Munitions Shortages After Epic Fury

Since Operation Epic Fury began in February, the United States has conducted its most munitions intensive military campaign in many decades. Over the last 5 months, US forces have expanded thousands of high-end offensive and defensive missiles, deeply reducing the inventories for things like Patriot, THAAD, and Tomahawk cruise missiles. So, how serious is the situation? What will it take to get back to pre-war inventories? And will that be enough? I'm Tom Carico, director of the CSIS Missile Defense Project, and I'm joined uh with my colleague Mark Canian, a senior adviser uh with the Defense and Security Department as well to discuss this important topic. Before we jump in, I want to play a quick clip of Secretary of State Marco Rubio from several months ago describing one of the objectives of the war and how it related to production rates. >> They are producing, by some estimates, over 100 of these missiles a month. Compare that to the six or seven interceptors that can be built a month. They can build a hundred of these a month. Not to mention the thousands of one-way attack drones that they also have. >> Well, I wanted to start with that because it really brings us to why we're here. Uh and what at least one of the objectives of the conflict was was to degrade the Iranian missile program. And we see this here in one of our our graphics of the various ballistic and cruise missiles uh and of course a number of uh Shahed drones. We've heard a lot about the Shaheds over the past uh several months. Uh these maps perhaps don't do it justice. The Iranians also took a shot uh which came reportedly close to Diego Garcia with a ballistic missile which perhaps surprised some people. Uh but suffice to say uh Iran entered this conflict with many many missiles and drones. Uh the president I think about a month and change ago said that they still had like 20%. uh they believe that Iran still had about 20% uh of their offensive uh capability. So I guess we we've degraded a lot, but there's still a lot that is, as it turns out, hard to do from standoff and hard to do uh from the air. Uh so Mark, where do we find ourselves? Uh we've we've talked a lot. There's been a lot of headlines uh about the munitions problem. You and I have talked about this quite a bit. Um our colleagues at CSIS have as well. Where do we find ourselves from your perspective? Well, why don't you give me the next slide here and we can talk about some numbers and then what they mean. Uh, this is the situation at the ceasefire. We looked at seven uh munitions that would be used against China in the Western Pacific and have also been used against Iran. It's not the full universe of important munitions, but it's an very important subset. There were four uh missile defense uh systems and three ground attack systems. Not going to go through all of them, but overall you can see two things. One is they're very expensive and the second thing is that we've used from a third to a half of the inventories. Why don't you give me the next one because we're going to do a deep dive on two of them. Patriot and THAAD. These are the premier missile defense systems. And here you can see what we had with Patriot for example before the war. What we had at the ceasefire and then what we have calculated now which is in the about 800. We've used about 14500 during the war. FAD we used uh a lot of them and we were at about 50% although there were reports that it might even be lower than that. It's important to keep in mind though that these inventories before the war were considered to be too low that looking at a conflict in the western Pacific most analysts believe that we needed a larger inventory and of course now it's much smaller. I think the acquisition objective uh just as [clears throat] of a year and a half ago for pack 3 was 3376 and so the fact that we started with 23 uh 100 uh says we we weren't even up to that. Now last February 2025 u the budget documents confirmed that the army had quadrupled the objective uh acquisition goal to nearly 14,000. Well, we've had a little bit of a setback. It's going to be a little bit difficult to get there. Well, we we have and it's going to take um many years to get back even to the u pre-war probably about three years for for patriot even with the expansion of the production and then several years after that to get to where the war planners want. >> And I my comment on this is that um and look these numbers these are your estimates. Uh there have been actually some reports that are even deeper uh even more troubling and that that could well be the case. Uh but it's not as if we could just go into the toolbox and find alternatives. You know, as you said, the Patriot and Thad are main stays. It's the army's principal ballistic missile uh defense capabilities. The standard missile of course being for for the Navy. Uh but this is this is an annihilation. This is a generational annihilation of our call it theater missile defense capability. As you said, it's going to take years to get back there. But it's not just the cost or and all that, but it's the fact that we're going to face uh an absence of this capability. It's a very significant absence of this capability