A Pentagon watchdog has confirmed that the six-month U.S. air campaign against Iran drained American munitions stockpiles to the point of creating "strategic inventory shortfalls," according to a congressionally mandated inspector general report released this week — the Defense Department's first formal accounting of the conflict's costs.
The report found that Operation Epic Fury, the U.S. military's name for the campaign, cost $33.4 billion between February 28 and June 30, with $22.3 billion of that spent on munitions alone. Separately, the State Department spent $79.2 million on evacuations and personnel costs, and the government spent another $184 million repairing diplomatic facilities in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Bottlenecks in the supply chain
Investigators wrote that the pace of munitions expenditure "resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply," pointing to constraints in rocket motors, explosives and the skilled labor needed to manufacture replacements. The Defense Department Inspector General's office also detailed equipment losses from the campaign: four F-15 fighters destroyed, one F-35 damaged, seven KC-135 aerial refueling tankers damaged, and as many as 30 MQ-9 Reaper drones destroyed.
President Trump dismissed concerns about the findings, saying the United States has "virtually unlimited amounts of Mid to High Grade Ammunition" and is "producing Munitions at levels never seen before." Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has separately called for expanded weapons manufacturing capacity to close the gap identified in the report.
Outside defense analysts were less sanguine about what the shortfall could mean in a larger conflict. Mark Cancian, a defense budget expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said current stockpiles were sufficient for a conflict on the scale of the Iran campaign but would be tested severely in a longer war against a major power.
"A war against China... we might be able to provide enough munitions for a month, but... month two or month three or four, that's a great challenge."
Mark Cancian, Center for Strategic and International Studies
What happens next
The report is likely to intensify a long-running debate in Congress over the health of the U.S. defense industrial base, which lawmakers from both parties have said struggles to replace precision munitions as quickly as they are used. Pentagon officials have pointed to new contracts aimed at expanding rocket-motor and explosives production, though those facilities can take years to come online. Lawmakers on the armed services committees are expected to press Pentagon leaders for a timeline on rebuilding stockpiles when they return from recess, particularly given unresolved tensions with Iran and ongoing U.S. commitments elsewhere.
