Is America running out of missiles? The attacks on Iranian forces and leadership have had a devastating impact on the regime, but the repeated salvos of precision-guided munitions and interceptors have put a strain on U.S. and Israeli stores of some of these munitions. While the United States retains significant capacity, as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has stated, the expenditures do create risk, particularly in other potential theaters of action such as East Asia. President Donald Trump acknowledged as much in his Friday statement after meeting with industry chief executive officers on the imperative to “quadruple” the production of high-end munitions. After previous shortages in missiles and munitions caused by the expenditure of U.S. and allied stockpiles in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there were clarion calls for and funding appropriated to address these shortfalls. Why is America’s military in this predicament again?
There is no single reason for this situation, and there is no simple way out of it. While building magazine depth in many of the exquisite munitions the U.S. military forces use is critical, it is equally crucial to build magazine breadth by developing and deploying a wide variety of munitions, fostering producibility efforts, and incentivizing second sourcing to meet security threats across the spectrum.
Developing a robust high-low mix of munitions is essential for U.S. national security. As I discuss below, the operation in Iran and other ongoing efforts show that there is progress being made on this front, but additional Pentagon, Congressional, and industry actions are needed to build true resilience in the munitions industrial base.
How Did America Get Here… Again?
Munitions have been traditional bill payers in Defense Department budget battles for many years, with funding for munitions being taken to fix holes in other programs, and with continuously unfulfilled promises to make things right. For example, funding on 80 missile and munitions programs pitched and yawed sometimes more than 50 percent year over year between Fiscal Year 2001 and FY2021. This level of contracting volatility has created tremendous instability for both the government program managers and the companies that developed and produced these systems.
Delivering weapons in response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine illuminated this challenge, and building magazine depth has consequently been a major Pentagon priority over the past several years. Creating a more consistent demand signal has been the main focus, principally through Congressional appropriations and contracts issued to weapons producers.
This has led to progress, but chronic challenges persist, and stockpiles have not risen as rapidly as many initially hoped. Some of the challenges will take time to address. In late 2023, for example, the U.S. Army awarded nine production contracts for 155mm artillery shell production, including three with international vendors. The goal was to produce 100,000 shells per month by August 2025, but overall output has fallen well short of that. Long-lead items in the supply chain, performance challenges, and other issues have hindered faster production rates.
The continuing cyclical nature of munitions purchases also has an impact. Companies can only build facilities and develop capacity to support the terms of the contracts that they have with the Department of Defense. For example, even with the increased focus on precision-guided munitions, Joint Direct Attack Munitions procurement saw significant drops in the FY2023 to 2025 budgets as the military services balanced competing budgetary priorities. These fluctuations make it very difficult for both government and industry to maintain a consistent cost profile and sustain the workforce to produce these munitions.
Additionally, exquisite munitions are hard to produce at scale, having been painstakingly developed over decades with an emphasis on performance over producibility. Their per-unit costs are significant, with Tomahawks at more than $2 million each and Patriot missiles at more than $4 million each, for instance. The public focus is naturally on the prime contractors: large firms that deliver the final all-up-round to the government customer. Scaling production, however, extends to a more complex and less visible ecosystem of materials, components, and systems providers, from propulsion, guidance systems, and electronics, all the way to advanced materials and chemicals deep in the supply chain.
Critical bottlenecks can arise from minor hiccups anywhere in this supply chain. These supply chains are complex and often already strained by facility, equipment, personnel, or other challenges. Significant increases in munitions production thus demand that both government customers and large industry players closely monitor, curate, support, guide, and expand their supply chains. Indeed, for the recent multiyear Lockheed Martin-built PAC-3 missile procurement, the government has made commitments to Boeing, which is the supplier of the seeker. Primes are also taking a more proactive role in hardening their supply chains by supporting existing suppliers, qualifying new ones, or even bringing some capabilities in-house.
Building Magazine Depth Is Critical, But Will Never Be Enough
The last two administrations have aggressively worked to build depth by scaling production efforts of existing munitions, but it will take significant time and resources to overcome these challenges.
To accelerate this, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg formed the Munitions Acceleration Council in 2025 to dramatically ramp the production of 12 identified systems over the course of three years. These systems included Patriot interceptors, Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles, Standard Missile-6, Precision Strike Missiles, and Joint Air-Surface Standoff Missiles. These led directly to recent major framework agreements with Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and L3Harris on various specific munitions or components. The Lockheed deal, for example, is intended to increase PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement interceptor production from 600 to 2,000 annually. The purpose of these longer-term and very large deals is to help create a stable demand signal and significantly increase production rates. Industry commitments of private capital investment to increase industrial capacity have also been a major component of these agreements and will help further ramp up these efforts.