in other places like the Pacific uh or Europe. We've surged patriots and fads to Romania to to Europe uh to uh you know when Nancy Pelosi you know visited Taiwan and and caused such a stink with the with the Chinese. Look, FAD was there on Guam ready to go. Um, there's been all kinds of news reports about Patriot assets and THAD assets being moved out of the Pacific to the Middle East and then presumably either getting shot up or shot at in the case of some uh very exquisite big uh fad tippy two radars that you just can't replace and that are pretty expensive to replace as well. >> We looked at ground attack munitions, Tomahawk being uh the most wellknown here. The inventories are a little better than for uh the missile defense. You can see we have probably about twothirds remaining. That reflects partly the fact that the Navy has been outside of the Gulf and then has the shot geome geometry hasn't always worked out for them. U why don't you give me the next one because we also have some some >> um bright areas or bright less dark areas. Let's put it that way. These are JASM. These are air launched long range precision munitions. We started with a large number and that reflects the air force's desire for uh an air campaign in the Western Pacific and what they think the number of aiming points would be. Uh you can see we've uh what we've expended here. It's probably a little more now. uh and some fair number of deliveries again because of uh the Air Force's interest over the last really decade. >> Yeah. >> Uh one thing to keep in mind is that when we talk about deliveries, we're talking about things that were ordered in 23 24. Uh if you went and ordered a JASM today, >> probably get take two years to get the first one, maybe a little more. Uh, and then maybe 12 months to get the last one. So, you know, there's a a wait time here. Why don't you give me the next one here? Yep. >> And we wanted to make the point, too, that there were some additional backups. The these are short range and medium range munitions. So if we did run out of the long range, you know, the tom honk, the jasmine, we're not reduced to throwing rocks at the um the uh uh and on these we have, you know, large inventories, particularly JDAM, which is the joint direct attack munition. The problem with these is the range. And to make a contrast here, uh JDAM has a about the same explosive power as a tomahawk, about,000 pounds. It has the same precision, but the range is only 25 miles. You have to get very close. Whereas a tomahawk has a range of a thousand. You can stay way back and stay out of an adversar's defensive zone. >> But JDM costs $100,000. Tomahawk cost $2.5 million. >> Right. Let me react to some of that. Let me go back to the Tomahawk for instance. I mean, this is a still a pretty significant uh expenditure. What are you looking at 1500 or or something like that kind of or maybe a little less than that in terms of your estimate uh here but in some respects the difference between tomahawk and jasm other than the amount used is that we were we were producing tomahawks at an anemic rate you know the FY26 budget requested put aside the reconciliation which actually didn't add that much for for for numbers but it requested 57 tomahawks now they're talking about going to a thousand Actually, they were talking about that before Operation Epic Fury kicked off, but that that's a pretty small number. Keep in mind, and I've been a broken record on this over the years. You had the Biden administration sent shooting tomahawks at the Houthies all all these years. Again, that desire for standoff, that that that risk aversion. Uh we had the Trump administration shooting tomahawks uh to in ISIS in Nigeria, right? I mean, I don't know what kind of air defenses ISIS and Nigeria has, but it's probably not that much. Now, sometimes you want to get rid of old rounds that you're going to demill to be sure. Uh I I would have perhaps and I've written an article uh endorsing handing off some old tomahawks maybe in the the dozens to Ukraine, for instance, to hold the Russians at risk. But no, we couldn't we couldn't possibly square uh spare a dozen tomahawks for Ukraine. But somehow we can we can spend a thousand of them here on JASMs. Let me just say real quick, um, the Air Force is, as as you said, has kind of been producing those at greater numbers for a couple years now. And so they're probably in a better situation for JASM, maybe to a lesser extent, El RASM, than some of these other things. And now this munitions ramp, they kind of got a head start, I think, is that fair? >> They did. And it's because of JASM's uh use in an air campaign that the Air Force envisioned. But it's important uh to uh talk about so why we had these anemic uh production rates back uh several years ago. And again we put out a commentary that lays that out. But there are two big reasons. One is that after the cold war we expected to fight short regional conflicts, North Korea for example or Iraq that didn't require a lot of munitions. uh and we pushed the industrial base to produce munitions efficiently at a peacetime rate. We squeezed out all of the the surge because strategically it wasn't necessary. >> Although in the case of tomahawks, it