When Iran launched waves of ballistic missiles at Israel in April 2024 and again in June 2025, American soldiers and sailors did most of the shooting back. Pentagon assessments described to The Washington Post show that U.S. forces fired more than 200 THAAD interceptors and upward of 100 SM-3 and SM-6 missiles from Navy warships, totals that exceeded the number of interceptors Israeli forces launched in their own defense. The revelation, which surfaced in late May 2026, has ignited a debate over whether the United States can keep spending down its most advanced missile stockpiles to protect a partner nation while still covering its own global commitments.
The numbers behind the disparity
The more than 200 THAAD rounds the U.S. expended represent roughly half of America’s entire THAAD interceptor inventory, according to the same Pentagon assessments. On top of that, Aegis-equipped destroyers and cruisers in the eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea fired more than 100 SM-3 and SM-6 interceptors, the Navy’s premier tools for knocking down ballistic missiles in the upper atmosphere.
A Congressional Research Service analysis of the THAAD system found that U.S.-operated batteries accounted for almost half of all American and Israeli interceptors used to protect Israel against Iranian medium-range ballistic missiles during the June 2025 engagement. Put differently, a single American weapon system, crewed entirely by U.S. soldiers on Israeli soil, shouldered nearly as much of the defensive burden as every other interceptor type combined.
The SM-3 missile had never been fired in anger before April 2024. Designed for the Navy’s Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense architecture, it had only been tested in controlled scenarios. Its first operational use, according to a CRS defense primer, came not in defense of the American homeland or a NATO treaty ally but in an operation to shield Israel from Iranian ballistic missiles. By June 2025, the scale had grown sharply, with THAAD batteries absorbing the dominant share of the workload against the most threatening portions of Iran’s salvos.
Taken together, the data paints a picture that goes well beyond augmentation. The United States did not plug a few gaps in Israel’s shield; it supplied and fired a majority of the most sophisticated interceptors used across both engagements.
What remains uncertain
Important details are still classified or simply unpublished. The Pentagon has not released firing logs or inventory depletion tables, so the specific counts of more than 200 THAAD rounds and more than 100 naval interceptors rest on assessments described to reporters rather than on declassified operational records that outside analysts can audit independently.
Israel has disclosed even less. The Israel Defense Forces have not published after-action reports detailing their own interceptor expenditures during either engagement. Without those figures, the precise ratio of American to Israeli defensive fire cannot be pinned down. The verified claim is directional: U.S. usage exceeded Israeli usage. Whether the gap was narrow or closer to two-to-one remains an estimate, not a documented fact.
Replenishment timelines are another open question. A Government Accountability Office report on the Next Generation Interceptor program has documented development delays, testing risks, and supply-chain fragility across the interceptor industrial base. That report focused on homeland defense systems rather than THAAD or SM-3 specifically, but the production bottlenecks it describes apply broadly to the same factories and subcontractors. Whether the Pentagon can accelerate manufacturing to replace what has already been spent is a question no public document has answered with specific contract timelines or delivery dates.
Then there is the price tag. Each THAAD interceptor costs in the tens of millions of dollars; SM-3 Block IIA missiles carry a comparable unit cost. Burning through roughly half the THAAD inventory and more than 100 naval interceptors likely represents a bill running into the billions, but no official cost accounting for the two operations has been released.
The strategic trade-offs no one is talking about publicly
Every interceptor fired over Israel is one that is no longer available for other contingencies. U.S. war planners maintain missile defense postures in the Indo-Pacific, where North Korean and Chinese ballistic missile threats drive force-structure decisions, and in Europe, where Russian missile capabilities shape NATO planning. Depleting high-end interceptors in the Middle East forces the Pentagon to decide where it is willing to accept greater risk, and those decisions have not been disclosed.
Public sources do not reveal whether the military has adjusted alert postures, redistributed remaining interceptors among combatant commands, or asked allies to shoulder more of their own missile defense burden. Nor has Congress held public hearings specifically on the interceptor burn rate, though the FY2027 defense budget request, now working its way through committees, contains procurement lines for THAAD and SM-3 that lawmakers could use to press the issue.
The pattern that emerges from the available evidence is clear even if the fine details remain classified. Across two engagements spanning more than a year, Washington chose to expend a significant share of its most advanced missile defenses to protect a partner from a regional adversary. That choice bought time and saved lives. It also left the United States with a thinner inventory of weapons it may need elsewhere, and no public plan for how quickly the gap will be closed.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