These framework agreements are not contracts, however, and must be followed by matching Congressional appropriations. The reconciliation law, passed as part of the FY2026 appropriations, included over $25 billion for munitions, but Congress has acknowledged that appropriated funds are still well short of Pentagon requests. Congress has granted multiyear procurement authority to some munitions to help spur production, but that does not address all munitions being used in Iran today. Moreover, most of the planned production increases that the President noted after his meeting with industry have not even been submitted to Congress as part of a budget or a supplemental request for appropriations.
A major challenge to building magazine depth is the simple fact that presidents regularly use precision-guided munitions as tools to accomplish foreign policy goals. The second Trump Administration, for instance, has used missiles against the Houthis in Yemen in early 2025, during last summer’s Midnight Hammer operation in Iran, and in Venezuela during the recent raid to capture Nicolás Maduro, all before Operation Epic Fury. Precision-guided munitions are clearly a weapon of choice, if not first resort, for presidents. They have tremendous destructive power, there is limited physical risk to American warfighters in their use, and their precision means that collateral damage is reduced. It is therefore not surprising that precision-guided munitions are used in tremendous numbers in initial volleys during conflicts.
Why Magazine Breadth Is Equally Essential to Depth
While these efforts to increase magazine depth are vital, they are not enough. America needs alternatives that expand the breadth of its munitions capabilities to more affordable and rapidly producible systems, as well as additional sourcing options.
New categories of munitions would give American warfighters a better range of options to address threats. Iranian and other adversary forces are engaging in cost-imposing strategies by using $20,000 drones to attempt to get U.S. forces to expend $4 million Patriot missiles and wear down American stockpiles. The United States has other tools to counter drones, but the more optionality that it can give its warfighters, the better.
The good news is that developing swarms of low-cost drones and increasing the producibility of lower-cost missiles have become major Department of Defense priorities in recent months. Epic Fury, for example, has seen the unheralded introduction of the Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System. Ironically, it is an attack drone reverse-engineered after the Iranian Shahed-136. Developed by Arizona-based SpektreWorks, the FLM 136 model went from a demonstration in the Pentagon courtyard last summer to being operationally deployed last week. It is not yet public how the drone has been used or how effective it has been in Epic Fury, but the Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System’s introduction (at $35,000 a copy), coupled with efforts to rapidly field low cost, unmanned one-way attack drones at scale under the Department’s Drone Dominance Program, make it clear that low-cost munitions are gaining significant traction in military planning and investment.
A related area of focus, particularly in the Air Force, is manufacturing producibility. The Family of Affordable Mass Munitions developed out of an earlier Air Force Program Executive Office for Weapons effort to create an Enterprise Test Vehicle that prioritized “affordability distributed mass production.” Family of Affordable Mass Munitions emerged in the Air Force’s 2026 budget request to develop “affordable and highly manufacturable” cruise missiles with unit costs in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars, versus millions. Its core purpose is to be able to rapidly produce effective munitions at scale through multiple vendors. These efforts continue, but accelerating these types of producibility initiatives through multi-year procurement and sustained investment is urgent.
Finally, additional sources of munitions, through co-production and second sourcing, build capacity across the industrial base. Working with allies and partners adds production capacity. In August 2024, for example, Poland signed an agreement for producing 48 Patriot missile launchers in-country. These and other licensed production efforts are actionable ways to scale production of existing munitions. Congress’s creation of a new Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Armaments Cooperation, and the Department’s reform focus on security cooperation, create an ideal opportunity to do much more co-production in the future. At the sub-system and component level, the surfeit of recent new entrants in the solid rocket motor business, the creation of a munitions campus for collocating supply chain manufacturers, and novel commercial uses of excess organic capacity, for example, create significant opportunities for new entrants and the employment of second sourcing strategies to build overall industrial capacity.
Further Progress Is Necessary
Addressing America’s munitions industrial base challenges demands significant attention and investment. This starts with rebuilding capacity expended in the Iran conflict through a significant supplemental appropriations request and following through on the large framework agreements with Congressional appropriations and company private capital investments. Building magazine depth is only part of the answer, though. The United States must create greater magazine breadth through an increased and sustained Department and Congressional focus on low-cost systems, producibility, and second sourcing. Sustained Department investment, multiyear procurement authority from Congress, the integration of these new types of munitions into military operations, and the development of additional sourcing strategies throughout the munitions supply chain will help unlock that needed breadth. Industry investment of private capital will be an important enabler across the board. This balanced approach will help create the resilience needed for the long-term health of the munitions industrial base.
Jerry McGinn, Ph.D., is the director of the Center for the Industrial Base at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former senior Pentagon acquisition official.
**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.
Image: U.S. Central Command Public Affairs via DVIDS.
