When US President Donald Trump took the stage earlier this month at the Pennsylvania Defense and Innovation Summit, flanked by the CEOs of some of America’s largest defence firms, he had one message in mind: build more weapons, and build them faster.
“We have the best quality in the world,” Trump told the armsmakers gathered at the US Army War College, with ‘Secretary of War’ Pete Hegseth at his side. “But we need a little more speed.”
The Trump administration framed the summit as part of a two-pronged approach to revitalise American industry and bolster US warfighting capabilities and, in Hegseth’s words, its “arsenal of freedom”.
Largely unspoken, however, was the vast expenditure of sophisticated and difficult-to-manufacture weapons used during nearly 40 days of intense combat operations in Iran during Operation Epic Fury earlier this year and tit-for-tat strikes that have taken place since. So far, the US government says the war has cost $37.5bn (£28bn), and the vast majority of that has been spent on munitions.
By the time a tenuous ceasefire took effect on 8 April, US forces had struck over 13,000 targets across Iran, according to the White House. American air defences intercepted over 1,700 Iranian drones and ballistic missiles over the same period.
Now, the US has paused its strikes on Iran to allow negotiations to go ahead. A New York Times report says that Trump was advised to shelve plans to escalate the conflict as it would further drain American stockpiles.
On Monday, Trump denied there was a shortfall, telling the Wall Street Journal: “We have far more munitions than anyone in the world, and far more than we need.”
