A bitter dispute has broken out inside Washington over the state of the United States’ weapons stockpiles, as its war against Iran raises questions over whether American forces are burning through irreplaceable military assets faster than they can replace them; and whether President Donald Trump had any business starting the fight in the first place.
The argument has been sharpened by the destruction of a key, $300-million radar system at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, confirmed by a US official this week to news agency Bloomberg.
Live: Updates on US-Iran conflict
The AN/TPY-2 radar, manufactured by RTX Corporation and essential to directing America’s THAAD missile defence batteries, was obliterated in the opening days of the conflict that began on February 28.
Its loss has forced greater reliance on Patriot missile systems whose interceptors were already, by many accounts, dangerously depleted before the first shot was fired, news agency AP reported.
Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said in a statement that the US military “has everything it needs to execute any mission at the time and place of the President’s choosing and on any timeline”.
President Trump reinforced that message by posting on social media that several defence contractors had agreed to “quadruple” production of certain weapons “as rapidly as possible”. He gave no detail on which systems he was talking about.
Lockheed Martin subsequently confirmed it had agreed to “quadruple critical munitions production” and stated that it “began this work months ago”, without providing a timetable for when increased output would materialise.
Democratic lawmakers have greeted those assurances from the Republican government with scepticism, and in some cases scorn.
“Our munitions are low. That’s public knowledge,” said senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He added, “It will require additional funding; funding where we have other domestic needs as well.”
Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut went further, drawing a direct line between the current crisis and America’s prior commitments to Ukraine.
“We’ve been told again and again and again, one reason that we can’t provide interceptors for the Patriot system or other munitions for Ukraine is that they’re in short supply,” he told CNN.
For many Democrats, this debate only fueled a larger political objection; that Trump has dragged the United States into a conflict it did not need to fight.
Defence analysts have tried to cut through the political noise with numbers. Ryan Brobst, deputy director of the Centre on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, estimated that roughly 25% of the entire THAAD interceptor stockpile was used up defending Israel from Iranian ballistic missiles during a 12-day confrontation last June.
“These were already in very high demand and we had not procured enough before the conflict,” he said, “And now we’ve probably used, between the two of them, probably several hundred more.”
Brobst added, though, “I’m not particularly worried about us actually running out during this conflict.”
He argued, “It’s about deterring China and Russia the day after this conflict is over.”
Tom Karako of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies noted that the US operates only eight THAAD batteries globally. “There aren’t exactly any spare TPY-2 lying around,” he said, referring to the destroyed radar. With that system gone, its interception duties fall to Patriot batteries operating with PAC-3 missiles that cost millions of dollars each.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed this week that Middle Eastern (or West Asian) nations allied with the US had fired more than 800 such missiles in just three days. This exceeded the total stockpile Ukraine has held throughout its entire four-year war with Russia.
The question of how America arrived at this point has become the nub of the debate.
Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut drew a direct line between the current crisis and America’s prior commitments to Ukraine. “We’ve been told again and again and again, one reason that we can’t provide interceptors for the Patriot system or other munitions for Ukraine is that they’re in short supply,” he told CNN.
Katherine Thompson, who served as a deputy senior adviser at the Pentagon under the current Trump administration before leaving her post in October, pointed her finger at Democrat Joe Biden’s years as President. “It was a short-term win for the Biden administration but a long-term strategic problem for the United States as a whole,” she said of the decision to send interceptors to Ukraine. “I would hope that the Trump administration doesn’t make that same mistake here.” Thompson now serves as a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.
That argument has cut little ice with Democrats. “These are scarce strategic resources and its (the radar’s) loss is a huge blow,” said Karako.
“Successive administrations over multiple decades did not procure sufficient quantities of these interceptors,” Brobst said, “and when that happens, companies don’t have an incentive to expand their production capacity.”
But there are some claims that the pressure on stockpiles may be easing. General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters this week that the number of ballistic missiles fired by Iran had dropped by 86% since the war’s first day.
Defence secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed that US forces were shifting from expensive standoff munitions towards cheaper gravity bombs — “500-pound, 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound GPS- and laser-guided, precision gravity bombs”. These, the US holds in greater abundance, though they require aircraft to operate at closer range to their targets, AP reported.
The administration has also moved to deploy an anti-drone system called Merops in the region, a low-cost platform that uses artificial intelligence to hunt and destroy enemy drones. It is small enough to fit in the back of a mid-size pickup truck.
Ukraine holds key?
In this backdrop, Ukraine has offered a radically cheaper alternative. Forced to innovate when Russia launched its full-scale invasion four years ago, Ukraine developed a mass-produced, battlefield-tested drone interceptor capable of destroying Iranian-designed Shahed attack drones at a cost of between $1,000 and $2,000 per unit. That is dirt cheap compared with the millions of dollars required for a single Patriot interceptor missile, Bloomberg has reported.
An Iranian-designed Shahed itself costs from roughly $30,000, making the economics of Patriot-based interception increasingly unsustainable.
Washington recently requested “specific support” against Iranian-designed Shaheds in the Middle East, prompting Zelensky to order the deployment of Ukrainian equipment and specialist personnel, though details remain classified.
The US, alongside Gulf states including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, has made repeated requests for Ukraine’s domestically produced interceptor drones, according to three Ukrainian weapons producers contacted by AP. None of the governments responded immediately to requests for comment from the news agency.
Zelensky has framed the offer as a swap. “Our message is very simple,” he said, “We’d like to quietly… receive the Patriot missiles we have a deficit of, and give them a corresponding number of interceptors.”
Marco Kushnir, a spokesperson for General Cherry, one of Ukraine’s leading interceptor manufacturers, said his company could be ready to supply partners “within days”, and had the capacity to produce “tens of thousands” of interceptors per month.
But Ukraine currently bans weapons exports under a wartime freeze. “We need more than just presidential statements. We need action,” said Yevhen Mahda, executive director of the Kyiv-based Institute of World Policy. “How can we talk about exports if we officially aren’t selling anything yet?”
Even if the legal obstacles were cleared overnight, significant operational challenges would remain. Interceptor drones must be integrated into a broader radar network to function, and foreign crews would require substantial training. “This is a tool that requires training,” said Oleh Katkov, editor-in-chief of Defence Express, “The real, proven expertise — not just on paper — exists only in Ukraine.”
