America shot its arsenal empty in 2 wars. Now it needs Beijing’s permission to reload

Steve Hanke is a professor of applied economics at The Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book, co-authored with Matt Sekerke, is Making Money Work: How to Rewrite the Rules of Our Financial System, Wiley, 2025. Jeffrey Weng is the chief of staff at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration finally let the cat out of the bag that Operation Epic Fury, America’s war on Iran, has burned through $25 billion so far. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. The White House has already requested a supplemental budget of $200 billion for its war on Iran.

The inventory math is brutal. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) finds that in Iran alone, the United States burned through 45% of its Precision Strike Missile stockpile, half of its THAAD interceptors, nearly half of its Patriot PAC-3 inventory, roughly 30% of its Tomahawks, and more than 20% of its long-range JASSMs.

That is just one war. Add Ukraine, where, since 2022, the United States has shipped roughly one-third of its Javelin inventory, one-quarter of its Stinger stockpile, more than two million 155mm artillery rounds, and thousands of GMLRS rockets. The combined drain is what the Pentagon’s own internal assessments now describe as a “near-term........

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