Hope Trump is asked about this
The U.S. and Israel attack Iran
- Thread starter rio's upper lip
- Start date
US has used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war, sources say
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-ha...recision-missiles-during-iran-war-2026-08-04/
well...Who'd have thunk it.
I hate Military reporting part 151515: That headline is nonsense.
There are over 15,000 JASSM's in stock.
It then actually refers to PrSH and ATACMs. Well...duh. Of course it ran out. Here's what I said about those 2 missiles....2 years ago:
ATACM's ceased production in 2013. Most of it got given away to Ukraine to make way for PrSH. Only production line now for ATACM's is in Germany for foreign buyers in a deal with Rmttl.
PrSH has like what, serial production of 100 a year since 2025?
US primary long range precision missile is JASSM and TLAM, the former of which, including all variants, has around 15k of them lying around.
Like, how is this headline anything other than fake news?
On top: since when did we start calling ATACMS "long range"?
It's just not in the same class as actual long range (cruise) missiles.
They’re not, good catch.
Their exact classification is SRBM (Short range ballistic missile)
It would help if Hegseth and this administration was more transparent with the press and citizens funding this effort could truly understand the state of the military stockpile.
I'm sure some details are off but there's too much smoke to believe everything is fine with munition levels
Some munition levels are very poor.
But the key context here isn't vis-a-vis Iran. The key context here, which I said on D1 of the war, is not that, "USA are using missiles at a rate in which we're going to run out vs Iran", it's "USA are using missiles at a rate which could leave them seriously exposed in a Pacific war."
-TLAM production is pretty poor, but this is being addressed. TLAM production wasn't the bottleneck, money was. Navy couldn't afford to buy them so they were buying like 50 a year for the past 10 years.
-THAAD production was rate limited, and DoD were paying money to keep production liens open. That's been resolved now as THAAD attrition rates in 2025 were unsustainable.
-Patriot production, despite the contrary comments, is absolutely fine.
-PrSH production is lacklustre but eh, its not very useful in a pacific war.
-SM-6 production has been very poor for years, but that's being ramped up now. Still not where it needs to be however.
-JASSM production is pretty insane and the existing stockpile is ridiculous.
Look at the FY2027 purchases and production numbers:
785 Tomahawks for 2027. Which is what, about the same number that's supposedly been fired in this war? (Of that I severely doubt, given lack of in-fleet reloading). Raytheon plan to have a production line totalling 1200 a year by 2029 which should solve this issue.
What's really quite interesting is DoD are procuring 12 Hypersonic cruise missiles in 2027 which has completely fallen under the radar.
540 SM-6's. Half of where it should really be.
This should really give you an indication too of where Patriot production is. US Navy has ordered 405 Patriot PAC-3 MSE's. That's not including any for Army Air Defence. If there is enough capacity for 405 Navy Patriots, then production is fine.
3200 Patriot PAC-3 missiles in 2027 alone. Yeah...I think Patriot stocks are going to be pretty much fine.
THAAD has gone from 12 in 2025 to 857 in 2026. 70x the standard production numbers.
But what transparency are you specifically looking for? US publish, year on year, how many missiles they procure per year. It's not a secret. It's why claims of "JASSM is running low" is utter nonsense because if you follow budget lines from 2000-2026 you will see US has consistently purchased 1000 JASSM's a year for over 2 decades, and unless some have magically disappeared, there should not be any munition depth issues there.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-way-out-of-trumps-iran-trap-well-find-out-in-2029-6abd049c
The Way Out of Trump’s Iran Trap? We’ll Find Out in 2029
He isn’t the first president to get bogged down in Asia. The others left it to their successors.
Gerard Baker
Aug. 3, 2026 at 11:38 am ET
from the author of
Gerard Baker’s gift is hindsight delivered as prophecy. In March, the war was working; by August, it had obviously been a fiasco all along.
The only constant is that Gerard was always right (even when contradicting Gerard).
The Way Out of Trump’s Iran Trap? We’ll Find Out in 2029
He isn’t the first president to get bogged down in Asia. The others left it to their successors.
Gerard Baker
Aug. 3, 2026 at 11:38 am ET
from the author of
Gerard Baker’s gift is hindsight delivered as prophecy. In March, the war was working; by August, it had obviously been a fiasco all along.
