In roughly the time it takes to rotate a single aircraft carrier crew, the United States fired more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles at targets across Iran, consuming close to half the nation’s stockpile of its most expensive precision strike weapons. The expenditure, concentrated heavily in the war’s opening salvos, has forced the Pentagon into an urgent scramble to rebuild arsenals that took decades and tens of billions of dollars to accumulate.
The scale of the drawdown is now driving one of the largest defense budget requests in American history and raising pointed questions on Capitol Hill and inside the Pentagon about whether the country can rearm fast enough to deter threats elsewhere, particularly from China.
A thousand missiles in weeks
The clearest accounting of the Tomahawk expenditure comes from The Washington Post, which reported in late March 2026 that more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched in the first month of the conflict alone. Subsequent reporting from the same outlet pushed the total past 1,000, a figure consistent with separate Pentagon disclosures indicating that roughly half the military’s most expensive munitions have been depleted since the war began.
That rate of fire dwarfs every previous U.S. campaign. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the military launched approximately 800 Tomahawks over the course of the entire war. In the 2011 Libya intervention, about 220 were fired. The Iran conflict surpassed both totals within its first weeks.
The heaviest use came during the opening days of strikes, consistent with standard U.S. doctrine: overwhelm enemy air defenses, destroy command nodes, and knock out strategic infrastructure before transitioning to shorter-range or cheaper ordnance. But the sheer volume suggests that Iran’s layered air defense network, built with Russian and domestically produced systems, demanded a heavier initial barrage than planners had publicly anticipated.
The budget tells the story
The Pentagon’s fiscal year 2027 budget submission confirms the severity of the problem in bureaucratic black and white. The $1.5 trillion request, a dramatic increase over previous years, explicitly prioritizes munitions replenishment alongside personnel and modernization. Senior defense officials who briefed reporters on the budget in May 2026 described rebuilding high-end weapon stocks as a “core objective,” not a routine line item.
Separately, the Pentagon announced in late March 2026 that it would accelerate contracts with defense companies to ramp up war supplies, a tacit acknowledgment that current production rates cannot keep pace with wartime consumption. Tomahawk missiles are manufactured by RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies), and each Block V unit costs between $1.5 million and $2 million, according to Navy procurement documents. Replacing 1,000 of them represents a bill of at least $1.5 billion for the missiles alone, before accounting for other expended munitions, logistics, and support costs.
The FY2027 procurement exhibits, available through the Pentagon Comptroller’s portal, contain line items for Army, Navy, and Air Force weapons purchases that analysts are still parsing. But the speed with which the budget was assembled after the war began tells its own story: the drawdown was severe enough to reshape the Pentagon’s near-term spending priorities on a compressed timeline.
What the Pentagon is not saying
For all the data points that have surfaced, several critical questions remain unanswered. No official Department of Defense record has disclosed the exact number of Tomahawks remaining in inventory. The “nearly half” depletion estimate, while repeated across multiple credible accounts, is drawn from anonymous officials and people familiar with classified assessments. The precise baseline inventory from which that fraction is calculated has never been publicly released, leaving outside analysts to work backward from partial clues and historical procurement data.
Production timelines for replacing the expended missiles are similarly murky. The Pentagon’s announcement about accelerating contracts established intent but offered no delivery schedules, no wartime unit pricing, and no assessment of whether RTX’s existing production lines can absorb a surge without bottlenecks in components, labor, or testing. Defense industry analysts have noted that Tomahawk production was already running below Cold War-era capacity before the conflict, and scaling up a complex weapons manufacturing process is measured in years, not months.
Operational performance is another gap. Public reporting has not clarified how many of the 1,000-plus Tomahawks hit their intended targets, how many were intercepted by Iranian air defenses or suffered mechanical failures, or what share of total strikes relied on Tomahawks versus other weapons like the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) or precision-guided bombs. A high success rate would help justify the heavy expenditure. Significant losses to interception would raise uncomfortable questions about both tactics and the wisdom of investing so heavily in a subsonic cruise missile against a modern integrated air defense system.
The China question
The strategic anxiety running beneath the stockpile numbers is straightforward: if the United States has burned through half its precision strike weapons in a regional war with Iran, what does that mean for a potential conflict with China over Taiwan?
Multiple defense analysts and at least one widely circulated opinion piece published in April 2026 have argued that the Iran war drawdown leaves the U.S. dangerously exposed in the Pacific. That concern is not new. War games conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in 2023 found that in a simulated conflict over Taiwan, the U.S. exhausted its stock of long-range anti-ship missiles within days. The Iran war has turned that theoretical vulnerability into a concrete one.
Senior defense officials have pushed back on shortage fears, insisting the United States retains sufficient capability for other contingencies. But their public reassurances have not included specific inventory numbers or readiness metrics, making it difficult for outside observers to independently gauge the margin of safety. Congress, which must ultimately approve the $1.5 trillion budget request, is likely to press for those details in closed-session hearings over the coming months.
Allied contributions remain unclear
Nearly all public reporting on the munitions drawdown focuses on U.S. stockpiles. What remains largely unaddressed is whether coalition partners have contributed substitute strike capabilities, shared munitions from their own inventories, or adjusted procurement plans in response to the conflict. The United Kingdom operates its own Tomahawk variant, and several NATO allies field comparable cruise missiles, but no official accounting of allied contributions to the strike campaign has been made public.
Without that context, it is impossible to know whether the burden of sustaining long-range strike capacity is falling almost entirely on American arsenals or is being distributed across a broader coalition. That distinction matters enormously for assessing how quickly the U.S. can reconstitute its stockpiles and at what cost.
Rebuilding an arsenal at wartime speed
The public record as of June 2026 supports a clear if incomplete conclusion: the United States has expended more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles in the Iran war, likely consuming close to half its prewar precision strike stockpile, and the Pentagon is moving to rebuild through the largest munitions-focused budget request in decades.
How quickly those weapons can be replaced depends on decisions still being made by Congress, by RTX and its subcontractors, and by military planners weighing competing demands across multiple theaters. The missiles already fired are gone. The harder question is whether the industrial base that built them can move fast enough to close the gap before the next crisis tests what remains.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
