Some Pentagon officials are concerned about the “alarmingly low” supply of Tomahawk missiles remaining in the U.S. military’s arsenal after firing 850 of the weapons into Iran, according to a report.
The rate at which the U.S. military has used the Tomahawk missiles in President Donald Trump’s war in Iran, now in its fourth week, has prompted internal talks about increasing supplies, according to The Washington Post.
U.S. officials told the newspaper that the number of Tomahawks left in the Middle East was “alarmingly low.” Another official told the outlet that the U.S. supply of Tomahawks was closing in on “Winchester,” military slang that means almost out of ammunition.
Many of the Tomahawks, which can be launched from submarines and Navy warships, were used during the first days of the war, which began on February 28, people familiar with the matter told the Post. Each missile is estimated to cost more than $2 million.
A Tomahawk missile was likely responsible for the strike on the elementary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab during the first weekend of the conflict that killed 175 people, including children, according to preliminary findings from an investigation.
Inventory numbers for the Tomahawk missiles are classified, but analysts told the Post they estimate 850 or so was approximately “a quarter” of the U.S. military’s stockpile.
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said the U.S. military “has everything it needs to execute any mission at the time and place of the President’s choosing and on any timeline” in a statement to the outlet, and said the media was “obsessed with portraying the world’s strongest military as weak.”
Parnell added that the media’s scrutiny over weapon supplies in the Iran war inaccurately suggests that the Pentagon has failed to provide its service members “every advantage to be successful” while attempting to “frighten and sow doubt in the minds of the American people.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth previously said the U.S. military has “no shortage of munitions” and supplies would “sustain this campaign as long as we need to.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also asserted that there was “more than enough munitions, ammo and weapons stockpiles to achieve the goals of Operation Epic Fury laid out by President Trump — and beyond.”
The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the Navy may have had around 3,000 Tomahawk missiles on hand at the beginning of the war last month.
Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the think tank, told the Post that if more than 800 Tomahawks were used in Iran, it “would leave a large gap for a conflict in the Western Pacific” and would “take several years to replenish.”
Trump announced on March 6 that his administration held a “very good meeting” with U.S. defense manufacturing companies that included the contractor of the Tomahawk missiles, Raytheon.
The president said the companies agreed to “quadruple production of “exquisite class weaponry…as rapidly as possible.”
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