Operation Epic Fury may have been paused for now with a shaky ceasefire with Iran, but the US has already depleted more than half of its prewar munitions, according to a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
The US drew heavily on its stocks of Tomahawks, Patriots, and other missiles in the first 39 days of its joint war with Israel against Iran, according to CSIS. Replenishing those stocks could take from one to four years.
Mark Cancian, a former Pentagon official, told Al Jazeera that US war planners – who believed even before the war that “inventories were not adequate for a war with China” – are now “quite nervous”.
“So there’s a window of vulnerability here. We do have some munitions that are plentiful, so it’s not that we will be down to throwing rocks at an adversary. But they are not the preferred munitions,” said Cancian, who co-authored the CSIS report.
At the same time, he added, “the United States has shown what its military can do” in attacking Iran.
Potential adversaries “have to be looking at this and wondering whether the US military might be more formidable than they had originally thought”, Cancian said.