The United States has fired more than 1,000 Tomahawk missiles at Iran since February and burned through over half its Patriot interceptor stock. Washington still could not stop Iranian missiles from reaching an American air base in Jordan this month. Replenishing some of that arsenal will not finish until the next decade.
Jordan hosts the troop buildup Washington shifted there for safety after Gulf states came under fire. Instead, the kingdom became the war’s deadliest front this month, and analysts say the missile math behind that decision only gets harder the longer Operation Epic Fury runs.
America’s Deepest Magazines Are Running Thin
Before the fighting reignited this month, the US had already used more than 3,000 Tomahawk, Patriot and JASSM missiles against Iran, according to the Washington based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). The think tank’s own review found the US had expended more than half its Patriot interceptor stockpile and over half of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors during the campaign.
The US had roughly 3,000 Tomahawks before the war and has fired more than 1,000. Its JASSM stealth cruise missile inventory ran about 4,000 before the fighting, and roughly 1,100 have been used. The newer Precision Strike Missile, delivered in batches of only 90 since 2023, saw 40 to 70 rounds fired, with one military official telling reporters the entire inventory had been expended at one point.
Katherine Thompson, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank, told The Post the clock matters more than the count.
“Time is the main factor here. If this goes on for weeks and then we settle into a cease-fire, it could be fine,” she said. “But I don’t think our munitions are in a great place if this lasts another year or two.”
Washington Bet That Jordan Would Be Safer
Most of America’s missiles went out in the first six days of Operation Epic Fury. The Trump administration believed it had degraded Iran’s missile forces enough that the thinner post war stockpile could absorb whatever retaliation followed.
“But as it turns out, Iran still has access to its missiles and drones,” Thompson said. “Their retaliatory attacks won’t be as big as during those initial days of the war, but they’ve shown the ability to keep attacking.”
That ability forced a rethink of where American troops should stand. Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar were absorbing steady fire and limiting how freely Washington could operate aircraft and forces there. The Pentagon shifted personnel toward Jordan instead, a kingdom that had not been a primary target and looked, on paper, like the safer bet.
Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, roughly 100 kilometers northeast of Amman, had already absorbed $143 million in American investment since 2018 for special operations, surveillance and airlift capacity. Satellite imagery tracked by The New York Times showed the buildup accelerate sharply as the crisis deepened.
- 60-plus combat aircraft parked at Muwaffaq Salti in February, roughly three times the base’s normal load, including 30 F-35s and 36 F-15s tracked by an Institute for National Security Studies live map.
- 67 of 112 total US cargo flights into the region by early February landed at that single base, according to flight tracking data cited by the Times.
- Roughly 3,800 to 4,000 US troops now operate in Jordan under a 2021 Defense Cooperation Agreement, up from a pre crisis baseline.
- Patriot batteries and a THAAD radar were installed at the base specifically to protect the surge in aircraft.
Jordanian officials told the Times the buildup fell under the countries’ broader defense agreement, and that they hoped negotiations would still prevent a wider war. That hope did not hold.
The Attack That Got Through
Iran had already probed Muwaffaq Salti’s defenses for weeks before the deadliest strike landed. Jordanian and Iranian accounts of each attack rarely agree on the damage, but the pattern of escalation is not in dispute.
- June 10 to 11: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says it fired twelve ballistic missiles at hangars and command centers on the base. Jordan’s military says it intercepted about five incoming missiles and reported no casualties or damage.
- July 9: The Revolutionary Guard fires ten more ballistic missiles in what it calls the second phase of retaliation. Jordan’s military says it intercepted eight of ten, with government spokesman Mohammad Al Momani telling reporters the rest were “intercepted and dealt with.” Jordan’s forces reported intercepting 49 projectiles overall that day, including 13 ballistic missiles, and Iran’s Guard warned that other US bases in the region “will not be spared.”
- July 17 to 18: Ballistic missiles and drones hit the base again overnight. At least three projectiles got through, and one ballistic missile struck the housing unit where American troops were sleeping. NASA’s fire tracking satellites detected heat signatures near the living quarters around 2 a.m. local time.
US Central Command confirmed two service members were killed in action defending the base, with a third listed missing and four more evacuated to Jordanian hospitals. A Bundeswehr field camp elsewhere in Jordan and the US embassy in Amman also reported security scares in the same stretch, and Jordan’s THAAD radar at the base was still being replaced after earlier strike damage.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the missiles which reached the housing unit had evaded American defenses entirely, evidence that Iran’s cheaper missiles and drones are adapting faster than expected to a system built to stop them.
What Happens If Jordan Tells the US to Leave
Jordan has not asked American forces to go, but the pressure to do so is now explicit. After the deadly strike, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard warned Jordan to expel US forces from the kingdom or continue facing consequences, a threat that lands on a government trying to hold two positions at once.
Jordan is simultaneously the base of the Pentagon’s regional air power and, per its own aid agreements, one of Washington’s most dependent security partners. A 2022 memorandum commits the US to $1.45 billion a year in economic and military assistance through 2029, one of the largest such packages Washington gives any country. That dependence sits awkwardly beside the EU’s recent praise of Jordan as its most trusted Middle East partner, a diplomatic honor arriving in the same stretch that Iranian missiles are landing on Jordanian soil.
The kingdom’s exposure is not new to this war alone. Jordan was already absorbing spillover from the evacuation scare that followed the US strike on Iran’s Darkhovin nuclear plant, which briefly rattled the southern port city of Aqaba even as officials denied any wider danger. Each new strike adds to a security bill Jordan never chose to run up.
A Second Audience Is Counting the Rounds
Iran is not the only party studying how America’s defenses perform under sustained fire. OSINT analysts circulated Chinese commercial satellite images of the Muwaffaq Salti buildup roughly a week before Western imagery confirmed it publicly, an early sign that Beijing is watching this specific base closely.
