U.S. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, warned Friday that the ongoing conflict with Iran is eroding U.S. national security and military readiness, pointing to reports that American interceptor missile stockpiles have fallen to dangerously low levels after months of fighting.
Warner’s warning came in a post on X published at 3:27 p.m. on July 31, 2026. The senator wrote: “The longer this war of choice drags on, the greater the cost to our national security and military readiness. Reports that months of fighting with Iran have left U.S. interceptor missile stockpiles dangerously low should be a wake-up call.”
Warner’s post lands amid a steady stream of reporting and independent analysis showing that the United States’ primary ballistic missile defense systems — the Patriot and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system — have been drawn down substantially since fighting with Iran began. Analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimated in a report published this week that the U.S. has between 759 and 827 Patriot interceptors remaining, down from a prewar inventory of roughly 2,200 of the platform’s most-modernized variants. The same analysis put the remaining THAAD stockpile at between 234 and 278 interceptors, down from 452 before the war.
CSIS analysts Mark Cancian and Chris Park, who authored the assessment, wrote that “diminished stockpiles may force the United States and its coalition partners to take more risks with interceptions,” adding that “there are no good alternatives to Patriot and THAAD for ballistic missile defense.” Their findings noted that rebuilding depleted interceptor inventories will take multiple years, a timeline that raises readiness concerns for other potential theaters of conflict beyond the Middle East.
The strain on U.S. air-defense inventories has already begun to shape battlefield decision-making, according to reporting from NBC News. U.S. commanders in the region, motivated by a desire not to waste scarce interceptor missiles, have reportedly opted not to shoot down some incoming Iranian projectiles that are on track to strike unpopulated areas of U.S. bases, a departure from earlier air and missile defense practices used to protect American installations in the region.
The Pentagon has moved to expand production of both systems as the conflict has ground on. The Army this week awarded Lockheed Martin a contract worth up to $58.6 billion to produce Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (PAC-3 MSE) interceptors through fiscal year 2032, part of a broader push to increase manufacturing capacity for both Patriot and THAAD rocket motors. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to say when the production expansion would translate into meaningful inventory gains.
Friday’s post is the latest in a series of statements Warner has issued criticizing the Trump administration’s handling of the conflict with Iran since it began in mid-2025. When President Trump ordered direct U.S. military strikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure in June 2025, Warner said the president had come into office “promising to ‘end the endless foreign wars,'” but instead “took steps that could drag the United States into another one, without consulting Congress, without a clear strategy, without regard to the consistent conclusions of the intelligence community, and without explaining to the American people what’s at stake.”
Later that month, Warner voted in favor of a war powers resolution introduced by fellow Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine seeking to curb the administration’s use of the military against Iran without congressional authorization. In a statement following the vote, Warner said Article I of the Constitution “is clear: the power to declare war belongs to Congress,” and argued the administration’s “complete lack of consultation ahead of the operation, combined with its lack of objective transparency since,” did not reflect “a clearheaded and strategic plan for navigating this in the long term.”
When the administration expanded its campaign against Iran earlier this year to strike a broader set of targets, including senior Iranian leadership, Warner again pressed the White House for clarity. He said the strikes marked “a deeply consequential decision that risks pulling the United States into another broad conflict in the Middle East,” and while acknowledging that “Iran’s leadership has long supported terrorism across the region,” he said that reality “does not relieve any president of the responsibility to act within the law, with a clear strategy, and with Congress.”
Warner has also linked the war directly to rising costs for American families. In a statement on the administration’s decision to temporarily lift sanctions on Russian oil, Warner said “Trump’s war of choice with Iran has come with immeasurable cost to American lives — with 13 servicemembers killed and hundreds more injured — and passed enormous costs on to working families.” He pointed specifically to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which he said had “cut off 20% of the world’s oil and gas supply,” as an example of a consequence the administration failed to plan for.
Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” earlier this year as Congress weighed a White House request for supplemental war funding, Warner said the administration should have consulted lawmakers before committing to military action, arguing that “this president should have come to the American people and Congress first and said, ‘I’m going to choose to go to war, here’s what I want to try to accomplish.'” He also questioned whether the stated objectives of the war — which he described as “regime change, uranium, missiles and the Strait of Hormuz” — had been achieved, saying “on any honest assessment, I don’t think we’ve accomplished any of them so far.”
In a more recent appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Warner said he was hoping for “a classic Donald Trump move — declare victory tomorrow and be done,” warning that “the continuation of this war at this pace will be a continuing disaster.” He also criticized the cost-efficiency of the U.S. response to Iranian drone attacks, noting that American forces have been using missiles costing roughly $2.5 million apiece to shoot down Iranian drones that cost around $50,000, and said Ukraine had offered the U.S. access to a far cheaper counter-drone technology that the administration declined to accept.
The broader financial and political toll of the conflict has continued to mount. Military officials have told members of Congress that the first week of the war alone cost approximately $11.3 billion, and lawmakers have since debated additional supplemental funding requests from the White House. Some Republicans have signaled that congressional support for the war could erode if it is not brought to a close before reaching the 60-day cap on unauthorized military engagements set by the 1973 War Powers Resolution.
The depletion of interceptor stockpiles has drawn attention beyond Capitol Hill as well. Earlier assessments from the Jewish Institute for National Security of America found that the U.S. and Israel had already burned through a substantial share of their combined missile interceptor inventories defending against Iranian counterstrikes in 2025, warning of an “urgent need” to replace those stocks and increase production rates before further escalation.
CSIS analysts have cautioned that the greater strategic risk is not the ongoing Iran conflict itself, but the possibility that the U.S. could be forced to respond to another high-intensity contingency elsewhere in the world before Patriot and THAAD inventories can be rebuilt. According to their assessment, depleted stockpiles could compel the United States and its coalition partners to accept greater operational risk in future air-defense operations, conserving interceptors or prioritizing only the highest-value threats rather than intercepting every incoming projectile.
As of Friday, the Pentagon had not publicly confirmed the specific inventory figures cited in the CSIS analysis, though sources familiar with the matter told CNN the think tank’s estimates closely tracked internal government figures. The Defense Department has not provided a timeline for when expanded production efforts will meaningfully restore U.S. interceptor stockpiles to prewar levels.