Aug 23, 2026

Running Out of Missiles?

Can America Build Missiles as Fast as It Uses Them?

For most of the last century, one of America's greatest military advantages wasn't a particular airplane, ship, tank or missile.

It was the ability to build more of them.

During World War II, American factories produced weapons on a scale that is difficult to comprehend today. Automobile plants became aircraft and tank factories. Shipyards launched vessels at extraordinary rates. By the end of the war, the United States had produced roughly 300,000 military aircraft, along with tens of thousands of armored vehicles and an enormous fleet of warships.

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Modern warfare presents a very different problem.

The United States still possesses an enormous defense industry and some of the world's most sophisticated weapons. But the ongoing war with Iran has highlighted an uncomfortable question:

Can the United States manufacture modern precision weapons as quickly as a major war can consume them?

The United States Is Not "Out of Missiles"

That's an important distinction to make from the beginning.

The U.S. military has not run out of missiles, and claims that America has somehow exhausted its overall arsenal greatly exaggerate what is actually known.

What has happened is more specific.

Heavy expenditure during operations against Iran, combined with weapons supplied to allies in other conflicts, has significantly reduced inventories of several important categories of precision-guided weapons and missile-defense interceptors.

In August, Reuters reported that the Army had used much of its inventory of highly accurate long-range missiles during the five-month Iran conflict. According to people familiar with the inventory data, the affected weapons included ATACMS and the newer Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM.

Other weapons have also been expended in substantial numbers.

Tomahawk cruise missiles have been used extensively for long-range strikes, while Patriot and THAAD interceptors have been fired to defend American forces and other targets against incoming missiles.

The precise size of U.S. weapons stockpiles is understandably not public information, and estimates of how much remains should therefore be treated cautiously.

But the Pentagon's response leaves little doubt that replenishing certain inventories has become a major priority.

$22.9 Billion for Tomahawks

On August 17, the Navy awarded Raytheon a seven-year contract worth as much as $22.9 billion to dramatically increase production of the Tomahawk cruise missile.

The scale of the planned increase is remarkable.

Production is expected to rise from approximately 60 Tomahawks per year to more than 1,000 annually.

That represents far more than simply ordering another batch of missiles.

Factories must expand. Suppliers must increase production. Specialized machinery must be acquired. Workers must be trained. Companies farther down the supply chain must be capable of providing everything from propulsion components and electronics to explosives and guidance hardware.

Similar efforts are underway elsewhere.

In July, the Army awarded Lockheed Martin a contract worth up to $58.6 billion for Patriot PAC-3 interceptor missiles as the United States works to replenish inventories strained by operations in Iran and weapons supplied to allies.

Days later, another agreement worth more than $3 billion was announced to increase production of components used in Patriot and THAAD missile interceptors.

The message is difficult to miss.

The Pentagon wants a lot more missiles.

And it wants them much faster.

Why Can't We Just Build More?

To someone familiar with American production during World War II, the obvious question might be: Why is this so difficult?

After all, the United States once built aircraft by the thousands and ships by the hundreds.

But comparing a World War II bomb or artillery shell with a modern precision weapon is somewhat like comparing a 1942 automobile with a modern fighter aircraft.

A Tomahawk isn't simply an explosive attached to a rocket motor.

It is essentially a disposable unmanned aircraft.

It has propulsion, navigation, guidance, communications and flight-control systems. Its components must function after potentially spending years inside a launch canister aboard a ship or submarine. When finally launched, the missile must fly hundreds or even thousands of miles and place a warhead very close to its intended target.

A Patriot interceptor has a different but equally demanding job: detect, track and destroy an incoming threat traveling at tremendous speed.

These weapons depend upon highly specialized components and manufacturing processes. Some suppliers may be the only companies producing a particular part.

Money can increase production, but money cannot instantly create another factory, another production line or another generation of experienced engineers and technicians.

The Arsenal of Democracy

America confronted a very different industrial challenge before World War II.

President Franklin Roosevelt famously described the United States as the "Arsenal of Democracy."

That description ultimately proved remarkably accurate.

Before America's entry into the war, U.S. industry was already expanding to supply Britain and other Allied nations. After Pearl Harbor, the transformation accelerated enormously.

Ford's Willow Run plant became perhaps the most famous example. At peak production, the massive Michigan factory was completing approximately one B-24 Liberator every hour.

American shipbuilding achieved similarly astonishing results.

Liberty ships were designed to be relatively simple cargo vessels that could be produced rapidly using standardized construction techniques. More than 2,700 were eventually built.

America wasn't merely supplying its own armed forces.

It was helping equip an alliance fighting across much of the planet.

That industrial capacity became a weapon in its own right.

Axis forces could destroy American tanks, aircraft and ships.

The problem was that American factories kept replacing them.

We Built a Different Defense Industry After the Cold War

The modern American defense industry evolved under very different circumstances.

Following the Cold War, defense spending declined and the industry consolidated dramatically. Companies merged, factories closed and production lines disappeared.

Maintaining enormous unused manufacturing capacity is expensive.

