US Missile Stockpile Shortage: The THAAD Depletion Crisis Explained

The U.S. fired 25% of its THAAD stockpile in 12 days. With Epic Fury underway, what the interceptor math reveals about empire’s industrial limits.

On June 23, 2025, during the twelve-day Israeli-Iranian war, the United States fired approximately 150 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors from two THAAD systems deployed in Israel to defend against Iranian ballistic missiles. Each interceptor costs roughly $13–15 million. The 150 launches represented quarter of total stockpile — nearly a quarter of the entire THAAD supply the Pentagon had ever purchased, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by multiple defense analysts. Replenishing it could take three to eight years, according to researchers at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. The pre-war production rate was 11 new THAAD interceptors in 2024 and 12 in 2025.

Now Operation Epic Fury has begun, with the United States and Israel striking Iranian targets again, and Iran retaliating across the Gulf. Dangerously low stockpiles — Fortune and Bloomberg report going into this escalation, interceptor stocks are “most likely dangerously low” after last summer’s war. Military doctrine calls for firing two or three interceptors at each incoming target. Iran fired 574 missiles during the twelve-day war; 201 intercepted missiles were destroyed by THAAD and Arrow interceptors. This time Iran is already firing at U.S. bases across the Gulf — Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE — simultaneously.

This is not primarily a story about whether the U.S. will “run out” of weapons. It is a story about the structural contradiction built into how American military power is actually organized — and what happens when that contradiction meets sustained, multi-theater warfare. The theoretical framework for that contradiction is developed in the throughput problem piece.

The Specific Problem with High-End Interceptors

THAAD is not an obscure system. It is the United States’ primary capability for intercepting ballistic missiles at high altitude — the layer of defense that catches Iranian medium-range missiles before they can reach their targets. The U.S. Army operates eight THAAD batteries in total. Two were deployed to Israel last year. The other six are distributed across global commitments: South Korea, Guam, the continental U.S., and rotating deployments elsewhere.

Before the emergency contract announced in July 2025, 96 interceptors yearly was Lockheed Martin’s production rate. A single twelve-day conflict consumed 150. The math requires no elaboration. The Pentagon has since signed Lockheed’s $2B contract to expand production toward 400 per year — a fourfold increase that analysts describe as still insufficient for a peer conflict.

The Patriot system is cheaper and faster to produce, but faces its own constraints. Patriot annual output was running at roughly 600–740 interceptors per year, with plans to triple that to 2,000 under a new Lockheed deal. The U.S. fired approximately 30 Patriots fired defending Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar during the June 2025 conflict alone. More are now being fired as Iran strikes Gulf bases again.

The cost asymmetry is structural. Iran fires Shahed drones at $20,000–50,000 per unit. The U.S. responds with $1–15 million interceptors. In April 2024, it cost an $1.1 billion defense cost to defend against a few hours of Iranian missile and drone attacks. Iran currently possesses Iran’s missile inventory — over 3,000 ballistic missiles and many thousands of drones. The arithmetic of sustained defense at this exchange ratio is not sustainable.

Long-Range Precision Munitions and the Taiwan Arithmetic

The interceptor problem is the most immediate, but it sits within a broader inventory crisis.

CSIS war game findings conducted over multiple years consistently show that in a Taiwan Strait conflict, the United States would run out of long-range precision-guided munitions in less than a week. Seth Jones, author of a 2023 CSIS report on the defense industrial base, confirmed as recently as December 2025 that Seth Jones confirmed “we still right now would run out after roughly a week or so of conflict over Taiwan — that’s just not enough to sustain a protracted war.”

The specific numbers that surfaced in congressional testimony are revealing. Gallagher’s 250 figure — outgoing House China Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher disclosed that U.S. inventory of long-range anti-ship missiles stood at approximately 250 in spring 2024, while CSIS estimated a minimum of 1,000 would be needed in a Taiwan conflict. The Navy’s annual procurement of Tomahawk cruise missiles in FY22 was 70 — for a fleet of 73 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. RUSI analyst confirmed that the two years of Middle East operations “have seen the US expend pretty substantial amounts of capabilities that the American defense industrial base will find pretty hard to replace” — and that from a purely military standpoint, “the Chinese are absolutely the winners.”

The current conflict is not with China. But every interceptor and long-range munition consumed defending Israel and Gulf bases is one fewer available for the Indo-Pacific contingency U.S. defense planning designates as its primary challenge. The structural implications of that arithmetic are the subject of the Jiang Xueqin analysis.

