SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
The U.S. and Iran have blown past a deadline this week to start peace talks.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
That conflict, which has gone on for months, has sent gas prices soaring in the U.S., and now military resources like warships and interceptor missiles are running short. That has hurt the U.S. military capabilities in other regions, notably in Asia.
PFEIFFER: And we have NPR's Emily Feng with us to explain why. Good morning, Emily.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: Good morning to the both of you.
PFEIFFER: So we heard this week that Trump said the U.S. would reduce joint military exercises with South Korea. He said that within hours of those exercises actually beginning. Is this related to the Iran war?
FENG: According to Trump, yes. He spoke to reporters yesterday and said he had unsuccessfully asked South Korea's president to help the U.S. with its war against Iran.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And I said, wait a minute. We have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong Un, your next-door neighbor, and you're not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran?
FENG: As you mentioned, these drills have already kicked off. These exercises go back at least until 1976, and they were designed to largely counter North Korea and its nuclear program. And I spoke to Hal Brands, a global affairs professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He says North Korea is actually a bigger threat in Trump's second term than in his first.
HAL BRANDS: The nuclear program has expanded over the past decade, and the missile arsenal has become larger and more sophisticated. You can add to that the fact that North Korea is now getting increasingly advanced technological help from Russia.
FENG: But Trump has been upset with Seoul from even his first term for not paying the U.S. more for the security assistance it provides to South Korea.
PFEIFFER: Emily, speaking of security, correct me if I'm wrong, but is this one of the few times there will be no U.S. aircraft carriers in the Pacific region?
FENG: Right. And when I went back into this, I found that you can count on one hand the number of times there has not been a U.S. carrier group in the Pacific since the 1970s. Now, the USS George Washington, a carrier, was in the Pacific, but it's been sent to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is already in the Middle East and has had its deployment extended. Like the Washington, it was also in the Pacific when it was diverted to the Middle East.
I've been speaking to naval experts about this, and they say it could be weeks, if not months, until a replacement carrier formation is ready and arrives in the Pacific to replace the Washington. One of these experts is Mike Dahm. He's a former naval intelligence officer with the Mitchell Institute, which is an aerospace research group.
MIKE DAHM: Aircraft carriers move and they move quickly, but they have to be ready to go. The question really is, who's ready to go? Who's not in the maintenance period? Whose air wing is qualified to get underway and go on a long deployment?
FENG: And while they have not been as publicly concerned as Ukraine, countries in Asia are noticing, and they're also really worried about the depletion of American interceptor missiles.
PFEIFFER: Yes, we've been doing a lot of reporting on that. And give us a sense of just how depleted is the missile stockpile.
FENG: They're very depleted. One think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies here in Washington, found U.S. interceptor stockpiles shrunk by about two-thirds during the Iran War. And then even before the Iran War, the think tank the Heritage Foundation determined this month that the U.S. already only had a fraction of the interceptors it needed to push back, say, against a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
PFEIFFER: That is NPR's Emily Feng. Emily, thank you.
FENG: Thanks, Sacha. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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