A company producing perhaps a few dozen missiles each year has little economic reason to maintain a factory capable of producing thousands unless the government is willing to pay for that unused capacity.

For decades, that arrangement made sense.

The United States generally wasn't fighting wars requiring the expenditure of thousands of sophisticated missiles against another nation possessing significant missile forces of its own.

Ukraine began changing that calculation.

The war demonstrated just how quickly modern combat can consume artillery ammunition, air-defense interceptors, anti-tank weapons and other munitions.

The Iran conflict has reinforced the lesson with some of America's most sophisticated weapons.

A 2026 CSIS analysis concluded that replacing inventories of several important munitions heavily used during the Iran war could take months or years depending upon the weapon system, even with production increases.

The China Question

There is another reason Pentagon planners care about missile inventories.

China.

Any major conflict in the Western Pacific would likely place enormous demands on long-range precision weapons and missile defenses.

Distances across the Pacific are immense.

American forces operating from ships, submarines, aircraft and dispersed island bases would depend heavily upon weapons capable of striking targets from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

At the same time, American bases and ships would potentially face large numbers of Chinese missiles.

That makes many of the weapons being expended or replenished today particularly important.

A missile sitting in a warehouse isn't useful merely because America possesses it.

But neither can a missile fired today be used again tomorrow.

In a prolonged war, eventually the factories matter as much as the stockpile.

Manufacturing Is Part of Military Readiness

Military readiness is normally discussed in terms of aircraft mission-capable rates, ships available for deployment, troop strength, training and ammunition inventories.

Industrial capacity deserves a place on that list.

A nation may enter a conflict with an impressive arsenal. But if that conflict lasts months or years, what matters increasingly becomes its ability to repair equipment and replace what has been destroyed or expended.

That lesson is hardly new.

It helped determine the outcome of World War II.

The difference today is that the weapons are dramatically more complicated and the factories producing them are dramatically more specialized.

The Pentagon appears to recognize the problem. Contracts worth tens of billions of dollars are now intended not simply to purchase missiles but to expand the industrial capacity required to manufacture them.

The planned increase in Tomahawk production—from roughly 60 missiles annually to more than 1,000—is an extraordinary example of the scale of that effort.

Whether industry can actually achieve those production goals, and how quickly, remains to be seen.

America's Other Arsenal

The lesson emerging from today's conflicts isn't that America is defenseless or that the United States has "run out of missiles."

It is more complicated than that.

Modern precision weapons can be consumed during combat far faster than traditional peacetime production lines were designed to replace them.

For decades, the United States could accept that imbalance because it maintained large inventories and rarely faced opponents capable of sustaining a high-intensity missile war.

That assumption is being reconsidered.

The factories, machine tools, suppliers, engineers, technicians and production workers behind America's weapons may rarely appear in recruiting commercials or military documentaries.

But history suggests they are every bit as important to national defense as the weapons themselves.

During World War II, America's enemies discovered that destroying American equipment wasn't enough. Behind the soldiers, sailors and airmen stood an industrial machine capable of replacing what was lost—and then producing even more.

More than 80 years later, the technology has changed beyond recognition.

The underlying question hasn't.

If the next major war lasts longer than expected, can America's arsenal build replacements faster than America's military uses them?

The answer may prove just as important as the capabilities of the missiles themselves.

A More Recent Example

In 2020, the United States faced predictions of a potentially catastrophic shortage of medical ventilators. President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act and challenged American industry to rapidly expand production. General Motors, working with Ventec Life Systems, went from making automobiles and automotive components to producing critical-care ventilators in a matter of weeks, ultimately receiving an order for 30,000 machines. Across American industry, the federal government pursued roughly 100,000 additional ventilators on an emergency timetable. Within months, the feared shortage had been overcome so thoroughly that thousands of American-procured ventilators were being sent to other countries.

A Tomahawk missile obviously isn't a ventilator. But 2020 offered a recent demonstration of something Americans had previously associated with World War II: when faced with an urgent national need, American industry can move remarkably fast.

Don't be Fooled

Foreign observers looking at the United States today could be forgiven for seeing a country hopelessly divided. Americans argue loudly, publicly and endlessly about politics, culture and almost everything else.

History, however, contains a warning about mistaking American division for American weakness.

When Americans perceive that their country has genuinely been attacked, those internal divisions have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to become secondary almost overnight. Pearl Harbor didn't merely mobilize the U.S. government. It mobilized factory workers, engineers, farmers, businessmen and millions of ordinary Americans.

That may ultimately be the most important part of America's industrial capacity. Factories are buildings. Production lines are machinery. What turned the United States into the Arsenal of Democracy was the willingness of ordinary Americans to build, work, sacrifice and improvise when they believed their country needed them.

In 2020, the emergency was very different, but American industry again demonstrated how quickly production could be reorganized when government and industry agreed that time mattered.

America's political divisions are real. So are the difficulties facing its defense industrial base. Neither should be dismissed.

But neither should America's adversaries make the mistake of assuming that the America they see arguing with itself in peacetime is necessarily the America they would face after an attack.

History suggests those can be two very different countries.