was consistently fewer than we were firing at random Syrian or Houthy targets. >> Yes. Which brings up the second point, which is that munitions have always had a hard time competing in the Pentagon's budget process. uh and the reason is that uh they don't have the visibility of a platform. If a service is going to build a an aircraft, a tank, a ship, that will be around for 30 years. It will be visible. It will uh contribute to deterrence. If they buy munitions, they come off the production line, they go into a bunker, and they stay there until you either shoot it or 25 years later demilitarize it. And as a result, they didn't compete very well. >> Well, let me go back to the um to the JDAM chart as well because I mean look, that's a lot. 140,000 of them. Uh that's a lot. And we of course did spike production in especially towards the end of the war on terror, I guess. Uh and we've got significant inventories as a result. But you know, on March 4th of this year, uh, Chairman General Dan Kaine talked about our establishing a certain degree of air superiority. Um, you need standoff when you don't have air superiority, but but having gotten a degree of air superiority over Iran, he said it permitted a munitions transition from standoff to stand in weapons. I haven't heard the Pentagon kind of go back to that. kind of haven't been doing as many press conferences uh lately, but your analysis and the kind of the continuing uh expenditure of the long range standoff would seem to suggest that that transition didn't last as long uh as as it could. As you said, we've got these things. We could fly over Iran and drop these very substantial uh small diameter bombs or JD dams or or what have you. Uh, but I think there's the the other thing going on here is a certain degree of risk aversion, right? When when you want to go in and and take out a big country like Iran, you're either willing to put forces on the ground and it's hard to do everything in the air or you're willing to fly over top them and risk things being shot down. And it's kind of a it's a basic question of strategy. If you you have this goal, you have this end, but somehow you're not willing to do the the ways and the means to get to that end, and you're only willing to expend your high-end standoff weapons, that contributes to getting us in this pickle. >> Well, it does. Uh, you the high risk aversion, the country's very sensitive to casualties. You know, they they track, of course, those very closely, and the White House is very aware of that, as is, uh, the Pentagon. Um they the the Pentagon and Sencom did make a major shift because they conducted about 13,000 strikes and as a result uh you know had to have used most of for most of those used those short-range munitions because we used maybe 2,00 2500 >> of the you know long range munitions. So the rest had to be the short range. But it's it's also true that for example recently for these strikes we've been using tomahawks uh the post ceasefire. And I I I'm scratching my head why we're why we're doing that. >> Um this slide by the way uh this talks to the question about how long is it going to take to replace the inventory. And what you're seeing here is uh the line represents the pre-war inventory. Now keep in mind that was below what most experts believe we needed. Uh and then you can see by quarter how what the uh inventory looks like. The uh the bottom line is that you know there are deliveries that will be coming. >> Uh those are in the orange here. Those are from previous budgets. And then red here, that's if the uh FY2027 request is approved, then you see those starting to kick in and they kick in at a very high rate. We've assumed that this foundational agreement to take production up to a thousand a year has you know been implemented and therefore you're getting very large. and they want to get to 2,000 a year by 2030 and that was the number just just of pack 3es and that was the number that was set however before epic fury kicked off. You know, we had the 12-day war last June, and we expended a lot of patriots, a lot of thads, uh, too many tomahawks. Uh, and I remember saying at the time, we can't afford to do this again, right? The Israelis can't afford to sit and play cash with arrows again. Uh, we can't afford either. And that was one of our reports last summer suggested we used, you know, between 30 and 49% of our our ths uh, last year. So, it's it's it's it's troublesome, but the it's important to recognize that this munitions ramp was formulated last year. It was kind of announced, the numbers and the goals were announced in kind of the November to January time frame. And that was all before Epic Fury kicked off. And so, when the Pentagon said and Steve Fineberg led this munitions acceleration council and this this ramp to to to shake industry, defense industry by the lapels and say, "What what does maximum production look like?" It's quadrupling our THAAD production. It's it's at least quadrupling our standard missile production for patriots. Look, the Biden administration ramped from 300 350 a year to 650 a year uh or 600 650 a year this past year, for instance. Uh and they want to go to 2,000 a year uh at least uh for instance. And I I think they