KARACHI: According to a recent report in Bloomberg, the US military is showing unexpected strain against Iran’s cheap and plentiful weaponry. Part of the report is reproduced here: When the first cruise missiles began detonating inside Iran, the strikes had all the hallmarks of previous successful US military campaigns — unstoppable, overwhelming force delivered without warning.
But almost two weeks into the conflict, the US war effort is showing unexpected signs of strain against an adversary whose military budget is smaller than the GDP of Vermont — but which has an arsenal of missiles and drones unlike anything the US has ever faced.
American forces have been forced to dig deep into inventories of expensive, hard-to-replace interceptors to counter the Iranian barrage. Even with the Pentagon saying Iran’s attacks are down more than 80%, Tehran is still hitting valuable military installations and energy infrastructure across the Mideast daily, part of its strategy to raise oil prices to economically punishing levels. A strike in the United Arab Emirates near one of the world’s biggest oil refineries halted operations there Tuesday. Inside Iran, hard-to-spot anti-aircraft missiles have prevented the total aerial dominance the US is accustomed to.
“The United States led the long-range precision strike revolution, and this is the first war where we’re seeing the adversary have that kind of capability,” said Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “It’s putting stress on the system that we haven’t seen before.”
The US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain has been struck by several ballistic missiles and Shaheds, a rare and expensive early warning radar in Qatar was destroyed, and the radar for a $300 million THAAD battery — the most advanced ground-based mobile missile defense system in the US inventory — was hit in Jordan.
“It’s a race to see will our inventories get low before the Iranian missile inventories get low,” said Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
US officials insist that’s a contest Iran can’t win, but every day that Tehran’s weapons continue to threaten populations, military bases and oil installations across the Middle East, they ratchet up the political pressure on the White House.
The US hasn’t provided an estimate of how much the campaign is costing, but discussions of as much as $50 billion in additional funding are already underway in Congress. The Washington Post reported Pentagon estimates put the US tab at about $5.6 billion for munitions alone in just the first two days of the war.
Trump, saying US inventories “are not where we want them to be,” met with defense-industry executives Friday to come up with ways to boost production. But the closed-door meeting resulted mainly in confirmation of existing plans — which will take years to deliver results — according to official readouts. And the administration has yet to ask Congress for supplementary funding for the war.
If the war continues at this intensity, the US may be forced to pull hard-to-replace missiles from other regions.
Before the war, Iran had about 2,500 ballistic missiles, with ranges from a few hundred kilometers to more than 2,000. That arsenal could be exhausted in a matter of weeks, according to people familiar with the matter, but strikes with Shaheds could continue indefinitely, as the weapons don’t need much launch infrastructure and can be manufactured more easily than complex ballistic missiles.
The result: The US and its partners in the Gulf most likely burned through well over 1,000 PAC-3 interceptors alone. That’s almost twice the annual production of the weapons and more than the US and its allies have supplied to Ukraine since the Russian invasion four years ago, according to Kyiv. Officials there have been astonished at Gulf states deploying PAC-3s to bring down low-cost drones.
Lockheed Martin Corp., which makes the PAC-3, plans to increase output to more than 2,000 a year, but only by 2030. For this year, the company aims to make about 650.
The Defense Department is spending $93 million to replace as many as 10 SM-6 naval air defense missiles. Another $225 million is set aside to increase production of both those and SM-3 missile interceptors, made by RTX Corp’s Raytheon unit, from 96 to 360 annually. But that will take years.
In addition to running down supplies of interceptors, Iranian strikes have also taken a toll on the radars and other equipment used to direct them. One attack damaged a radar for a THAAD, an air-defense system of which the US has only 8 deployed around the world. The radar that was hit in Jordan is the first such loss in combat.
Just how much longer Iran will be able to keep up the daily attacks around the region isn’t clear.
