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President Trump’s war against Iran has depleted U.S. weapons stockpiles to troubling levels, siphoning supplies from Asia and Europe, according to senior officials.
The rapidly shrinking supply of air-defense missiles and other critical weaponry in Europe and Asia not only leaves the U.S. military less equipped, but could also leave Russia and China feeling emboldened should they contemplate a potential conflict with the United States, experts said.
Bombing Iran burned through thousands of multimillion-dollar missiles that contain precision parts from a global web of suppliers and can take years to produce. Defending against Iran’s retaliatory barrages has worn down U.S. stocks of air-defense missiles to an extent that has privately alarmed top officials in the Trump administration and has led to the United States’ delaying deliveries to European and Asian customers.
The Iran campaign has forced the Pentagon to rush ships, aircraft and air-defense units from across Europe and Asia to the Middle East, an effort with cascading consequences for equipment maintenance and troop morale, U.S. officials said. The result is a significant erosion of American firepower in those regions, a shift with long-term implications that are a growing concern in the military and intelligence communities, senior U.S. and Western officials said.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the United States has “more than enough firepower to carry out any operation the president orders at any time and place.” But experts say the munitions crisis — part of which Mr. Trump inherited from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — is almost certain to outlast his presidency.
Tom Karako, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the depletion of munitions was a “generational annihilation of the means of conventional deterrence.” The impact on how decisions are made in Beijing and Moscow, he said, could resonate for years.
“It’s impossible for that not to have a significant effect on the decision calculus of Russia and China,” said Mr. Karako, who has been tracking U.S. weapons stockpiles. “They may do something quite deliberate and at the time of their choosing, because keep in mind — we’re going to take years to reconstitute.”
In meetings in the lead-up to the Iran war, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed the president of the risks of dipping deeper into drained stockpiles, according to two officials with knowledge of the exchanges. Mr. Trump still decided to go ahead, believing the war would be over quickly. A spokesman for General Caine declined to comment on his private conversations with the president.
After attacking Iran alongside Israel on Feb. 28, Mr. Trump repeatedly promised victory within weeks. More than five months later, he remains unable to bend Iran to his will, or even to find a way to end the war. The munitions shortage is said to have played a role in persuading Mr. Trump to put aside a major bombing campaign late last month. But it also shows how the president’s decision to attack Iran has left the United States and its allies more vulnerable to other threats.
The Trump administration has worked with military contractors to try to accelerate and expand production. But even accounting for those efforts, it could take more than two years for the United States to replenish the more than 1,500 Patriot air-defense interceptor missiles that have been used in the Iran war. The current U.S. inventory of those missiles is fewer than 1,700, according to two people briefed on the stockpile who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military details.
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Buildings targeted by airstrikes in Tehran in April. Bombing Iran burned through thousands of multimillion-dollar missiles that contain precision parts from a global web of suppliers and can take years to produce. Credit…Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
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