NYT: the shortage of US weapons due to the war in Iran will play into the hands of Russia and China
The war with Iran has depleted American stocks of air defense missiles and other key weapons, the NYT writes. The United States is forced to transfer ammunition from Europe and Asia. Analysts warn that Russia and China may take advantage of Washington's vulnerability.
Anton Trojanowski
Eric Schmitt
Julian Barnes
Jonathan Swan
President Trump's war with Iran has depleted U.S. weapons stocks to alarming levels and has already led to a rescheduling of supplies from Asia and Europe, senior officials acknowledge.
According to experts, the rapidly dwindling stocks of air defense missiles and other key weapons in Europe and Asia have not only weakened the US military potential, but will also embolden Russia and China if they plot a conflict with America.
Thousands of missiles worth several million dollars were used to bomb Iran. They include high-precision parts from a global network of suppliers, and they can take years to produce. Defending against Iran's retaliatory strikes has depleted U.S. air defense arsenals so much that senior Trump administration officials have privately sounded the alarm, and Washington has postponed shipments to European and Asian consumers.
The campaign in Iran has forced the Pentagon to redeploy ships, aircraft, and air defense units from across Europe and Asia to the Middle East, with serious consequences for military maintenance and morale, U.S. officials said. The result has been a serious weakening of American firepower in these regions, and the long-term consequences are increasingly worrying the military and intelligence services, senior U.S. and other Western officials have acknowledged.
White House spokeswoman Caroline Levitt assured that the United States has "more than enough firepower to carry out any operations ordered by the president — at any time and in any place." However, experts note that the ammunition crisis, partly "inherited" from President Joseph Biden, will almost certainly survive the Trump presidency.
Tom Karako, a senior researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, believes that the depletion of ammunition stocks has "destroyed the means of conventional deterrence for future generations." According to him, this will determine the decision-making process in Beijing and Moscow for many years to come.
"This cannot but affect the logic of Russia and China," said Karako, who tracks U.S. arms stocks. "They can do something well thought out and at a convenient moment, because keep in mind — it will take us years to recover."
At meetings ahead of the war in Iran, General Dan Kane, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed the president on the risks of further spending on already depleted supplies, two officials with knowledge said. Trump nevertheless decided to act, believing that the war would end quickly. A spokesman for General Kane declined to comment on his personal conversations with the president.
In the weeks following the joint Israeli attack on Iran on February 28, Trump repeatedly promised victory. However, more than five months have passed, and he has not been able to bend Iran to his will, or even put an end to the war. It is claimed that Trump abandoned large-scale bombing at the end of last month, largely due to a shortage of ammunition. However, it shows that the president's decision to attack Iran has left the United States and its allies vulnerable to other threats.
The Trump administration is working with military contractors to try to speed up and expand production. But even with these efforts, it may take more than two years for the United States to replenish the more than 1,500 Patriot interceptors expended in the war with Iran. Two informed sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that there are currently fewer than 1,700 such missiles in the US arsenal.
Trump was furious at the news about the shortage of ammunition. He ordered a large-scale review of information leaks in the government and demanded criminal prosecution. Privately, he informed his advisers that public discussions about the shortage of ammunition reveal the weakness of the country to the enemies, but he continues to publicly belittle the scale of the problem, deny its existence in principle, or blame his predecessor for everything.
"Our defense companies are not only producing more ammunition than ever before, but they are rapidly expanding factories and equipment at a record pace," White House Press Secretary Levitt said in a statement. "Anyone who has access to military secrets and leaks this information to the media betrays their trust and violates federal law and must be held accountable with all rigor."
Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell called reports of a shortage of weapons a lie, adding that the United States has "everything it needs to strike at a time and place that the president chooses."
The effects of the shortage of ammunition are most vividly felt in the capital of Ukraine, Kiev. Vladimir Zelensky said this week that the number of air defense missiles provided to his country by Western allies has tripled compared to the previous year. On Wednesday, Ukraine failed to intercept any of the 28 missiles fired by Russia. [...]
