U.S. long‑range missile depletion exposes deterrence gap in war with Iran
Internal figures cited by Reuters say the U.S. Army has used almost all of its ATACMS, PrSM and about half its Tomahawk missiles in a five‑month campaign against Iran. That depletion leaves Washington facing hard questions about how to deter Russia and China while still fighting a live war in the Gulf.
America’s war with Iran is exposing a vulnerability U.S. planners have warned about for years: the arsenal of precision long‑range missiles that underpins U.S. power projection is not built for a drawn‑out fight.
Internal figures, described in multiple reports on 4 August and attributed to U.S. officials, say the Army has effectively exhausted its stocks of ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM) after five months of operations targeting sites in southern Iran. The campaign has also consumed around half of Washington’s global inventory of Tomahawk cruise missiles, a cornerstone weapon for both the Navy and Air Force.
Reuters, citing those internal assessments, reported that the depletion will take years to reverse, even if defense production lines are pushed hard. A separate summary of the figures circulating in defense circles used even starker language, stating the U.S. has used “virtually all” of its long‑range ground‑to‑ground missiles. Such characterizations have not been officially confirmed by the Pentagon, but they align with the tempo and scale of publicly known strikes on Iranian command nodes, air defenses and drone facilities since early March.
For U.S. forces actually fighting the Iran war, the impact is immediate and practical. Commanders prefer long‑range precision munitions because they allow them to hit heavily defended targets from outside Iran’s air defense envelope, reducing the risk to pilots and warships. As stocks shrink, planners are forced toward harder trade‑offs: which high‑value targets justify the remaining missiles, and when do manned aircraft or closer‑range weapons have to take on missions that were once handled from hundreds of kilometers away.
The stakes extend well beyond Iran. ATACMS, PrSM and Tomahawks are the same classes of weapons U.S. strategists count on to blunt a sudden move by Russia in Eastern Europe or by China in the western Pacific. If the internal tallies are accurate, Washington is now fighting a regional war that has already eaten through much of the firepower it would need on day one of a second major crisis. Allies in NATO and the Indo‑Pacific, who depend on U.S. reinforcement plans, will read those numbers closely.
Defense industry capacity is the other pressure point. The war in Ukraine had already drawn down U.S. and allied stocks of artillery rounds, air defenses and older cruise missiles. The Iran campaign is now stressing higher‑end missile lines that cannot simply be switched on overnight. Expanding production of complex systems like PrSM or Tomahawk requires specialized components, cleared workforces and often new factory space, all of which run into supply‑chain and budget limits.
Strategically, the dilemma is blunt. Washington has chosen to answer Iranian attacks with an extensive precision strike campaign rather than a large ground deployment. That has reduced U.S. casualties but accelerated missile burn rates. Every additional salvo makes it harder to credibly signal to Moscow or Beijing that the United States could simultaneously surge comparable firepower to another theater.
The more the U.S. leans on a small family of exquisite munitions, the more its adversaries learn how finite that arsenal is.
Sources
- OSINT