The United States has funneled such a large share of its air-defense arsenal into the fight against Iran that military planners now fear the drawdown is eroding America’s ability to deter China and Russia, according to U.S. officials briefed on the matter. Stockpiles of PAC-3 Patriot interceptors and Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) rounds in Europe have fallen to levels some officials describe as “beyond critical,” a designation that reflects just how thin the buffer has become on a continent still absorbing Russian pressure on NATO’s eastern flank.
The transfers were carried out under the authority of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who oversees an “orders book” that directs the movement of military assets worldwide under longstanding Pentagon procedures. Every shift of interceptors, radars and counterdrone systems from Europe and Asia to the Middle East required his sign-off, officials said, making the Pentagon chief the central figure in a redistribution of American firepower that is now being felt from the Baltic to the Taiwan Strait.
Direct exchanges of fire between the U.S. and Iran have mostly stopped in recent weeks, but officials caution that refilling the weapons stocks pulled from Japan, South Korea and Germany could take years. That leaves persistent gaps in America’s global military posture even though Western officials do not currently assess that a full-scale Chinese or Russian attack is imminent. The U.S. European Command has already had to adjust its operational plans in response to the shortfall, and administration officials have increasingly concluded that the United States could not fully execute its contingency plans to defend Taiwan from a near-term Chinese invasion.
Beyond the Patriot and ATACMS shortages, officials say precision-strike missiles and guided rockets based in Europe have also been drawn down to extremely low levels. THAAD antimissile interceptors and Merops counterdrone systems have likewise been redirected from Europe to the Middle East, compounding the strain on the continent’s defenses at a moment when Russian hybrid activity, including explosive drones discovered at a German airport that officials believe are likely linked to Moscow, has unsettled NATO allies.
The scale of consumption in the Iran war helps explain the depth of the shortfall. By mid-July, the U.S. had expended roughly 1,700 Patriot air-defense interceptors and more than 200 THAAD interceptors, officials said, while Navy ships fired an additional 150 Standard Missile interceptors to shoot down Iranian missiles and drones. Independent analysts have produced similar estimates for some of these systems based on budgetary data. Iran, for its part, has fired more than 1,500 ballistic missiles and 6,000 large drones since the war began, a number that has continued climbing as the regime keeps targeting commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.
To conserve what remains of its interceptor inventory, the U.S. military has held back from retaliating against every Iranian attack on shipping in the strait, with officials debating internally whether tit-for-tat strikes are worth the munitions they cost. President Trump also paused strikes on Iran in late July amid internal disagreement over remaining stock levels, and the military has resorted to refurbishing older Tomahawk cruise missiles in an effort to pad depleted supplies, according to one official.
Operation Epic Fury, the U.S. code name for the joint military campaign with Israel against Iran, began on February 28, 2026, and the White House declared its core objectives met within roughly 38 days, touting the destruction of more than 85 percent of Iran’s defense industrial base. Iran subsequently agreed to a ceasefire and to reopening the Strait of Hormuz as the Trump administration pursued a broader peace agreement. That truce, however, proved fragile: the 60-day U.S.-Iran ceasefire expired in mid-August, with Trump telling Fox News he was in “no hurry” to settle the dispute even as a backchannel with Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officials remained open. Iranian attacks on shipping in the strait have continued to test the limits of the earlier memorandum of understanding, prompting periodic American responses that further draw down munitions stocks.
The White House disputes that any of this amounts to a shortage. “The United States Military has more than enough munitions, ammo, and stockpiles to serve all of President Trump’s strategic goals and beyond, and Operation Epic Fury has exposed what happens when you mess with the United States,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said, adding that Trump has urged defense contractors to keep increasing production of “made-in-America weapons, which are the best in the world.”
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell was more pointed in rejecting the characterization. “Claims of U.S. munition shortages are false. When the Fake News media irresponsibly amplifies these lies, the real-world consequence is clear: our enemies are emboldened to provoke—or attack—American troops,” Parnell said. The Trump administration has otherwise declined to detail which weapons systems have been moved out of Europe and Asia or how many interceptors remain in those theaters.