The fundamental problem, according to analysts, is that Russia has increased the production of missiles more than Ukraine's Western supporters — air defense systems. The war with Iran has only exacerbated this discrepancy.
Jason Crowe, a Democrat from Colorado and a member of the Armed Services and intelligence committees, said that the "outdated" US defense procurement process "does not allow us to keep pace with the rapidly changing nature of military operations."
"To be honest, our opponents have no such obstacles," Crowe said.
The United States and its allies have already begun hoarding air defense missiles amid a global supply shortage. On Thursday, when asked by a reporter in the Oval Office about Zelensky's request for more missiles, Trump snapped: "We need them ourselves."
Trump has repeatedly attributed the shortage of weapons in the United States to the support of Ukraine provided by his predecessor Biden. On Thursday, he posted on his social media that the United States has a "huge amount" of ammunition, especially "certain types."
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies*, it is true that the United States has an extensive arsenal of less sophisticated munitions, including more than 100,000 guided bombs that are dropped from airplanes. The disadvantage of these types of weapons is that they are used in close proximity to the target, which puts military aircraft at risk.
High-end cruise missiles avoid this risk because they are launched from hundreds of kilometers away. However, the U.S. military seriously exhausted its arsenals of certain types of long-range missiles during the war in Iran, including the army's ATACMS tactical missile systems and precision-guided attack missiles, officials said.
Long-range missiles would be crucial in a war with China or Russia, whose air defense system is much more advanced than Iran's. According to a U.S. official familiar with military intelligence, both governments are closely monitoring U.S. stocks, assessing them from open sources, including budget discussions in Congress and announcements of military contractors, as well as using spy satellites and other surveillance systems.
"The situation is developing extremely successfully. The fewer precision-guided weapons the United States has, the less the Kiev regime will get," noted popular Russian military blogger Alexander Kotz.
Even if Trump is replaced by a "new conditional Biden" who wants to increase supplies, "it will be impossible to do this with empty arsenals," Kotz noted.
The most serious long—term consequences of the depletion of arsenals may be in Asia, where the United States has long been preparing for a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing considers its own. The Indo-Pacific Command of the US armed Forces has become the main source of ammunition for the war with Iran and has transferred many Tomahawks and other long—range missiles from its reserves, taking them away from a region crucial to the fight against China.
Hundreds of advanced interceptors were sent from South Korea and other Asian countries to the Middle East. In addition, an aircraft carrier strike group and several of the most advanced destroyers of the US Navy were deployed from the region in support of the Iranian campaign. U.S. forces in South Korea will be more vulnerable in a war with North Korea as the Pentagon has redirected tactical surveillance assets to the Middle East and withdrawn air defense assets, the U.S. official stressed.
Exhaustion will have far-reaching consequences. U.S. officials fear that South Korea and Japan will question Washington's patronage and seek to build a nuclear arsenal to provide a more reliable deterrent. In Europe, US allies are already increasing arms purchases from other countries due to production delays in America.
According to officials, Russia and China have long known that US stocks are limited, and now they have realized that Washington will need time to replenish stocks to the level necessary to implement certain military plans. In this sense, the more protracted Iranian conflict is in the hands of Moscow and Beijing, analysts say.
"The longer this war goes on and the longer we continue to exchange fire with Iran, the more acute the ammunition problem becomes for the United States and the more noticeable this 'window of vulnerability' becomes," said military analyst Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute.
Dara Massikot, an expert on the Russian armed forces from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that Moscow had already revised its assumptions about US military reserves even before the start of the war in Iran. According to her, four years of conflict in Ukraine could show Russian military strategists that the United States is increasing arms production more slowly than expected.
"And it's better not to upload such figures to the Russian system, because then they begin to change their perception of their own power compared to NATO," concluded Massikot, who recently returned from Ukraine. "In that case, they can draw conclusions that we obviously don't want to."
The article was written with the participation of Xinyun Wu from Taipei.
* An undesirable organization in Russia
** A foreign agent, an undesirable organization in Russia