they may get there. There's a lot of new facilities being built in Camden, Arkansas, and and other places around the country that are they're building new buildings. They're getting secondh second second sources or or new suppliers. You see a lot of heads of agreement being announced. You don't see many contracts, but you do see some heads of agreement being announced. Uh from your standpoint, Mark, what what else is required to to get there uh to get from here to there to those goals or perhaps beyond? I think the United States and many countries h are coming to the recognition that you can't have an inventory that's all high-end systems. As much as we would like to have, you know, all patriots, uh it's just too expensive. And although a larger inventory to start off is important, when you're looking at these extended conflicts, you have to have a range. And we see that with uh offensive systems like u uh in Russia and Iran. They have ballistic missiles that are relatively expensive, difficult to intercept. They have cruise missiles in the middle and then they have uh hundreds and hundreds of the cheap uh drones. Uh but putting those all together that stresses then a air defense system. has to be defending against many different threats. The cheap drones are easy to shoot down, but if you fire a hundred and the interception rate is 90%, that still means 10 of them got through. Uh I think the United States will be moving towards a system like that. >> Uh now on the ground side, I think it's pretty clear what that might look like. Um the uh you see development of sort of midcost midcapability cruise missiles. There are a couple of companies that had a lot of that happen. >> Yeah. Have proposed that um on the missile defense I've heard proposals uh about a less expensive Patriot. But my question to you then would be what are the options there for a less expensive interceptor? Yeah, a couple couple things come to mind. One, first of all, just on the drones. Um, you know, I think one of my major pet peeves is the headline about using a $4 million missile against a $40,000 drone. It sounds really good. It gets the clicks and all that, but there's there's a lot of counter drone capability that's in the Middle East. It's been shooting down shaheds and doing so for very low cost. You've got things like Mi Ops and Coyote. coyotes like $130,000 a pop. It's not four million. It's not super cheap. It's not free, but these [clears throat] things are shooting them down and they're doing so with with some regularity. SH heads are getting through in large part because this is a point defense system and it's not an area wide point defense system, which means you have to have it basically next to your defended asset. Yeah, >> I think a lot of these things are getting through because they don't have it's impossible to be everywhere all the time and you have to prioritize what you're going to park a coyote launcher uh next to uh for uh for example it's back to your point about we had lots of JDMs we're just choosing not to use them we do have that high low mix we're just choosing to to to use the high uh I don't think we're going to see a reduction in demand for pack 3es or for pack 3 m embassies in part because the threat just keeps getting worse and worse. You've seen news reports about uh Iranian um ballistic or quasi ballistic missiles that have some some maneuverability introduced in them. There's some news reports saying maybe that was why some of these things got uh uh and hit that base in Jordan for instance. It may also be that we didn't have >> a capability there because you can't be everywhere all the time. So the it is the evolution of the threat that from my perspective I think the demand signal for the MSE or MSE plus is going to be there for for a long time to come. But I but I think to your point there's going to be the demand for lots of the lower tier stuff and that's where you see the the the press release about the the pack 3 ACE concept. >> Uh but I would just say there's other the army is pursuing what it calls a lowcost interceptor uh uh pursuit. And so I think there you're going to have several offerings there of which uh a couple of those have come out come out in the news. Uh it's going to be hard though. You can throw you know a a flock of road runners in the air as I've said that's a counter drone capability. You can throw a flock of them in the air and they won't have the capability of a single MSE against the higherend threats. Uh, and so you're you absolutely going to still need the the higherend stuff for the higherend uh especially maneuvering or areawide uh capabilities. And then um having said that on the the strike side, here's where I think the there's real and there's there's massive uh potential for for new entrance and new capabilities and doing so much more cheaply. And I'm very impressed at the the uh uh the department the Pentagon has awarded a number of contracts for thousands of lowcost cruise missiles. You alluded to that. Uh one of which is the lowcost containerized munition. Like that that's beauty to me because that gets you something that gets you away from those those tomahawks, the tomahawk shortage, excuse me, and supplements it. It's not going