EMILY KWONG, HOST:
Practically speaking, how long can the U.S. continue to trade strikes with Iran? According to one estimate, about a week. A 2023 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies warned a war with a major power could deplete some U.S. munitions stockpiles. Now, with the possibility of U.S. strikes extending for more than a few days, we've called Seth Jones. He's the author of that report and the president of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
SETH JONES: Thanks, Emily, for having me.
KWONG: You wrote this report a few years ago. Is your assessment still the same, thinking about what's happening right now?
JONES: Well, the report focused on the challenges that the U.S. industrial base faces. The particular focus on a week was some of the key munitions the U.S. needs for a war in Taiwan straits, like long-range, anti-ship missiles, for example, or JASSMs, extended-range ones. In the war we're seeing in Iran, it's a little bit different. The U.S. is not using some of those long-range, anti-ship missiles. But on some areas like air defense systems - THAADs, Patriots...
KWONG: OK.
JONES: ...The U.S. almost certainly will start to feel some pain on munition stockpiles sooner rather than later. Just one data point on this - in 2025, the U.S. military fired a quarter of all of its THAAD missiles in a few days of operations against Iran. So we already went through a chunk of those last year.
KWONG: This is something not every American person knows. So question, also, does Israel's involvement in these strikes alter your assessment in any way of what the U.S. could do here?
JONES: Well, Iran - sorry - Israel does have a range of its own stockpiles of weapons - both offensive missiles, drones, as well as air defense systems. But I think the reality is neither Israel nor the United States have sufficient munitions, either offensive or defensive, for a war that really lasts weeks into months. It will...
KWONG: How long could it last based on...
JONES: It would depend...
KWONG: ...Ammunition availability?
JONES: Yeah. It would depend on the type of missiles. The - one good example, the U.S. has used, for example, GBU-31s. These are smart bombs. There's a pretty large stockpile of those. But it's the big ones, like the GBU-52 - these are the massive ordinance penetrators, the bunker busters. The stockpile of those is much lower, and they come from B-2 stealth bombers. So U.S. is going to have to pick and choose which types of munitions it can use in that case.
KWONG: So the U.S. defense budget in FY '25 was $2 trillion. That's a lot of money. How can the U.S. spend so much on defense and still face the possibility of depleting munition stockpiles?
JONES: Well, the reality is if you look at the comparison on the procurement budget, which is what it spends on weapons right now - now versus, say, the Reagan administration - it spends a significant amount less on that. And what the U.S. spends a lot of its defense budget is on the Tricare, the welfare system for servicemen and women. So that defense budget goes into a lot of different costs overall.
KWONG: Right. The military is more than weapons. It's all the people in service.
JONES: Exactly.
JONES: Yeah. What do you know of Iran's capacity to continue to hit U.S. targets? Do you know anything of that?
JONES: Yeah. So by mid-2025, there are a range of estimates that Iran had about 3,000 ballistic missiles, about 400 missile launchers, and then a fair number of drones, including Shaheds. These are one-way attack drones. Actually, the Russians have used them in Ukraine. I think the challenge in assessing right now is that that has been a major focus of U.S. and Israeli strikes right now. So the big question, or one big question, is how much damage have they actually caused right now to Iran's missile stockpiles. I know going into the planning of this...
KWONG: Yeah.
JONES: ...U.S. and Israeli planners were going to use that as a major element of targeting for the first part of the campaign, which is what they've done. And again, the question is, how much...
KWONG: Yeah.
JONES: ...Damage did they do to those missiles?
KWONG: Iran has so far responded by attacking U.S. and Israeli military targets throughout the Middle East, as you've mentioned, but can Iran reach the continental U.S.?
JONES: The only way Iran, at this point, could reach the continental U.S. is if it was able to pull off a - some kind of a terrorist attack by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force, its global paramilitary arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, or one of Iran's proxy forces like Hezbollah. That's probably, at this point, the only way Iran could really pull off an attack inside of the U.S. And we have seen that before. I mean, there were - there was a big plot in Washington, D.C. a little over a decade ago at one of the big D.C. restaurants. So there have been some threats. There was a threat against President Trump during the election campaign. So that's really the big consideration inside the U.S. homeland.
KWONG: Are you worried about it?
JONES: I mean, I think the Iranian regime is - has been targeted. Its leader has been killed. I think at this point, the Iranians are going to do whatever they can to fire back, whether it's missiles or these kinds of asymmetric attacks. So I think at...
KWONG: Yeah.
JONES: ...This point, frankly, anything is possible.
KWONG: There are, of course, allies who rely on America for defense. I'm thinking about Ukraine. I'm thinking about Taiwan. Does a depleted U.S. stockpile put those allies at risk?
JONES: That is a very interesting question. The U.S. has war plans for North Korea, for Russia and for China. And the more it uses in this Iran war - Tomahawks, for example, or some of these big bunker busters, these MOABs - the less it's going to have for deterrence, and if deterrence fails, any kind of activity in Ukraine to support Taiwan or elsewhere.
KWONG: That is Seth Jones. He's the president of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Thank you for speaking with us.
JONES: Thank you.
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