How the Industrial Base Got Here

The production gap is not an accident or an oversight. It is the legible outcome of deliberate choices made over three decades.

After the Cold War ended, U.S. defense production was restructured for a world that no longer required the capacity to sustain industrial-scale attritional warfare. The expectation was short, decisive conflicts against regional adversaries — what the Gulf War of 1991 appeared to validate. Stockpiles were sized for limited campaigns. Redundant production capacity was treated as waste. The defense industry consolidated from dozens of major primes into a handful — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman — each operating with guaranteed procurement contracts, stable margins, and no particular incentive to maintain surge capacity.

This consolidation happened in parallel with the broader financialization of the American economy. Manufacturing supply chains globalized in search of lower costs. Domestic heavy industry contracted. The logic of shareholder returns — maximize efficiency, minimize idle capital, eliminate redundancy — colonized the defense sector along with everything else. The FPRI study described the result plainly: “a fundamental philosophical error in how America has conceptualized post-Cold War warfare,” a fixation on “cutting-edge, low-volume systems” at the expense of “the strategic importance of mass production and stockpiling conventional munitions.”

Production is calibrated to steady-state contracts, not wartime requirements. Expanding output requires long-term demand guarantees before companies will invest in new facilities, trained labor, and expanded supply chains. Lockheed Martin will not build a new THAAD factory on speculation. It builds on contracted certainty. The result is a production system that is optimized for the stable, predictable revenue of peacetime procurement and structurally unable to surge in response to actual combat consumption.

Ukraine exposed this in 2022 with 155mm artillery shells. 155mm supply exhausted within months of supporting Ukrainian operations — the U.S. had allowed annual production to fall to levels that couldn’t sustain the commitment. Rebuilding required expanding explosive materials supply chains, reopening facilities, hiring and training skilled labor — processes measured in years. The lesson was relearned, not for the first time.

The Contradiction: Capitalism and War Production

There is a genuine structural contradiction between the logic of late capitalism and the material requirements of sustained military power. But it is worth stating precisely.

The contradiction is not simply that capitalism is inefficient. In narrow terms, the peacetime defense industrial base is highly efficient — consolidated suppliers, stable contracts, optimized production runs, strong margins for major primes. What it cannot do is hold idle capacity for a contingency that may not arrive for years or decades, because idle capacity destroys quarterly earnings. Maintaining a factory capable of surging THAAD production from 96 to 400 interceptors a year requires that factory to be underutilized in peacetime. Underutilized assets do not produce returns. They are cut.

This is not a failure of corporate planning. It is capitalism functioning as designed, applied to an industrial base that empire requires to behave differently. The state is now attempting to bridge this gap. Pentagon’s THAAD contract — a $2B deal to accelerate production. Production expansion announced — tripling Patriot to 2,000 per year and growing THAAD output fourfold. Congress artillery funding — $6 billion to expand production and modernize factories. HIMARS production investment — $742 million to increase output. Public funds de-risk private investment; government guarantees justify capital expenditures; the industrial base expands under national security cover.

This is not a break from the system. It is the system correcting itself — slowly, expensively, and belatedly — using public resources to subsidize private firms that will retain the profits from the contracts being signed today. Lockheed’s 11% growth — the division producing THAAD and Patriot missiles reported an 11% increase in sales in the quarter after the June 2025 conflict. The emergency created by military operations optimized for corporate efficiency is being resolved through corporate contracts funded by public money. The firms that structured production for shareholder returns in peacetime are now being paid to rebuild what they eliminated.

None of this produces interceptors this week. Lead times for THAAD remain years. The supply chain for rocket motors, energetics, and advanced electronics does not expand on demand. The Pentagon is buying time. For the historical and theoretical context that explains how this contradiction was built into the system, see the Bukharin and Keynes piece.

The Bottom Line

America is not out of munitions. It is not about to lose a war tomorrow because the shelves are empty. What it has done is operate a global military empire on a production base calibrated for peacetime efficiency, and it is now discovering — again — that this combination produces structural vulnerability in sustained conflict.

The problem is not individual failures of planning or procurement. It is systemic. A defense industrial base organized around profit, consolidation, and lean inventory cannot spontaneously become an arsenal of democracy when the shooting starts. It requires years of contracted ramp-up, public subsidy, and supply chain reconstruction to do what it was structurally designed not to do: hold redundant capacity for contingencies that reduce quarterly returns.

For an analysis of how the same conflicts depleting these stockpiles are generating the political conditions for their continued use, read why war was coming.

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