The U.S. military has used more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles in four weeks of war against Iran. According to people familiar with the matter, such a high rate of expenditure has already unsettled some Pentagon officials and triggered internal discussions about how to make more of the weapons available before stockpiles are pushed into a more dangerous state.
The Tomahawk is one of the most recognizable long-range cruise missiles in the American arsenal. It can be launched from Navy surface ships and submarines and has been a core element of U.S. strike operations since it was first used in combat during the Persian Gulf War in 1991. But even for the United States, the supply is not unlimited, because only a few hundred are manufactured each year.
That is exactly why the scale of Tomahawk use in the Iran war has become more than a tactical issue. It has turned into a strategic one. These missiles are especially valuable because they can travel more than 1,000 miles and allow the United States to strike without sending pilots into heavily defended airspace. In a conflict like this, that capability is not just useful, but central.
According to the report’s sources, Pentagon officials are already discussing whether some Tomahawk stockpiles may have to be shifted from other regions, including the Indo-Pacific. At the same time, there is growing recognition that the United States will need a long-term effort to increase production, because the current war has shown that high-end munitions can be consumed far faster than planners once assumed.
The issue reaches well beyond one conflict. It has exposed wider concern inside both the Pentagon and Congress about the Trump administration’s war against Iran, its changing explanations for why the conflict is necessary, and the risks posed by shrinking inventories at a time when the United States still has to think about other potential crises elsewhere in the world.
People familiar with internal assessments said the Pentagon is tracking not only how many Tomahawks have already been fired, but also what the current burn rate means for the sustainability of the campaign. One official described the number of Tomahawks left in the Middle East as “alarmingly low,” while another said the military is approaching “Winchester,” the term used when ammunition is nearly exhausted.
Officially, the Pentagon declined to answer direct questions about how many Tomahawks had been expended or how many remain in the region. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said only that the U.S. military has everything it needs to execute any mission at the time and place of the president’s choosing. At the same time, he accused the press of trying to portray the world’s strongest military as weak.
But the capabilities of the missile itself explain why the supply issue is being treated so seriously. Modern Tomahawks have been in service since 2004. They can communicate through satellite links, strike preprogrammed targets, locate adversaries through GPS while in flight, and even relay battle-damage information back to commanders. That makes them one of the most flexible and valuable precision-strike tools in the U.S. arsenal.
They are also expensive and slow to replace. The most advanced versions can cost as much as $3.6 million apiece, and a single missile may take up to two years to build. In recent years, the Pentagon has bought them in relatively small batches. Last year’s defense budget, for example, included just 57 Tomahawks.
A large portion of the more than 850 missiles fired were launched in the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, the Trump administration’s name for the war against Iran. Among those strikes was at least one missile that hit in the vicinity of an elementary school in the Iranian city of Minab. The United States has since opened an investigation, while Iranian officials said the strike killed large numbers of children.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Adm. Charles “Brad” Cooper, who oversees U.S. operations in the Middle East, have argued that once American and Israeli forces degraded Iranian air defenses and other military capabilities early in the campaign, U.S. pilots were able to move farther inland and rely more on munitions that are available in greater numbers. But that does not change the fact that the first phase of the war was extremely costly in long-range precision missiles.
And Tomahawks are not the only concern. The United States has also fired more than 1,000 air-defense interceptor missiles from systems such as Patriot and THAAD in response to Iranian counterattacks across the region. That means the problem is not limited to one weapons category. It points instead to a broader drawdown of expensive and scarce systems needed both for offensive operations and for protecting U.S. assets and allies.
The high burn rate of Tomahawks has already forced the Navy to resupply at least some of the warships involved in the Iran operation. Each destroyer can carry dozens of these missiles, but reloading is typically done in port. Now the Navy is being pushed to expand its ability to conduct resupply at sea, which by itself says a great deal about the pace and scale of the campaign.
Estimates of the total U.S. Tomahawk inventory vary. MacKenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute suggested that before the operation began, the Navy probably had between 4,000 and 4,500 missiles available. Other naval analysts believe the number may have been much lower, perhaps closer to 3,000, especially after extensive use in previous operations involving Iran, Yemen, and Nigeria.
Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said that if the military has really fired more than 800 Tomahawks at Iran, that could amount to roughly a quarter of the total inventory. In his view, such a rate of use would leave a major gap in the event of a future conflict in the Western Pacific. More importantly, it could take years to rebuild the stockpile.
According to CSIS, the Navy has purchased nearly 9,000 Tomahawks over the life of the program. But thousands of those were older variants that are now obsolete and retired. So while the historical procurement figure sounds large, it does not mean the United States currently has anything close to that number of modern, ready-to-use missiles available.
Tomahawks are built by Raytheon with support from other manufacturers. Ryan Brobst of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said the U.S. defense industry currently has the capacity to produce about 600 missiles per year. If that estimate is correct, replenishing the stock after the present rate of use would be difficult and slow even without another major war.
Despite all this, the Trump administration has publicly rejected concerns that the war with Iran is depleting critical U.S. stocks. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this month that the United States has more than enough munitions, ammunition, and weapons stockpiles to achieve the goals of Operation Epic Fury and beyond. Hegseth has made similar claims, insisting that there is no shortage.
At the same time, the administration has already convened meetings with defense contractors, including Raytheon, to push for faster production. After one of those meetings, Trump wrote on social media that the companies had agreed to quadruple production of what he called “Exquisite Class” weaponry. He also said another such meeting would take place in two months.
Hegseth has also personally pressed defense firms to speed delivery of key weapons, according to one person familiar with those discussions. That highlights the central contradiction in the current situation: publicly, the White House says there is no problem with supply, but in practice it is already mobilizing industry for emergency production expansion.
At the same time, the Pentagon is seeking more than $200 billion from Congress to fund the war against Iran. That request is already encountering resistance from lawmakers who oppose the conflict. But the Pentagon’s logic is clear: Washington needs not only money to cover the operations already carried out, but also funding to refill munitions stockpiles and push them above prewar levels.
In the end, the Tomahawk story has become one of the clearest signs of a much deeper problem. The war against Iran has shown that even for the United States, stocks of precision-guided weapons are not inexhaustible. The pace of a modern war can create a shortage in a matter of weeks, even when rebuilding it may take years. That is why the concern inside the Pentagon is not just about Iran, but about America’s broader readiness for future crises across the globe.
