Hegseth faces questions as Iran war drains U.S. missile stockpiles

The Iran war did not create the weakness in the U.S. defense industrial base. It exposed a long-running one under pressure: the United States can fire advanced precision-guided munitions in weeks, but replacing them can take years, and that gap is now driving a fresh fight in Washington over readiness for a future clash with China.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced bipartisan questions on Capitol Hill as lawmakers pressed him on the war’s rising cost and on whether America’s weapons stockpiles were thinning faster than the Pentagon could refill them. At May 12 hearings, Pentagon officials said the war had cost about $29 billion, most of it for repairing and replacing munitions. Hegseth told lawmakers the military still had enough missile-defense systems and other munitions for the Iran war and for future conflicts, even as Democrats and Republicans raised alarms about depleted inventories.

The debate has centered on the munitions that matter most in a high-end fight: Patriots, THAAD interceptors, Tomahawks and other long-range, high-cost weapons. Mark Kelly and other lawmakers questioned whether the administration was understating the strain on U.S. stockpiles. For Congress, the issue has become less about one war than about whether the Pentagon can sustain a prolonged one. The same industrial bottlenecks that have slowed previous reform efforts are now visible in real time, with the conflict consuming years’ worth of inventory faster than industry can rebuild it.

The administration has begun to move money and contracts toward faster output, but the scale of the response also shows how much ground still has to be made up. A January 2026 Lockheed Martin-Pentagon framework was designed to raise THAAD interceptor production from 96 missiles a year to 400. Another agreement would lift PAC-3 MSE production from about 600 missiles a year to roughly 2,000 over seven years. In April 2026, Lockheed Martin received a preliminary $4.7 billion contract for accelerated PAC-3 MSE production. Those steps follow a 2025 reconciliation bill that added $25 billion for munition procurement, a sign that Congress had already started pouring money into the problem before the Iran war made it impossible to ignore.

The consequences are spilling beyond Washington. Switzerland was weighing rival air-defense suppliers after Washington delayed Patriot deliveries because of the Iran war, a reminder that U.S. stockpile pressure can ripple through allied defense planning as well. The central question now is whether the Pentagon’s latest fixes will outpace the old pattern of slow production, slow procurement and fast battlefield consumption, or whether the same bottleneck will keep shaping American war plans.