic, but neither program has reached the production volumes needed to serve as a true Tomahawk alternative.
For now, the defense industrial base is the binding constraint. Factories that spent decades optimizing for low-rate production cannot flip a switch and deliver wartime output. The contracts signed in recent months are a down payment on rebuilding, but the real test will come over the next 18 to 24 months, as production lines either hit their targets or run into the workforce shortages, supply chain fragilities, and funding uncertainties that have plagued past surge attempts. The Iran war proved that modern conflicts can drain precision munitions faster than anyone planned for. Whether the Pentagon can refill the magazine before the next crisis arrives remains an open and consequential question.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