to it's they're not going to have the long legs of a tomahawk necessarily, but you know this is this is routine. The production of cruise missiles in particular is routine. Ukraine's getting into the business. You see North Korea and Iran being able to do this. Uh you know those long range shahads that we had that map up for thousands of kilometers in my book those deserve to be called cruise missiles. Uh not one-way attack munitions. You know when you go a couple thousand kilometers I think you deserve that uh that moniker. for instance. Well, let me ask you another thing and this is really goes to the international pieces. Um, how are you thinking about the the allies? You know, we've seen the department, we've seen an executive order talk about by American Americans uh weapons are the best. Um, how how are you seeing this munitions expenditure affect the allies? I have some thoughts on this too. Well, we already see a lot of temp uh tension with the allies on this because on the one hand uh we want them uh to buy American uh it's important for President Trump. It was in his first term sees this as an element of US manufacturing as a way of bringing manufacturing jobs to the United States and it is uh and this is one of our great competitive advantages with other uh countries. Our weapons our weapons are combat tested. They're very high quality. Uh they have interoperability. There are a lot of great things about them. The problem is that we get in a situation where we are now where the munitions inventories are low and actually some of the weapon systems are low as a result of uh Ukraine. So now we're telling allies, no, you know, we are going to hold back the production and you have to get back in the line and we'll get to you in, you know, three, four, five years. >> And that tradeoff is of course you you're seeing the tensions now. It's going to get uh worse. Let's take Patriot as an example. There are 18 countries that use Patriot and uh some of them are in the Gulf. Those Gulf states have used a lot of their Patriots. they have come to the United States and said, "We want to refill our inventories because we're being shot at now." >> And the US has bases in the Middle East that are being defended by those patriots. >> And [snorts] uh but the Pentagon given its uh preferences would say, "No, we want to keep them all the United States." That was a big issue about a year ago when the Pentagon tried to withhold patriots from other countries. They were not able to do it then. Uh but if they are able to do it then what what are the Gulf states going to do? U they they need those. And then you've got Ukraine for example which uh desperately needs them. They're almost running out of patriots as it is and but you know they're you know from the White House perspective they're pretty far down on the list and it looks like uh they're not going to get anymore. Uh and then there were a variety of other uh countries too like there was also tomahawks with Japan. Yep. >> They've bought 400. They've configured a ship specially to fire those and now they're being told well you know maybe not now. >> It's a problem for Tom Hawk also because and Japan because you know they would that ship and those Tomahawks would be fighting with us against China in all likelihood if there were a conflict in the West. >> The Japanese Tomahawk is is huge. They actually, I think, just tested one uh the other day. So, they they have some anyway, but the news reports that the uh deliveries will be delayed or depressed, that's that's that's very concerning. Um you know, this is a historic thing that Japan has done is doing in terms of being able to get long-range strike capability. Japan didn't even want to talk about strike capability for the internal political reasons just a couple years ago. On the Pack Three front, you know, the Swiss were told, "Sorry, we're cutting the line." I think there's probably going to be a lot more of that. Uh there was a news report that the US Army that has not acquired procured for itself PAC twos which are blast frag as opposed to hit tokill uh and a bigger missile. Uh that now the US Army is buying PAC twos again. Well, they're not doing it from from a flatfooted start. they're t going to the lines that are producing them for somebody uh one of our allies and taking them uh and which is frankly necessary to replenish the giant hole in our in our inventory that is that is opened up there. So it's it's a problem and you know I would also say in terms of the you know how are other adversaries thinking about this? How is China thinking about this? Uh, I've said that that, you know, there's a guy in Beijing whose job it is to sit there with a hand clicker and and click away at every time we shoot off a pack three or a tomahawk and he's been busy and he's making his bosses happy. And as a result, you know, you look at China, the they're the real winner here from what I can tell because the real worry is that they're going to look around and be like, well, there's no missile defenses left on Guam. They're probably more there's fewer uh on Okinawa. Wouldn't this be a good time to It would be tempting for them to jump through the proverbial Davidson window when the US has just