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Former President Joe Biden used up all the ammunition. There is no ammunition shortage. It is illegal to leak military secrets about the ammunition shortage. Asked on Meet the Press about reports that the U.S. military doesn’t have enough air defense interceptors to return to the Iran war, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz offered all three contradictory explanations on Sunday.
The latest round of U.S.-Iranian fighting ended suddenly this weekend. Despite President Donald Trump’s claim that he was “all set” for a “massive attack,” the U.S. military stopped bombing Iran on Friday; the Iranian government said it would reciprocate with its own ceasefire, and diplomats began talks in Tehran. Axios and The New York Times both reported that Trump backed down after Gen. Dan Caine warned him that an escalation would use up stocks of Patriot missiles and other air defense ammunition. Two officials told NBC that the U.S. military was already rationing interceptors, allowing more Iranian air raids to get through.
“The administration inherited, Secretary [of Defense Pete] Hegseth inherited, a depleted situation from not only Ukraine but also the ongoing fight with the Houthis under the Biden administration and a degraded military under the Biden administration,” Waltz said when asked about that reporting. Pressed on whether the shortages were still a problem, Waltz claimed that the military “has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be, and I want to tell you, the people that are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.”
The Trump administration has tried to keep a lid on bad news from the war, covering up casualties, threatening to yank TV stations’ licenses for “fake news,” and treating journalists as security threats or even Iranian agents. Waltz was an ironic messenger for this latest threat, given that he was demoted from Trump’s national security adviser to U.N. ambassador after accidentally adding a journalist to a group chat for war planning in Yemen.
The interceptor shortage is no secret. It’s been a widely reported issue for years, based on public information, and Waltz is correct to say that the warning lights have been blinking since the Biden administration. Both administrations have insisted on dumping weapons into or directly fighting multiple wars around the world, and the military is finding it harder and harder to protect troops against cheap missiles and drones.
But the Iran war in particular has burned through ammunition at an extremely rapid rate. Studies by the Royal United Services Institute in London and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington have both estimated that the U.S. military used up huge chunks of its interceptor supply in a matter of weeks, including nearly half of its Patriot missiles. CNN confirmed those numbers with Pentagon sources.
It’s clear by now that the Trump administration had underestimated the number of missiles and drones in Iran, and overestimated how quickly the war would go. In the first two weeks of the war, Trump and U.S. Central Command Adm. Bradley Cooper repeated wildly optimistic numbers about how much of Iran’s missile force had been destroyed. By the time of the April ceasefire, U.S. officials were quietly admitting to the media that Iran had far more missiles left than the military originally estimated.
The U.S. strategy to take out Iran’s missile forces focused on creating quick and dirty bottlenecks—blowing up launcher trucks or caving in the entrances to underground bunkers—rather than blowing up the missiles themselves. Those issues were easy for Iran to resolve before the next round: It takes only an excavator to reopen a tunnel entrance, and a launcher is just a flatbed truck with some extra hydraulics. But U.S. planners weren’t expecting a next round.
Trump himself estimated that the war would last just three days. Pentagon officials gave a slightly more modest timeline of several weeks. Newly-released footage of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) shows exactly how war planners expected the campaign to unfold. “In three to four weeks, we should have them in a spot where they start losing control of some cities,” he told former Biden administration official Jake Sullivan on March 4, less than a week into the war. “What we’re trying to do is get a few cities to fall in the next month, get the Arabs more openly involved tomorrow, or by the end of the week, and just have irreversible momentum.”
Graham’s choice of conversation partner is telling. Despite publicly criticizing the war now, Sullivan was reportedly pushing for a similar attack at the end of the Biden years, arguing that Iran was weakened and unlikely to fight back. In a sense, Waltz is correct that the Trump administration inherited the problem. But that problem wasn’t, as Waltz likes to claim, a lack of guts. It was the opposite: a confidence that war is cost-free because enemies don’t fight back.
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