The US military officially maintains a doctrine that states it is able to fight two major wars in different theaters simultaneously. The combination of 5GW and the Iran War has demonstrated that it is no longer even able to fight one major war, outside of a defensive war on US territory.
The expenditure has been historic by every measure. U.S. warships fired roughly 400 Tomahawks in the first 71 hours of Operation Epic Fury alone, principally to smash Iran’s air defenses and command nodes. By the end of the first month, the total passed 850, which made this, by a wide margin, the largest Tomahawk campaign ever conducted, more than Operation Desert Fox’s 325 and Desert Storm’s 288 combined. Firing continued to the April 8 ceasefire, and CSIS’s munitions review, citing updated Wall Street Journal reporting, put the figure at more than 1,000 Tomahawks expended. The same review tracked parallel drawdowns across the rest of the precision magazine, including heavy use of Patriot and THAAD interceptors against Iranian barrages and large expenditures of air-launched JASSM cruise missiles. Since the ceasefire collapsed this month, strikes have resumed, and no updated official count exists; the only precise statement available as of July 17 is that the true number now exceeds 1,000 by an undisclosed and growing margin.
Two details give the raw number its weight. First, the scale relative to the force: CSIS calculated that 850 missiles represented roughly half of all the Tomahawks loaded on launchers in the entire Middle East theater, and those launchers cannot be reloaded at sea; a destroyer that empties its cells must sail to a properly equipped port. Second, the alarm inside the building: officials told the Washington Post that regional Tomahawk stocks were running dangerously low, with one warning the Pentagon was approaching “Winchester,” the military’s slang for out of ammunition, even as the administration publicly insisted that critical stockpiles had not been dangerously depleted.
What a China or Russia War Would Actually Take
This is the question the months of expenditure snapshots have circled without answering, and it is where the picture turns dark. The reference point is the Pentagon-adjacent wargaming on a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and its headline finding predates this war: CSIS’s landmark industrial-base study concluded from a series of wargames that the United States would likely run out of some munitions, specifically long-range precision-guided weapons, in less than one week of a Taiwan Strait conflict, a finding a member of Congress repeated almost verbatim in a formal warning to the Pentagon.
The simulations put numbers on it. Across two dozen iterations, a three-week war with China consumed on average about 4,000 air-launched JASSMs, 450 Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles, 400 Harpoons, and roughly 400 land-attack Tomahawks, plus large numbers of the Navy’s SM-6.
The wrinkle in those figures is the most misunderstood part of this entire subject. The Iran war has already consumed more than twice as many Tomahawks as the Taiwan simulations averaged, and that is not because a China war would be smaller. It is because the weapons mix inverts. Against Iran’s degraded defenses, the ship-launched Tomahawk was the tool of choice. Against China’s dense air defenses and blue-water fleet, the burden shifts to stealthy air-launched standoff weapons and anti-ship missiles, the JASSMs and LRASMs, which are precisely the munitions the wargames show emptying first, and which the Iran war has also drained; the same CSIS review tracked heavy JASSM expenditure alongside the Tomahawks.
In other words, the remaining Tomahawks could, on paper, cover the modeled land-attack draw of a Taiwan fight. What they cannot do is compensate for the rest of a magazine that empties in days. CSIS’s most recent assessment, published this spring with the Iran war’s costs in view, is blunt on this point: wargames suggest hundreds of LRASMs and thousands of JASSM-ERs could be expended in just the first week of a Taiwan conflict, expenditures that would climb dramatically in later weeks, and open-source assessments indicate the Pentagon has nowhere near the inventories a protracted war with China would require.
The geography compounds it. Taiwan is an island; unlike Ukraine, it cannot be resupplied across a land border once fighting starts, so the munitions that matter are largely the ones already in theater on day one, and CSIS notes that the naval forces and missiles diverted to the Middle East for this war are exactly the ones that would otherwise sit in the Western Pacific.
What we’ve witnessed has been the most significant revolution in military affairs since WWII, the decline of the battleship, and the end of the UK as a major military power. The USA is still a major power, but it now has little more ability to project its power against a real opponent than China or Russia.
