(Al Jazeera Media Network) On Thursday, the acting United States Navy secretary, Hung Cao, was asked by a Senate committee about $14 billion in weapons sales to Taiwan that Congress has approved but that President Donald Trump needs to sign off on.
“Right now we’re doing a pause,” said Cao, “in order to make sure we have the munitions we need for Epic Fury – which we have plenty.”
Epic Fury is the name of the US military operation that the Trump administration launched on February 28 against Iran. Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio has since stated that Epic Fury was over, so Cao’s comments on needing munitions for the operation appeared to contradict the US’s top diplomat.
But the Navy secretary’s comments on needing munitions for the Iran war also hit at another contradiction between the administration’s claims and the facts.
While Cao was adamant that the pause in supplies to Taiwan was not due to a critical shortage of weapons – echoing other officials in the Trump administration – there is growing evidence that the US is running through its munitions and missiles in the war on Iran much faster than they can be replenished.
That strain was captured by Cao’s own comments. “We’re just making sure we have everything, then the foreign military sales will continue when the administration deems necessary,” he told senators.
On Thursday, The Washington Post revealed that the US used more of its advanced missile-defence interceptors to defend Israel than even Israel itself during the 40 days of the Iran war, before the ceasefire came into effect on April 8.
The report found that the US launched more than 200 Terminal High Altitude Area Defenses (THAAD) interceptors – which equate to about half its total inventory – and more than 100 Standard Missile-3 and Standard Missile-6 interceptors. By contrast, Israel fired fewer than 100 Arrow interceptors and about 90 David’s Sling interceptors.
While US officials publicly project confidence in their stockpiles, analysts say the diminishing munitions could be factoring in Washington’s calculations in resuming its war on Tehran.
Following The Washington Post’s report, the Pentagon and Israel both defended their joint strategy of interceptor deployments, with the US defence body downplaying concerns of dwindling weapons.
Ballistic missile interceptors are “just one tool” in the US air defence network, and both Israel and the US “equitably” shouldered the burden of Operation Epic Fury, Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, told the US outlet.
Even as early as the first week of the war, Trump shrugged off concerns about US stocks of some critical missiles running low.
But in late April, when the ceasefire had reduced the daily use of missiles and interceptors, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington, DC think tank, warned that US forces had heavily used seven critical ammunitions, and for four of them expended more than half of the pre-war inventory. They included the THAAD interceptors, Patriot missiles and the SM-3 and SM-6 ship-based surface-to-air missiles used to intercept ballistic missiles.
By April 21, the CSIS report said, the US had also used up more than 1,000 of its estimated 3,100 Tomahawk missiles.
“Rebuilding to pre-war levels for the seven munitions will take from one to four years as missiles in the pipeline are delivered,” the report stated.
To be sure, Felix Arteaga, a defence and security fellow at Madrid’s Elcano Royal Institute, said that unless a conflict with China erupts over Taiwan from today, the US is largely prepared – for now.
“They will have prepared because they have made calculations for planning – alternative planning, contingency planning, [and] emergency planning,” Arteaga told Al Jazeera.
But Omar Ashour, a professor of security and military studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar, said that while the Iran war did not empty the US arsenal of weapons, it burned through some of the most important and strategically valuable layers of this arsenal.
“It’s not tactical exhaustion, it’s just a strategic inventory shock if you wish, because that depletion will affect other theatres [of war],” Ashour told Al Jazeera.
He added that while expenditure on weapons like Tomahawks was serious, the missile defence depletion was a sharper strategic problem for the US.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/5/23/missiles-to-munitions-does-the-us-risk-running-out-of-key-weapons
