Is the U.S. military running out of weapons?

U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth shot back at lawmakers last week for suggesting the country is running short of weapons.

“The munitions issue has been foolishly and unhelpfully overstated,” Hegseth said during a hearing May 12 with the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense.

“We have all the munitions needed to execute what we need to execute.”

On that specific issue, analysts say Hegseth has a point: When it comes to munitions for Operation Epic Fury, the war against Iran, the U.S. does have what it needs.

It’s potential future conflicts where analysts are raising concerns.

“[It’s] very worrisome,” John Ferrari, a retired army major general who served as the director of program analysis and evaluation, told CBC News.

“We’re running out of certain types of weapons for the type of war we like to fight. We’re running out of the expensive, exquisite ones,” said Ferrari, currently a senior fellow at the D.C-based American Enterprise Institute, who recently published an article about how the depletion of weapon stocks is a “strategic red flag.”

Other military observers have also raised alarm bells while highlighting that Hegseth’s department is working to triple production of munitions.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies published its own analysis last month of seven key munitions that are used for long-range ground attacks, as well as air and missile defence.

It found the United States does have enough missiles to continue fighting Operation Epic Fury “under any plausible scenario.”

However, it noted: “The risk—which will persist for many years—lies in future wars.”

‘A window of vulnerability’

The centre, using their own analysis and other news reports to estimate the number of munitions used, calculated that in the first 39 days of the war, the U.S. may have expended more than half of its prewar inventory of four of seven key munitions.

“The diminished munitions stockpiles have created a near-term risk” while “restoring depleted stockpiles and then achieving the desired inventory levels will take many years,” the report stated.

It said those diminished stocks will also affect supplies to Ukraine and other allies.

The shortages have created a “window of vulnerability where we don’t have the munition inventories that we would like,” said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and a senior adviser at the centre who co-wrote the report.

As for what constitutes a inventory shortage, Cancian said the Pentagon has its own classified numbers.

‘Shocking how deep’ U.S. has gone: senator

[“The centre doesn’t] have the classified numbers, but we run a lot of war games. So we have a sense about what kind of risks come with what inventory levels.”

The munition shortage recently gained steam following comments made last week by Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain.

Kelly went on CBS’s Face the Nation to discuss some of the briefings he said he’s received from the Pentagon about the impact of the war on U.S. munition inventory.

“It’s shocking how deep we have gone into these magazines,” Kelly said, noting it would “take years” to replenish.

“We’ve expended a lot of munitions. And that means the American people are less safe, whether it’s a conflict in the western Pacific with China or somewhere else in the world — the munitions are depleted.”

The appearance sparked Hegseth’s ire, and he subsequently launched an investigation into the senator to determine whether he had disclosed classified information during the interview.

U.S spends nearly $1 trillion/year on military

Michael Allan, a professor of international relations at Idaho’s Boise State University, who focuses on U.S. military deployments, said reports suggesting the U.S. is running low on munitions are “concerning and somewhat surprising.”

Especially so as the U.S. spends more money on its military — nearly $1 trillion US annually — than the next nine highest-spending countries combined, he wrote in a column for The Conversation.

This isn’t the first time military analysts have signaled stockpiles are low. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies report pointed out: “Even before the Iran war, stockpiles were deemed insufficient for a peer competitor fight.”

But Operation Epic Fury has significantly exacerbated the issue, observers say.

The U.S. still has large inventories of short-range or medium-range missiles, Mark Cancian said, but a shortage of long-range munitions means greater risk as ships and aircraft will have to get closer to their targets.

According to Ferrari, the U.S. should have enough munitions stockpiled to be able to fight two long duration wars. But at present, he said, there’s only enough to fight one short duration war.

As for Hesgeth, Ferrari said if the Secretary of War thought there was nothing to be concerned about, then why would his deputy secretary be working to triple production?

“You only triple the production if you think you’re short. If there was nothing to worry about, we wouldn’t be entering into these seven-year production contracts to increase the industrial base.”

The U.S. has to worry about its munition stockpiles in order to deter its adversaries, such as China and North Korea, Ferarri said — focusing on one country in the Middle East discounts their “opportunistic behaviour.”

Adversaries “can do simple math” and decide that “maybe now’s the time,” he said.

What may matter more than weapons

But Michael O’Hanlon, foreign policy research director of the D.C.-based Brookings Institution, said he doesn’t believe that’s the case.

While weapons inventories are indeed too low, he said, they have not fallen below “some mystical minimum.”

“Calculations about the need for offensive and defensive weapons are always approximate at best,” he wrote on the Brookings website. “What the Pentagon calls munitions ‘requirements’ are really just rough estimates of expected need.”

O’Hanlon said there are “four uncertainties” that matter more than inventories:

• Who lands the first blow.
• Survivability of communications and reconnaissance systems.
• Potential for geographic expansion and/or nuclear escalation.
• Economic considerations.

Any adversary thinking that depleted U.S. inventories of several key weapons creates a window of opportunity “would be making a huge and quite probably foolish roll of the dice,” he said.