NATO has also sought to tamp down alarm over the reported shortages. Col. Martin O’Donnell, a spokesman for the alliance’s military headquarters, said NATO’s 32 members collectively hold sufficient air-defense munitions. “NATO has enough air defense munitions, including Patriot missiles, to defend ourselves,” O’Donnell said. “And we still have enough to continue to donate to Ukraine.” His statement did not directly address the declining U.S. stockpiles of PAC-3 interceptors, the most advanced version of the Patriot system, that were reported separately.
The industrial base underlying the Patriot system illustrates why replenishment will be slow. During the first four days of the Iran war, coalition forces expended Patriot interceptors at an estimated rate of 225 missiles per day, while Lockheed Martin’s Camden, Arkansas, facility was producing only about 1.7 per day. Boeing, which manufactures the PAC-3’s radar seeker at a single facility in Huntsville, Alabama, delivered only around 650 to 700 seekers in all of 2025. In response, Lockheed Martin signed a framework agreement with the Department of War in January 2026 to quadruple THAAD interceptor production, from 96 to 400 interceptors annually, building on an earlier agreement to accelerate PAC-3 output.
The Army has since moved to lock in a far larger, longer-term production pipeline. In late July, the Army converted a one-year, $4.7 billion contract into a seven-year, $58.6 billion agreement with Lockheed Martin covering interceptor deliveries from fiscal 2026 through 2032. The company says the funding will let it triple PAC-3 MSE production capacity by the end of 2030 and expand its Camden workforce by 50 percent, to about 1,850 employees. PAC-3 MSE is the hit-to-kill interceptor used within the Patriot system to counter ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and aircraft.
Even with that investment, analysts caution the math remains daunting. The reported halt in direct U.S. military aid to Ukraine during 2026, occurring alongside Operation Epic Fury’s heavy draw on shared air-defense resources, has left two active, geographically separate conflicts competing for interceptors built on the same limited production lines. The Army has also raised its own procurement target for PAC-3 MSE interceptors fourfold, from 3,376 to 13,773, an adjustment analysts describe as an after-the-fact acknowledgment that even substantial prewar stockpiles could be drawn down far faster than expected. Separately, global annual Patriot missile production is estimated at roughly 850 to 880 units, a figure that could rise to about 1,130 by 2027, according to Fabian Hoffman, an air-defense and missile expert at the University of Oslo — compared with Russia’s estimated production of 840 to 1,020 Iskander and Kinzhal ballistic missiles per year.
Lawmakers in Washington have voiced growing unease about the timing of the drawdown, given continued signs of Russian hybrid aggression against NATO members and intelligence assessments that President Vladimir Putin could test the alliance’s resolve within a few years. Sen. Roger Wicker (R., Miss.) tied those concerns directly to the Pentagon’s ongoing review of U.S. force posture in Europe, which could result in further troop reductions on the continent. “Discussions about our force posture review in Europe must account for a wounded Putin lashing out,” Wicker said.
The depleted stockpiles have also complicated Washington’s ability to support allies. Deliveries of previously purchased American munitions to partner nations have slowed, officials said, and the limited supply has sharply constrained the West’s capacity to send additional interceptors to Ukraine, where Russian missile strikes have recently killed civilians in population centers left exposed by the shortage of air-defense coverage. U.S. air-defense units, meanwhile, have been credited with destroying thousands of Iranian projectiles over the course of the war, protecting military installations, energy infrastructure and population centers throughout the Middle East — a defensive record officials say came at a steep and still-unfolding cost to the broader arsenal.
With military options against Tehran constrained by the state of its own stockpiles, the Trump administration has pivoted back toward economic pressure. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the shift toward sanctions is intended to avoid a return to major combat with Iran, at least for now. But former officials warn that approach carries its own risks. Daniel Shapiro, a former Pentagon official in the Biden administration now serving as a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said Iran retains the capacity to respond militarily even as it absorbs economic pain. “Iran has agency,” Shapiro said. “It certainly has the willingness to absorb enormous pain, but it also has tools to try to impose pain on us and on the global economy. And those tools are likely to involve military actions that the U.S. would almost certainly have to respond to.” Should Tehran act on that leverage, officials say, it would place the shrinking American interceptor inventory under precisely the kind of test the Pentagon has spent months trying to avoid.