The only constant is that Gerard was always right (even when contradicting Gerard).
No cards, no interceptors, no oil reserve, just a bunch of pedophile rapists brainstorming with other assorted sex offenders on how to get their little dicks out of a Chinese finger trap.
Would be catastrophic here - would turn the Middle East into a wasteland. Its “feels like 57 degrees celsius” in Doha right now.
Wasn’t even a remote possibility something like this could happen a year ago - trump truly knows how to poke a hornets nest for no reason
Trump’s top general is ‘looking for an off-ramp’ from Iran war as US military options remain limited, sources say
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/07/politics/general-dan-caine-off-ramp-iran-war
What are trumps “stated objectives” again?
And I mean what they are now, not what they were yesterday.
Does anyone know?
He did say something about going to hell, and wondering if he could climb out I think.
Woo great job Trump, wasted a few thousand missiles that would have been useful in PACCOM. For...absolutely nothing.
How has it been 40 years since a competent geopolitical strategist has been at the helm?
How has it been 40 years since a competent geopolitical strategist has been at the helm?
because the right turned everything into the "culture wars" and even Democrats that got elected cared more about the rich than the average person. And before you say that doesn't have to do with military and geopolitical strategy it absolutely 100% does.
Culture wars didn't really come to the forefront until the Tea Party arrived and the rot started in the early to mid 90's.
What a waste, especially as this war was won 5 months ago
It was way earlier than that
The modern culture war angle of the GOP came to the forefront with Pat Buchanon's speech at the 1992 GOP convention and then with Newt Gingrich taking control of the house in 1994. But it was rising in the 1980s with Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority and the rise of the evangelical televangelists and mega churches also during the 1980s. The rot started in the late 70s after Ford lost to Carter and they rallied around Ronnie Ray Gun. During his term in the 80s you had people like Edwin Meese, you saw the racist demonizing of the "welfare mom", the push for school prayer, a strong anti-gay rights crusade, power given to anti-choice advocates, etc. The modern culture war really started with Reagan in the early 1980s.
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I would add the rise of right wing talk radio to the equation as well. The damage done by Rush/Beck/etc. should never be forgotten.
Good point and entirely true. Fairness Doctrine is removed in 1987 and Rush gets syndicated nationally and was already a huge social conservative influence by 1990.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-way-out-of-trumps-iran-trap-well-find-out-in-2029-6abd049c
The Way Out of Trump’s Iran Trap? We’ll Find Out in 2029
He isn’t the first president to get bogged down in Asia. The others left it to their successors.
Gerard Baker
Aug. 3, 2026 at 11:38 am ET
from the author of
Gerard Baker’s gift is hindsight delivered as prophecy. In March, the war was working; by August, it had obviously been a fiasco all along.
The only constant is that Gerard was always right (even when contradicting Gerard).
In the next 2-3 year. every Republican and every Democrat who supports this war will do a similar Pivot and blame Trump and Hegseth for the war while they themselves would have always been against it.
I'm talking about the really premature, in-hindsight ridiculous decision in the 90's, starting in 1993 with the Last supper. Culture wars had nothing to do with this.
Gathering every single defense contractor, giving them dinner at the white house, and then outright telling them that you're all fecked, you're all going out of business, and that Defense is no longer being funded, will be looked back upon as one of the most catastrophic geopolitical mistakes of all time.
Even before this current debacle, things like not counter-acting China's moves in the Pacific, not re-arming when China was arming itself to the teeth, and then letting China do whatever the hell it wanted in SEA and SCS is just the icing on the cake.
We're never going to agree on China because you come from military background and believe Thucylides Trap. I read that after you first recommended it and found it highly flawed because I come from a behavioral economics and game theory background and the theory isn't sound. The correct strategy for the US and China was/is a mutually beneficial economic relationship that removes any incentive for war, which the dipshit greed monster in the White House has completely fecked the last 10 years.
And for Clintons basically flat military budget in the 90s, I've heard different opinions. You clearly believe the US should have just kept spending more and more every year but that doesn't mean it would have been money well spent. Clinton's decision here was perfectly sensible considering all the informatiom available at the time.
