US faces years-long gap to restock missiles depleted in Iran war, CSIS says

The United States will not fully replenish the advanced missiles expended in the Iran war until late 2030, a new analysis found, creating a potential window of military vulnerability in the Western Pacific as China pursues its goal of being capable of taking Taiwan by force by 2027.

The assessment by the Center for Strategic and International Studies underscores how conducting a major war in one region can constrain American deterrence in another — a calculation that carries direct consequences for U.S. Pacific allies, including South Korea and Japan, which depend on American extended deterrence against both China and North Korea.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies released the analysis based on Pentagon budget documents and publicly available production data, according to The Korea Times, citing The Associated Press. The think tank found that the United States fired more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles against Iran and expended more than 1,000 Patriot interceptors and roughly 290 THAAD interceptors — stockpiles that will take years to rebuild even with accelerated manufacturing.

"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 said in a statement provided to The Associated Press. "The time needed to rebuild those inventories has thus become a major concern."

The core obstacle is production capacity, not funding. "The problem today isn't money; it's time," the CSIS report said. Raytheon, Tomahawk's manufacturer, currently builds fewer than 200 of the missiles annually and has set a goal of producing more than 1,000 a year. Lockheed Martin has committed roughly $9 billion in capital investment through 2030 to expand output of related systems.

Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and senior adviser at CSIS, said in an interview that "the thinking started to change, but it just takes time to build inventories. Part of the challenge is bringing up to speed a complicated web of supply chains and subcontractors that produce very novel components."

The Pentagon contested the vulnerability framing. Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement that the U.S. military "has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the President's choosing." But Virginia Burger, a former Marine officer and senior defense policy analyst at the Project On Government Oversight, offered a sharply different view: "We are drawing down our stockpiles to a critical level," she said.

China has set 2027 as its target for achieving the military capability to take Taiwan by force, amplifying the strategic cost of any delay in American weapons production. The Trump administration is seeking a roughly $1.5 trillion defense budget for fiscal year 2027 in part to accelerate the rebuild, but CSIS cautioned that the vulnerability window "will last for several years until inventories return to their previous levels and another several years before they get to the levels that war planners desire."

CSIS projected that Patriot interceptors could be restored by mid-2029, THAAD stockpiles by late 2029 and Tomahawk inventories by late 2030 — only if manufacturers meet ambitious new production targets. The report did not project a timeline for fully reaching the higher levels that military planners say they need for a major Pacific contingency.