The interest goes beyond one air base. CSIS’s own wargaming on a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, conducted before this war began, found the US would likely exhaust some of its most critical long range munitions in less than a week of a Taiwan Strait fight, a finding a member of Congress has since repeated to the Pentagon almost verbatim, according to the defense outlet 19FortyFive.
The irony is that the Iran war has already burned through more Tomahawks than those Taiwan simulations assumed the US would need, not because a China fight would be smaller, but because the weapons mix would flip. Against Iran’s thinned out defenses, ship launched Tomahawks did most of the work. Against China’s denser, blue water navy, the burden shifts to stealthy air launched weapons like JASSM, precisely the munitions this war has also drained hardest. That overlap connects directly to satellite guided Iranian strikes on US bases that mirror Pacific war planning, a pattern regional watchers say looks less like coincidence and more like rehearsal.
CSIS’s authors, Mark Cancian and Chris Park, put it plainly in their report: “Even before the Iran war, stockpiles were deemed insufficient for a peer competitor fight. That shortfall is now even more acute and building stockpiles to levels adequate for a war with China will take additional time.”
Insiders Contradict the Pentagon’s Optimism
Publicly, the Pentagon insists nothing is running dangerously low. Privately, at least one official is telling a different story to reporters, and the gap between those two accounts is now shaping how seriously Washington treats its own resupply problem.
We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that.
That warning came from a US official familiar with internal war planning, speaking to The Washington Post on condition of anonymity.
- The Pentagon’s position: Chief spokesman Sean Parnell says the military has “a deep arsenal of capabilities to protect our people and our interests” and has run successful operations across every combatant command since Trump took office.
- CSIS’s position: The US likely has enough to finish the current fight, but prewar inventories were already too thin for a fight against a peer power, and this war has made that shortfall worse.
- The anonymous official’s position: Current stockpiles cannot safely sustain operations if the conflict widens, and the White House may not fully grasp that risk.
Defense Intelligence Agency director Lt. Gen. James Adams told the House Armed Services Committee that Iran, despite heavy losses, still retains thousands of missiles and one way attack drones capable of threatening US and partner forces across the region. That assessment undercuts the administration’s early confidence that Iran’s arsenal had been degraded past the point of sustained retaliation.
Replenishment Stretches Past 2030 for Some Systems
The Pentagon’s own numbers show why patience is running short. A Navy official told Fox News Digital the service is pushing an FY2027 budget request of $22.6 billion for more than 4,600 munitions, part of a broader roughly $70 billion request for munitions government wide, nearly three times current spending, tucked inside a $1.5 trillion defense budget request that also seeks a 785 Tomahawks for fiscal 2027 alone.
| Munition | Estimated Prewar Stock | Estimated Expended | Time to Replenish |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tomahawk | About 3,000 | 1,000-plus and rising | 3 to 5 years; some deliveries not until 2030 |
| JASSM | About 4,000 | Roughly 1,100 | About 1 year |
| Patriot | Classified, in the thousands | Roughly half | About 3 years |
| THAAD | Classified | 200-plus interceptors, over half | 3 to 3.5 years |
| PrSM | 90 delivered since 2023 | 40 to 70 | 8 months to 1 year |
| SM-3 | About 410 | 130 to 250 | About 3 years |
Those Tomahawk deliveries will not begin arriving until roughly March 2030, given a 34 month production lead time, with full replacement of missiles fired at Iran not expected until late that year. Industry reporting says Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are expanding production lines in Alabama and Arizona, and government plans call for lifting THAAD output from about 96 interceptors a year toward several hundred, though solid rocket motors, guidance electronics and rare earth components all carry lead times of two years or more.
Allied orders complicate the queue further. Japan’s promised 400 Tomahawks face delay as the Pentagon prioritizes its own stock first, even after a Japanese destroyer finished the modifications needed to fire them. Australia has ordered more than 200 and the Netherlands 175, and CSIS notes the resulting friction among allies competing for the same production lines will likely continue for years.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week that Washington remains “open to a diplomatic solution,” and Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said Tehran “advances both war and diplomacy” according to its own interests. Mediators from Qatar and Pakistan are pushing a 10 day ceasefire to revive the broader deal, even as US strikes on Iran entered a tenth consecutive night.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many US troops are stationed in the Middle East besides Jordan?
Roughly 50,000 US troops are spread across the region. A regional breakdown reported by NewsNation put about 4,000 in Jordan, 3,500 in the United Arab Emirates, 2,700 in Saudi Arabia, 2,500 in Iraq and 2,000 in Syria, alongside a larger than usual naval presence built up ahead of the fighting.
What agreement allows US forces to operate from Jordanian bases?
A 2021 Defense Cooperation Agreement, signed by King Abdullah II through executive decree rather than a parliamentary vote, formally grants American forces access to a dozen named Jordanian facilities, Muwaffaq Salti Air Base among them.
Had a base linked to US forces in Jordan been attacked before this war?
Yes. Three US soldiers were killed and 47 wounded in a January 2024 drone strike on Tower 22, a US outpost near Jordan’s border with Syria, in an attack later claimed by an Iran backed militia.
How much aid does the US send Jordan each year?
Washington committed to $1.45 billion a year in combined economic and military assistance to Jordan under a 2022 memorandum covering fiscal years 2023 through 2029, a total of $10.15 billion that makes Jordan one of the largest recipients of American foreign aid anywhere.
What happened to the US service member reported missing after the Jordan strike?
CENTCOM initially listed one service member as missing alongside the two confirmed killed at Muwaffaq Salti on July 17. Axios reported this week that searchers recovered that missing service member’s remains, and separately disclosed a previously unreported American death in northern Iraq from the same weekend.
