Trump battles time in bid to boost weapons stockpiles

President Trump’s talk of boosting U.S. munitions stockpiles is facing the harsh reality of America’s production capacity.

Even if Congress passes his enormous $1.5 trillion request for defense spending, which is looking less likely with each passing week, defense contractors are simply unable to rapidly refill caches that have been badly depleted during the wars in Ukraine and Iran.

Trump met last week with the CEOs of Lockheed, Boeing and Honeywell, a gathering during which Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg grilled executives over delays on key programs, Reuters reported.

“You’re not doing enough” was the initial message to executives, a source told the outlet.

But the highly sophisticated missiles and interceptors take years to churn out at the mercy of government funding cycles. That means recently announced intentions to expand assembly lines are still years away from yielding tangible results.

“It’s going to take two to four years to replenish” the likes of the Patriot missile, Tomahawk, Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD ) anti-ballistic missile system, said Jerry McGinn, the director of the Center for the Industrial Base at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

“The problem is these systems, they’re really, really great, but they were not designed for producibility, they were designed for performance,” he told The Hill. “They’re not really built to be made at scale. They’re essentially handmade in some ways.”

Washington’s weapons cache — which already took a hit during the Biden administration when the U.S. sent billions of dollars’ worth of lethal aid to help Ukraine in its war with Russia — have quickly dwindled thanks to Trump’s war in Iran and heightened tensions in the Middle East.

Prior to a tentative ceasefire announced in April, the United States reportedly burned through thousands of missiles in under two months of conflict, using nearly all of the long-range stealth cruise missiles left in Washington’s stockpile, more than half of its THAADs, almost 50 percent of its Patriot interceptor missiles, and depleting its stores of Tomahawks, Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-based missiles.

Rebuilding the stockpiles of these weapons to pre-Operation Epic Fury levels will take one to four years, according to an April analysis from CSIS.

Even with the ceasefire and recent memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran, U.S. forces have periodically conducted additional strikes against Iran in response to attacks near the Strait of Hormuz, including on Friday and Saturday.

The Defense Department has not publicly disclosed how many munitions it has used thus far in the Iran war. Apart from its own missile use, the United States has also supplied allies with large quantities of weapons.

Katherine Thompson, a former Trump administration official and now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, said publicly available information points to a timeframe of well beyond Trump’s term ends before the U.S. would be back to pre-war inventory levels.

“Those timelines are not something that the defense contractors are giving, but I think at a minimum we can say we’re not going to be back to pre-war levels until, based on the data that’s out there, the early 2030s,” she told The Hill.

Concerns over stockpiles grew so high that the administration earlier this year put a pause on weapons sales to allies and partners, with Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao last month telling lawmakers the U.S. was pausing a $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan “in order to make sure we have the munitions we need” for the Iran war.

And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in late April testified that replenishing weapons stockpiles could take “months and years,” blaming low munition numbers on the Biden administration.

The president has repeatedly insisted that U.S. munitions stockpiles have “never been higher or better,” but privately has pushed contractors to boost output and faster by investing in their factories and operations, most recently at last week’s White House meeting.

The Pentagon has a tentative production agreement with Lockheed Martin to triple production of Patriot interceptors and last week officially awarded the company a seven-year contract worth up to $35 billion for THAAD interceptors.

The administration also last week awarded RTX a $398.7 million contract for Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles.

Even with a deal on the books, a weapons ramp-up takes time. In an April earnings call, the Lockheed executives said it would take three to four years to increase Patriot missile production

from the current level of 650 annually to 2,000 per year.

Furthermore, both contracts are “undefinitized,” meaning they can’t be fully funded until Congress approves them. Until then, companies can’t invest more significantly in production lines.

The White House last week asked Congress for $87.6 billion in supplemental funding to pay for the Iran war and other requests, with $21 billion of that meant for munitions. In addition, the administration is hoping for a $350 reconciliation bill to fund a large chunk of defense spending priorities, including new missiles and interceptors. Neither funding bill is a sure thing, even among Republicans.

Thompson said not passing such bills would be a “significant” blow to Trump’s plans to increase munitions.

“It would have a serious impact if you can’t get the money through Congress in either a supplemental vehicle or reconciliation,” she said. “As a former congressional staffer, I’m a bit puzzled as to why that was the legislative strategy that you go with.”

Key lawmakers including Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who control the Pentagon’s purse strings, have said they don’t see the $350 reconciliation bill moving forward, and chided the administration for its broader defense spending strategy.

Elaine McCusker, a former acting Pentagon comptroller who’s now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said she sees “a lot of really good momentum that gives us a production ramp to get us where we want to go” in terms of munitions output, but also sees it as “being something that is somewhat perishable if we do something to stall that momentum.”

“Three to five years from now we could be a lot better off than we are now, but it takes that consistent demand signal and funding every year,” she said.