During a single 24-hour stretch last month, American forces stationed across the Middle East fired approximately 50 Patriot interceptor missiles at incoming Iranian fire — a barrage costing the Pentagon close to $200 million in one day alone, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the engagement. At roughly $4 million per interceptor, the expenditure illustrates the scale of the air defense campaign American troops have waged since Iran began targeting U.S. bases in Jordan in mid-July, and the mounting strain on a weapons stockpile that officials privately acknowledge is running thin even as the Pentagon publicly insists otherwise.
The barrage came during five consecutive days last month in which Iran launched successive waves of drones and missiles at three U.S.-linked bases in Jordan, probing for gaps in American air defenses. On the fifth day, Iran found one. A missile struck prefabricated housing units at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Azraq on July 17, killing three U.S. soldiers and wounding more than 100 others, with the Pentagon later acknowledging that additional troops were hurt and several aircraft damaged in that week’s fighting.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, asked about the fatal strike, said American forces intercepted nearly the entire barrage before conceding the fatal gap: “We shot down almost all the missiles. One leaked through.”
A Stockpile Running Thin
The Pentagon has expended more than 1,500 Patriot interceptors since the war with Iran began, and has fewer than 1,700 remaining, according to two people briefed on the stockpile who spoke on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the figures. The United States produced only about 600 interceptors in all of 2025 — a fraction of what a single week of intense fighting can consume. That imbalance has turned each interceptor into an increasingly precious and closely rationed asset, even as Iran has grown more adept at forcing American batteries to fire more of them per attack.
Seth G. Jones, president of the defense and security department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Iran has effectively studied and adopted tactics Russia has used against Ukraine — pairing ballistic and cruise missiles with drone swarms to overwhelm and distract air defense systems before a follow-on strike gets through. Combining both missiles and drones in a single attack, he said, has made the defensive picture considerably harder to manage across multiple locations in the Gulf.
Muwaffaq Salti Becomes a Frontline Hub
Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base has taken on outsized importance in the conflict, having become a major staging hub for dozens of American aircraft and several thousand service members. Many U.S. troops previously based in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates were relocated before and during the war to bases in Jordan, which commanders judged to be farther from Iranian territory and less exposed to drone and ballistic missile attacks. That assumption was tested directly by the July 17 strike.
In the days following the attack, American commanders moved to reinforce air defenses in Jordan and at other regional installations, according to a senior U.S. military official who declined to detail specific operational changes. Notably, two of the three soldiers killed in the July 17 strike were assigned to air defense units based in Germany that had been working for months with U.S. Central Command, applying lessons drawn from Russia’s drone-and-missile campaign against Ukraine to the Middle East theater.
Pentagon Denies a Shortage as Trump Presses for Answers
The dwindling interceptor supply has become a point of friction inside the administration. In late July, President Trump directly questioned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about the state of American weapons stockpiles, according to U.S. officials. Publicly, the Pentagon has rejected any suggestion of a shortfall. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement that claims of a munitions shortage were false, warning that repeating them “emboldened” adversaries to test American forces.
The public posture stands in some tension with Hegseth’s own assessment from earlier in the war. On April 8, he told reporters that Iran’s missile program had been rendered “functionally destroyed,” describing its launchers and missiles as depleted and nearly ineffective. Most of Iran’s missile stockpiles had been stored in deeply buried underground facilities that American and Israeli forces heavily bombed during the war’s first five weeks — but Iran subsequently excavated a number of those sites and resumed launches, choking off shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and renewing the threat to American forces in the region.
Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha Push for De-escalation
Roughly two weeks before the Jordan strikes, Trump called off a planned round of bombing raids against Iran after the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar urged him to pursue diplomatic talks instead, in a war that has killed an estimated 1,700 Iranian civilians. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman warned Trump in a phone call that large-scale airstrikes would likely prompt Iranian retaliation against energy infrastructure across the kingdom and its neighbors, according to a Saudi official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
With American interceptor stocks already stretched and Iran demonstrating a capacity to punch through U.S. defenses, the Saudi official said the risk of serious damage to regional infrastructure was genuine, and that Prince Mohammed pressed Trump to step back from further escalation.
A Pattern of Adaptation
The Jordan strikes were not the first sign that Iran had adjusted its tactics mid-war. In April, Iranian forces shot down a U.S. F-15E fighter jet over southern Iran using a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile after a drone swarm fed Iranian commanders the jet’s GPS location, speed and heading, according to a senior U.S. military official. Both crew members ejected; the pilot was recovered quickly, but the weapons officer evaded Iranian forces for nearly two days before U.S. Special Operations troops carried out a rescue. Crew members later told Pentagon debriefers that the $60 million aircraft’s countermeasures gave them only about half a second of warning before impact. Trump announced a pause in the fighting shortly afterward, which two military officials said was used to adjust to Iran’s evolving tactics.
That evolution has continued during subsequent lulls in fighting. The Houthi militia’s entry into the conflict last month extended the battlefield hundreds of miles south into Yemen, a move experts said was designed to force the United States and its allies to defend against threats from multiple directions simultaneously. International inspectors also believe Iran has relocated elements of its nuclear program to a fortified underground complex — referred to by the U.S. as Pickaxe Mountain — buried more than 300 feet beneath a mountain in central Iran, while Iranian troops and leadership have dispersed to scattered locations that are difficult to target. Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, said Iran’s leadership has made itself deliberately hard to locate, let alone strike.
Industrial Base Scrambles to Catch Up
The strain on interceptor stocks has already reshaped U.S. procurement policy. On July 29, the Army converted a one-year, $4.7 billion contract with Lockheed Martin into a seven-year, up to $58.6 billion agreement to mass-produce PAC-3 MSE interceptors, as the wars in Iran and Ukraine simultaneously drain the same limited supply. Lockheed has said the funding will let it follow through on a pledge to triple PAC-3 MSE production capacity by the end of 2030, in part by expanding its Camden, Arkansas, plant workforce by roughly 50 percent, and is investing $8 billion to $9 billion through 2030 to modernize more than 20 U.S. facilities.
Even with that investment, analysts caution the industrial base has real limits. During the first four days of the Iran war, coalition forces are estimated to have expended Patriot interceptors at a rate of roughly 225 per day, while Lockheed’s Camden facility was producing only about 1.7 per day — a gap researchers at the Foreign Policy Research Institute described as a roughly 132-to-1 consumption-to-production ratio. Much of that bottleneck sits not with Lockheed’s final assembly line but one tier down the supply chain: Boeing manufactures the active radar seeker used in every PAC-3 MSE interceptor at a single Huntsville, Alabama facility, and delivered only around 650 to 700 seekers in 2025, prompting the Pentagon to sign a separate framework this spring aimed at tripling seeker output.
Ukraine’s own dependence on the same interceptor supply has added further pressure on Washington’s calculus. Ukraine, described as a key U.S. ally, is running low on Patriot interceptors — its only weapon capable of intercepting ballistic missiles, putting Kyiv and U.S. forces fighting Iran in effective competition for the same limited production pipeline. Lockheed’s broader plan calls for scaling Patriot PAC-3 production to 2,000 units annually, up from roughly 600, though officials and independent analysts alike have said that ramp will take years, not months, to materially ease the shortage now being felt on the ground in Jordan and across the region.