'China Is Watching': US Fired Over 1,000 Missiles at Iran, Analysts Say It Will Take Years to Replace

America has burned through more than a thousand Tomahawk cruise missiles and a significant share of its Patriot and THAAD interceptor stockpiles during the Iran war, and analysts warn it could take until the end of the decade to rebuild them, leaving a window of vulnerability that Beijing is almost certainly tracking.

The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington defence think tank, has released two analyses assessing the damage done to US munitions stockpiles by Operation Epic Fury, the 39-day air and missile campaign against Iran.

The first, published on 21 April 2026, assessed stockpile status at the ceasefire; a follow-up report on 27 May 2026 focused on the rebuild timeline. The conclusion in both is that the US has enough firepower to finish this war, but the cost of fighting it has opened a vulnerability window for any near-term confrontation with China.

More Than 1,000 Tomahawks Fired, Fewer Than 200 Made Per Year

According to CSIS's May report, the US fired more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iranian targets during Operation Epic Fury, alongside more than 1,000 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs) and more than 850 additional Tomahawks in separate strike packages. The scale of Tomahawk expenditure is particularly alarming given current production rates.

Raytheon, the manufacturer, currently builds fewer than 200 Tomahawk missiles per year, a direct consequence of years of small government orders made on the assumption that future wars would be short and require limited mass firepower.

Replenishing the Tomahawk inventory to pre-war levels could take until late 2030, CSIS estimates. Raytheon's parent company, RTX, has set a goal of ramping production capacity to more than 1,000 missiles per year, and has pointed to investments of several billion pounds in facilities across Alabama and Arizona. RTX declined to comment specifically on the CSIS findings, telling the Associated Press it had not yet reviewed the report at the time of its release.

The story is similarly strained for air defence interceptors. CSIS estimates that the US used between 190 and 290 THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) interceptors during the conflict, each costing approximately £12.3 million ($15.5 million). Replacing that inventory could take until the end of 2029. Replenishing more than 1,000 Patriot interceptors expended during the campaign, at a cost of roughly £22.7 million ($28.7 million) apiece for SM-3 variants, is also estimated to be completed around mid-2029.

The Cold War Hangover That Left US Arsenal Exposed

The root of the problem, analysts say, stretches back more than three decades. After the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, US defence planners assumed future conflicts would be limited in scope and duration, requiring relatively small numbers of high-end precision weapons. The Pentagon ordered accordingly, and manufacturers scaled their industrial capacity to match those modest projections.

Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and senior adviser at CSIS who co-authored the May stockpile report with research associate Chris H. Park, said Russia's war in Ukraine fundamentally changed that assumption. 'The thinking started to change, but it just takes time to build inventories,' Cancian told the Associated Press. 'Part of the challenge is bringing up to speed a complicated web of supply chains and subcontractors that produce very novel components.'

Cancian also noted that the groundwork for accelerating production was not exclusively a Trump-era achievement. 'President Biden's administration should get some credit for starting conversations with the defence industry, putting money into the industrial base and ramping up production,' he said. 'A lot of people in the Trump administration are inclined to say that everything was terrible until they arrived, and that's not true. Now, it is true that the Trump administration really increased funding.'

The Trump administration's fiscal year 2027 defence budget proposal, totalling approximately £1.19 trillion ($1.5 trillion), includes a significant surge in munitions procurement. Lockheed Martin announced a £7.16 billion ($9 billion) investment through 2030, including a new Alabama manufacturing facility, aimed at boosting output for both Patriot and THAAD systems. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement that the military 'has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the President's choosing.'

China's Taiwan Window and the Vulnerability the Pentagon Is Racing to Close

The CSIS May report is explicit about who is watching the US rebuild its arsenal. 'The United States has enough munitions for any plausible scenario in the Iran war, but the depleted inventories have created a window of vulnerability for a potential Western Pacific conflict,' CSIS wrote. 'The time needed to rebuild those inventories has thus become a major concern.'

China has a stated objective of being militarily capable of taking Taiwan by force by 2027, a deadline analysts widely regard as aspirational rather than fixed. But Chinese President Xi Jinping warned in May 2026 that a US mishandling of Taiwan relations could lead to open conflict between the two powers.

CSIS offered one counter-balancing observation: China has no recent combat experience and performed poorly in its last war, against Vietnam in 1979. 'That difference in experience may preserve deterrence until munitions inventories are restored,' the report said.

Virginia Burger, a former Marine officer and senior defence policy analyst at the Project on Government Oversight watchdog group, was pointed in her assessment of how the stockpile situation arose. Pentagon officials 'knew the reality of our military stockpiles,' she told the AP, and should have warned decision-makers that even conservative estimates pointed to a critical drawdown. The concern has become a bipartisan fixture at congressional hearings, though its political weight differs sharply depending on which side of the aisle is framing it.

The United States won the battle against Iran's arsenal; the harder fight now may be rebuilding its own before someone else decides to test what remains.