The former head of the United States Army warned two months before the country went to war with Iran that American stockpiles of missile defence munitions were critically low — and that the shortage could persist until 2030, according to an investigation published on Thursday.
Gen. Randy George, who served as Army chief of staff, laid out the assessment in late December 2025 in the Pentagon’s Global Force Management Allocation Plan, the yearly directive setting out where troops and weapons are positioned around the globe. The plan is approved by the defence secretary. In it, George cautioned that inventories of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense batteries and Patriot missiles would remain at strategically low levels through the end of the decade.
A warning issued before the first shot
The timing matters. George’s assessment was drawn up as part of the Defense Department’s planning for fiscal year 2027 — before the outbreak of the US-led war with Iran, which is now in its seventh month. Officials who spoke anonymously said the shortfall stemmed from three pressures: the transfer of Patriot batteries to Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the munitions expended defending Israel, and the reduced capacity of the American defence industrial base.
The conflict itself has since deepened the problem. Estimates from the Center for Strategic and International Studies cited in the reporting suggest the United States entered 2026 with about 2,300 Patriot interceptors and has used between 1,050 and 1,430 of them — as much as 61 per cent of the pre-war stockpile. For THAAD, a pre-war inventory of roughly 355 interceptors has been drawn down by between 190 and 290. One official said that even if not a single further interceptor were fired, rebuilding stockpiles to their already-low December 2025 levels could take until 2030.
The Pentagon pushes back
The Pentagon rejected the report’s conclusions. A department spokesperson called the claims false and said the United States retained the weapons it needed to carry out operations and protect its forces. George himself declined to comment.
The stakes extend beyond the current conflict. Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and senior adviser at CSIS, said missile defence would be decisive in any future confrontation with China. Analysts note that the same shortages now squeezing shipping through the Strait of Hormuz colour every US security commitment in the region. Lockheed Martin has said it plans to raise annual THAAD interceptor production from 96 to 400, though new orders typically take more than four years to deliver — a timeline that keeps pressure on planners as warnings about large-scale escalation grow louder.