I'd argue Bush's unnecessary and extremely wasteful and filled with fraud and corruption Iraq debacle did far more long term damage to the US in both soft and hard terms than Clinton's flat military budget. Unlike Clintons choice, Bush poor choices were not logical amd sensible given all the information available at the time.
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I'm not sure how you can argue Clinton's budget in the 90's was "flat".
It was a 15% reduction, in nominal amount, and in real terms for 26%, by the end of his 2nd term.
That's a bigger drop in budget than any austerity measures the tories put up during peak Cameron/Osbourne years for any department.
By Bushes term, it was already too late. Most of the Defense contractors had gone bust or had been consolidated into big corps. Shipbuilding had terminally declined due to no US navy orders. Regardless of whether corruption existed or not, when you gut your industrial base.
In 1992 there were 51 Prime Defense contractors. By 1997 there were 5. 46 of them had been gutted, the industrial capacity has never been rebuilt.
I'm also how you can strategically position China/US away from each war as the two goals just cannot co-exist. US tried that in the 00's, with Jiang Zemin and consequently Hu JinTao. It was going quite well, until Xi took power.
Furthermore, how do you reconcile the 2 contrasting positions.
1) China sees Taiwan as sovereign territory and as such treats it as a national goal to take over Taiwan.
2) USA sees the Pacific Island chains as an existential red line which undermines the entire security apparatus of the Pacific and consequently West Coast. Lose the island chains, lose control of US West coast.
So...how do you "come to a deal." US and China's bottom lines cannot co-exist together.
I am going to park the China discussion for now. I don't have the time to do both debates justice and I am choosing to discuss the Clinton vs Bush years regarding the future of the military as I find that a more interesting topic at the moment. Feel free to tag me in the China thread in a month or two and as time allows we can continue that.
The first thing is we have to acknowledge the difference between a good decision given imperfect information vs. hindsight. To use a poker analogy, if someone raises when they have a hand that beats every possible hand an opponent could have, except if the opponent gets a single card on the river then that is a sensible, logical and smart bet. If the opponent calls, or even counter-raises, and then draws the single card on the river that allows them to win, that result doesn't mean the first player made a bad decision. The first player still made a perfectly rational decision based on the information they had available to them at the time. This happens a lot in poker and bad players always think things like "oh I shouldn't have raised". With imperfect information, you have to play the probability and if the 1% or 5% hits, that's the breaks (as Kurtis Blow says).
Clinton's decision to draw down the military during his terms was perfectly logical given the information available at the time - the Cold War was over, there was no more major enemy. Fukuyama got famous for his End of History thesis in 92 touting that liberal democracy had won. All the conservatives thought Milton Friedman advice on the former Soviet Union was going to work spectacularly. Etc, etc. Drawing down the military was sensible given all the information available in 1992-93. In fact, it was Cheney under Bush I that first argued this.
Now, for "flat" I just looked at the budget in 1992 (~298b) vs the budget in 2000 (~294b) but as percent of GDP, you are correct that it was a reduction YoY (4.7% in 92 decreasing YoY to 2.9% in 2000) throughout his term so I'll correct my quick take there. You are right, it was a decrease YoY as percent of GDP.
But going back to the first point, there weren't really any reasons during the 1990s to think that wasn't the right thing to do as it contributed to budget surpluses that were universally hailed in econ circles c.2000. The 90s were a very optimistic decade. A lot of us in our 20s thought that it would be the first decade in a very different world than the entire Cold War. It looked like the world would simply become more prosperous for everyone. Then 9/11 happened.
Now, let's look at Bush and the Iraq disaster. The Iraq war directly cost ~$1 trillion. If you add up all the cascading costs, estimates are usually around the ~$2-2.2 trillion range. Those numbers are staggering. The opportunity cost is insane, no matter what your political views. Progressive can easily point to how that $2 trillion could have better benefited the people directly through health care and social services. Even military hawks, like the veterans I know, look at the huge opportunity cost of the Iraq war. Crusader's cancellation was a frequent mention with some people I know and a lot of people knew the Iraq War would eat hundreds of billions more than Bush admin estimated at the start and it would hurt preparedness long term, which it did (see James Fallow's Bush's Lost Year article from 2004 or Nordhaus' analysis in 2002 that projected a $1.9 trillion cost, to see how many military and former military knew how stupid Iraq was going to be). By Bush, it was not even close to "too late" and the Reagan years prove that it wasn't.
