As the US pauses the war with Iran, is Trump really running out of weapons?

By Bernd Debusmann Jr White House reporter When US President Donald Trump took the stage earlier this month at the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit, flanked by the CEOs of some of America's largest defence firms, he had one message in mind: build more weapons, and build them faster. "We have the best quality in the world," Trump told the armsmakers gathered at the US Army War College, with 'Secretary of War' Pete Hegseth at his side. "But we need a little more speed." The Trump administration framed the summit as part of a two-pronged approach to revitalise American industry and bolster US warfighting capabilities and, in Hegseth's words, its "arsenal of freedom". Largely unspoken, however, was the vast expenditure of sophisticated and difficult-to-manufacture weapons used during nearly 40 days of intense combat operations in Iran during Operation Epic Fury earlier this year and tit-for-tat strikes that have taken place since. So far, the US government says the war has cost $37.5bn (£28bn), and the vast majority of that has been spent on munitions. By the time a tenuous ceasefire took effect on 8 April, US forces had struck over 13,000 targets across Iran, according to the White House. American air defences intercepted over 1,700 Iranian drones and ballistic missiles over the same period. Now, the US has paused its strikes on Iran to allow negotiations to go ahead. A New York Times report says that Trump was advised to shelve plans to escalate the conflict as it would further drain American stockpiles. On Monday, Trump denied there was a shortfall, telling the Wall Street Journal: "We have far more munitions than anyone in the world, and far more than we need." Image source, AFP via Getty Images Image caption, Pete Hegseth has made the case for extra funding to replace the missiles expended This has been a touchy subject for some time within the US administration. Last month, when pressed on the subject, Hegseth denied that supplies were thinning out. His position seems to have changed since. Last week, he told the Senate Appropriations Committee that the Pentagon needed another $87bn (£68bn) to address "critical shortfalls", including equipment. Exact ammunition expenditures and remaining stockpiles remain classified. But publicly available data compiled by the Washington DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) paints a stark picture of depleted stockpiles that, in the short-term, are difficult to replace. "It depends on the munition - but one to five years [to make a single missile] is the bottom line," says Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and senior adviser at CSIS who has been researching the issue. "And there's nothing you can do to speed that up." But is the US really eating through ammunition so fast that it may struggle to fulfil its military duties and objectives? A depleted US arsenal The critical munitions used in the war span two categories: long-range ground attack systems, and the air