Donald Trump is being very clear. The Strait of Hormuz is open and lots of oil is travelling through it. The war with Iran is going exactly as he wants it to be going. Any spike in global oil and gas prices is Ukraine’s fault, and nothing to do with the steady cut-off of supplies from across the whole Middle Eastern region.
Underpinning all of these claims – made in increasingly maniacal terms – is another, crucial one: that the US has everything it needs to sustain its military operations in the Middle East, should it need to.
The US is “producing more Exquisite and Elite Weapons than at any time in our History”, the President posted to Truth Social on Monday. “They are being delivered on a daily basis to our Forces in the Middle East and beyond.”
Both Trump and his Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, have insisted the US has “virtually unlimited” supplies of ammunition and missiles. Trump has repeatedly suggested that anyone claiming otherwise is a “traitor” or is even engaging in “treason” against the USA, while Hegseth has launched an escalating crackdown at the Pentagon, including a taskforce to target and prosecute leaks of “sensitive” information to the press.
Trump and Hegseth have good reason to insist that their supplies are well stocked: the US relies upon expensive missile interceptors to protect its bases and its allies in the region. Its sophisticated air defence systems use missiles that cost millions of dollars a time, sometimes to intercept much older and more basic missiles, or drones that can cost as little as a few thousand dollars a time.
Running out of ammunition for these systems doesn’t mean the US can’t launch new offensive operations. Instead, it means the US risks not being able to protect its forces and bases against future strikes. No wonder Trump and Hegseth are so insistent that everything is absolutely fine.
The trouble is, they aren’t – and now, it’s not just the media and independent reports saying it. A new inspector general report into the consequences of Trump’s “Operation Epic Fury” (OEF) produced for Congress reveals that behind the scenes, the Pentagon is saying exactly the same thing and is desperately trying to remedy them.
A US Army Air Defence Artilleryman re-loads a MIM-104 Patriot missile launcher in the US Central Command area of responsibility. (Photo: US Army Central)“The Office of the Under Secretary for Acquisition and Sustainment,” the critical sentence of the report reads, referring to the Department of Defence unit responsible for all defence procurement and maintenance, “said that the munitions expenditure in OEF has resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply.”
The language might be bureaucratic, but the message is clear: the conflict has used up a lot of munitions, supplies are running short, and – even worse – replacing the advanced weaponry that’s been depleted is no simple task.
The inspector general report did not quantify how low stockpiles were, but an independent estimate by the respected Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank suggested that they had already been seriously depleted by April. Then last month, a CNN report citing sources familiar with an internal inventory report said 80 per cent of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles had been used, as had half of the USA’s stocks of Patriot missiles.
These are both extremely sophisticated weapons systems, and they are neither quick nor easy to replace. If you are running out of bullets for a widely used small arms rifle, like the AK47, almost any arms dealer in the world can quickly restock you.
But only a tiny number of factories can produce Patriot missiles or restock THAAD systems, and scaling up capacity would take years – meaning that the munitions the US has used in just a few months of Trump’s conflict might take years to replace.
This is a cause for concern even if Trump managed to negotiate a lasting peace deal with Iran tomorrow. Both the Patriot and THAAD weapon systems are a vital part of the US deterrent against conflict with either Russia or China – their assurance that if either country tried to attack US assets at the start of a conflict, the US could protect itself.
If Trump’s conflict has already stretched the US military’s global supplies of these vital defensive systems – and still has no obvious end in sight – that means the US is less able to defend itself anywhere else in the world, too.
Against that backdrop, it makes sense that both Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth want to insist that there’s no problem at all, and stocks of the missiles are just fine. The issue for both men is that while shouting loud enough might be able to drown out media coverage of the shortfalls, neither of them can meme sophisticated missiles into existence.
Trump can claim the missiles are there, and he can claim everyone who says otherwise is lying – even if his own Pentagon says otherwise. But Trump can’t make the missiles appear, and without them, he can’t keep US troops or their allies safe.
Despite his bluster, even those on his side are waking up to that. Democrats in Congress have been repeatedly holding votes trying to force Trump to end the war, and each time they do, more Republicans rebel against the President and join them – with three more defecting just this week. Donald Trump can shout all he wants. When it comes to missiles, he can’t change the facts.
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