A bitter dispute has raged inside Washington over the state of the United States’ arms stockpile, as its war against Iran raises questions about whether American forces are burning through irreplaceable military assets faster than they can replace them; And whether President Donald Trump had any motive for starting the fight in the first place.
This argument has been intensified by the destruction of a major radar system costing $300 million at the Muwafaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, a US official confirmed to news agency Bloomberg this week.
stay: Update on US-Iran conflict
AN/TPY-2 radarManufactured by RTX Corporation and required to guide America’s THAAD missile defense batteries, it was destroyed in the early days of the conflict, which began on February 28.
Its loss forced greater reliance on Patriot missile systems, whose interceptors, according to multiple accounts, were dangerously depleted before the first shots were fired, the AP news agency reported.
Sean Parnell, chief Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement that the US military “has everything necessary to execute any mission at the time and place of the President’s choosing and on any timeframe”.
President Trump reinforced that message by posting on social media that several defense contractors had agreed to “quadruple” the production of some weapons “as quickly as possible.” He did not provide any details about which systems he was talking about.
Lockheed Martin later confirmed that it had agreed to “quadruple production of critical weapons” and said it “began this work months ago”, without giving a timetable for when the increased production would be completed.
Democratic lawmakers have greeted those assurances from the Republican government with skepticism and, in some cases, disdain.
“Our weapons are low. That’s public knowledge,” said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “This will require additional funding; funding will also be where we have other domestic needs,” he said.
Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut went further, drawing a direct line between the current crisis and America’s prior commitments to Ukraine.
“We have been told repeatedly that the reason we cannot provide interceptors for the Patriot system or other munitions to Ukraine is that they are in short supply,” he told CNN.
For many Democrats, the debate merely fueled a major political objection; That Trump has dragged the United States into a conflict it did not need to fight.
Defense analysts have tried to filter out political noise from the data. Ryan Brobst, deputy director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, estimated that about 25% of the entire THAAD interceptor stockpile was spent defending Israel from Iranian ballistic missiles during the 12-day confrontation last June.
“These were already in very high demand and we didn’t purchase enough before the conflict,” he said, “and now we’ve probably used, between those two, probably several hundred more.”
However, Brobst said, “I’m really not particularly worried about us finishing in this conflict.”
“This is about preventing China and Russia the day after this conflict ends,” he argued.
Tom Karako of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said the US operates only eight THAAD batteries globally. “There are no spare TPY-2s lying around,” he said, referring to the destroyed radar. Once that system is gone, its interception responsibilities fall to Patriot batteries carrying PAC-3 missiles, which cost millions of dollars.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed this week that Middle Eastern (or West Asian) countries allied with the US had fired more than 800 such missiles in just three days. This is more than the total reserves accumulated by Ukraine during the entire four-year war with Russia.
The question of how America got to this point has become the focus of debate.
Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut drew a direct line between the current crisis and America’s prior commitments to Ukraine. “We have been told repeatedly that the reason we cannot provide interceptors for the Patriot system or other munitions to Ukraine is that they are in short supply,” he told CNN.
Katherine Thompson, who served as deputy senior adviser at the Pentagon under the current Trump administration before leaving her post in October, pointed the finger at Democrat Joe Biden’s years as president. “It was a short-term victory for the Biden administration but a long-term strategic problem for the United States as a whole,” he said of the decision to send interceptors to Ukraine. “I would hope the Trump administration doesn’t make the same mistake here.” Thompson now serves as a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.
That argument has caused little disagreement with Democrats. “These are scarce strategic resources and its (radar) loss is a major blow,” Karako said.
“For several decades successive administrations have not procured sufficient quantities of these interceptors,” Brobst said, “and when that happens, companies have no incentive to expand their production capacity.”
But there are some claims that the pressure on reserves may be easing. Gen. Dan Kane, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters this week that the number of ballistic missiles fired by Iran had dropped by 86% since the first day of the war.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed that US forces are shifting from expensive standoff weapons to cheaper gravity bombs – “500-pound, 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound GPS- and laser-guided, precision gravity bombs”. The US has these in large quantities, although they require planes to fly close to their targets, the AP reports.
The administration has also moved to deploy an anti-drone system in the region called Merops, a low-cost platform that uses artificial intelligence to hunt and destroy enemy drones. It is small enough to fit in the back of a medium-sized pickup truck.
Ukraine has the key?
Against this backdrop, Ukraine has offered a much cheaper alternative. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion four years ago, Ukraine had developed a mass-produced, battlefield-tested drone interceptor capable of destroying Iranian-designed Martyr attack drones at a cost of $1,000 to $2,000 per unit. Bloomberg has reported that this is much cheaper than the millions of dollars required for a Patriot interceptor missile.
The Iranian-designed Shahed costs around $30,000, making the economics of a Patriot-based interceptor increasingly untenable.
Washington recently requested “specific support” against Iranian-designed martyrdom in the Middle East, prompting Zelensky to order the deployment of Ukrainian equipment and expert personnel, though details are classified.
The United States, along with Gulf countries including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have made repeated requests for Ukraine’s domestically produced interceptor drones, according to three Ukrainian arms producers contacted by the AP. Neither government immediately responded to requests for comment from the news agency.
Zelensky has framed this proposal as a swap. “Our message is very simple,” he said, “we want to quietly acquire … the Patriot missiles that we lack, and replace them with a reasonable number of interceptors.”
Marko Kushnir, a spokesman for General Chery, one of Ukraine’s leading interceptor manufacturers, said his company could be ready to supply partners “within days”, and has the capacity to produce “tens of thousands” of interceptors per month.
But Ukraine currently bans arms exports under a wartime embargo. “We need more than just statements from the president. We need action,” said Yevhen Mahda, executive director of the Kyiv-based Institute of World Policy. “How can we talk about exports if we are not officially selling anything yet?”
Even if the legal hurdles were resolved overnight, significant operational challenges would remain. Interceptor drones must be integrated into broader radar networks to function, and foreign crews will require substantial training. “This is a tool that requires training,” said Oleh Katkov, editor-in-chief of Defense Express, adding that real, proven expertise – not just on paper – exists only in Ukraine.