For shipbuilding I'd rate it as a push. From an economic point of view, Clinton's budgets hurt for sure. But I don't think that was as obvious in the 1990s, whereas the opportunity cost of Bush's Iraq debacle was more obvious. you can blame them both for the shipbuilding. Without Iraq, Bush Admin could have efficiently simply reversed the Clinton era shipbuilding decision but it didn't because Iraq. And again, it wasn't as obvious in the 1990s that that would even matter. No one argued in 1994 that the US military needed shipbuilding at the same rate as during the Cold War which was the information everyone was working with in 92-94. Perot had he gotten elected, with his isolationist bent, would likely have done exactly what Clinton did with military budgets.
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Who would benefit from the middle east becoming a wasteland?
No one except for some morons thinking it won’t impact them
Defence contractor would lick their finger over a prolonged Iran war. The contracts and procurement would be a windfall
Some oligarch shorting
Israel off course
The politicians getting kick back for their campaign fro AIPAC. Why waste trillions when you have your minions to do your bidding for a fraction of the cost.
Most of them wont care what happened to lives and geopolitics.
This is a fallacy. Defense contractors make their money whether or not there is a war going on because defense acquisition never stops during peacetime.
So the acquisition is exactly the same, wether there is a war or not?
More or less, there's some backfilling involved.
But budgets are set years in advance.
If tomorrow US pivots towards lets say a duke out with, hypothetically, a land invasion of Iran for 2027:
- Shipbuilding will get cancelled to make way for land vehicles
- FAXX and F47 will get budget cuts to make way for CENTCOM and not PACCOM
- Virginia Class will get budget cuts to fund operational costs etc etc
This is what happened in 00's. Naval and Air force budgets got slashed and the money went to procuring COIN weapons and operations in the Middle east.
Largely yes, because the US is in a neverending posture of preparing for the next big war; and the nature of war fighting and munitions themselves are rapidly evolving due to technology. So even if say the US were to expend a lot of munitions in a present day conflict, its highly likely that those munitions would've needed to have been replaced by completely different, more advanced ones in the coming years anyway.
Major defense companies are all expecting more sales and profit because of this war.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8pyyz5e0ro
BAE Systems, which makes products including F35 fighter jet components, said in a trading update on Thursday it expects strong growth in sales and profits this year.
Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman, three of the world's biggest defence contractors, have each reported having record order backlogs at the end of the first quarter of 2026.
Explain to me how Northrup's B-21 Flagship project, Lockheed undertaking F-35 Block IV and a secret, unannounced NGAD project, and Boeing being paid billions for F-47 has anything to do with the Iran war?
The 2027 Defense Budget requirements came out 1 day after the Iran War began. Explain how in that 1 day, somehow Billions got allocated to Iran War spending to the contractors?!
You're arguing against the companies themselves. They're the ones announcing the increase of orders and profits, not me.
Now you have two possibilities... believe this increase of orders and profits is related to ongoing wars, or believe it's just a coincidence and the increase of profits of companies that produce material used in war has nothing to do with ongoing wars.
The answer seems obvious.
The increase in orders came literally, quite literally from the FY27 budget, which was proposed and finalized before the Iran War began.
All of it is related to PACCOM stuff. Stop peddling conspiracies.
You left this bit out. "But shares in defence firms, which have risen sharply in recent years, have fallen back since mid-March, amid fears the sector is over-valued".
The reality in the US at least is that the actual defense budget itself has risen sharply about about 20% over the past five years alone, which predated any action in Iran or elsewhere - and will have risen by about 100% from 2020 to 2027 if Trump gets his 1.5 trillion budget next year. The rising costs are simply a byproduct of post pandemic levels of inflation coupled with Trump wanting absurd amounts to repurpose the entire defense department for a potential war with China.
War starts, governments spend a lot of war material, order more material, companies produce more, sell more, have more profits.
It's either basic supply and demand or a conspiracy.
It's either basic supply and demand or a conspiracy.
If what you're saying is true then why did defense stocks fall during the Iran war ? The article you cited to substantiate your position seems to undercut it.