basically uh degraded substantially degraded our conventional deterrent capability, right? I mean, the whole strategy by denial thing or deterrence by denial is substantially degraded when we shoot up exactly these kind of capabilities. >> And that is a war. We we talk about a window of vulnerability for three, four, five years until we can rebuild these inventories and of course then to build them uh beyond what we had pre-war as most you know analysts believe is necessary and we'll take another couple of years after that. I would offer one perspective that might help uh deterrence and that is the demonstrated skill of the US military and the effectiveness of our weapons >> not just against Iran but against Venezuela what we were able to do with Maduro uh and even and against Iran the military side has done very very well we have destroyed a lot of targets now converting that into political advantage has been very difficult And the Chinese are very conscious that they don't have any recent combat experience. Their last conflict was in 1979 against Vietnam and they did very poorly. So that has to be uh weighing on their thinking. Now is that enough to offset what looks like an opportunity because of inventory reductions? That's impossible to know. >> Yeah, I I totally agree this. I also uh can't help but think that the fact that we have not been able to sufficiently scutt and kill every Iranian missile on the ground, scutting is hard. It always has been. Um, another lesson I think that the Chinese and maybe the Russians are taking away from this is if you can find a way to ride out uh whether by passive defense or hardening or tunneling and burying, if you can ride out the precision guided munitions that the United States has at range, tomahawks, what have you, um, you can continue to persist. And, you know, against all of the American military advantages, a rump regime in Iran is continuing to persist. And so that's I I think you're you're absolutely right. It cuts both ways uh as well. Well, look, we we've we've covered a lot of ground. I think um over the next uh 12 months, you know, what what things should policy makers be thinking about and what what should the public be thinking about uh in terms of going about improving our munitions capability and capacity? >> Yeah, I the first thing I would watch for are further expenditures. you know are does this hole get deeper and that's very uncertain at this point and whether we trip another uh line red line uh will be important but what would be another red line well one red line now is are munitions inventories a consideration in setting policy the answer apparently is yes comes up at the war cabinet meetings u but another red line would be If the US in uh trying to uh husband munitions, ballistic uh missile defense, uh let one through and that cause casualties. Uh that would I think crystallize this problem in a way that just numbers uh don't. So I'm watching both of those uh uh both of those things. The other thing I would mention is that this is not a money problem anymore. We put a lot of money in. The Biden administration put some money in. The reconciliation bill put a lot of money in and then the 27 budget would put a lot more in. So adding money at this point doesn't really help a lot. What you need are contracts. And that would be my question to you. How are we doing on contracts? >> Yeah. The short answer is we're not doing very well. There have been a couple of contracts announced over the past couple uh couple months uh that are basically in pursuit of that uh big munitions ramp. I think PAC 3 there was a actually there was an award this past week uh for PAC 3 that is substantial by the US Army. Uh the problem is that the the heads of agreement, the agreements to agree for all of these prioritized munitions on this MAC list, the munitions acceleration council list, um in the 2026 appropriations when when Congress passed 26 appropriations this January, uh there's a little line in the report language saying, "Hey, we know when we're fully aware that this 26 appropriations is 28.8 8 billion with a B short of what the Pentagon asked for for uh for just for the munitions ramp just that. So we we entered um OAF we we started Epic Fury in that $29 billion hole. Uh now they've probably moved some money around, but there's a number that's floating on the hill right now for a supplemental of about $21 billion for munitions. that would maybe get us back to the ramp um rate plans before the war. There's not uh anything near I think the the funds even in that for the replenishment of what we've shot off. So unfortunately there have been a couple of contracts but mostly just heads of agreement. And the reason there the reason that is is there can't really be the contracts unless there's the money. And so I I I hear what you're saying. It's more a time problem and other factor problem than money. It's also a money problem and we need to have the money uh appropriated in order to do the contracts unfortunately. Uh having said that, we've seen the stalling. Uh Secretary Hath is on the hill today talking about this exact topic, but we've seen the stalling for the supplemental and the prospects of reconciliation. What are we up to? 3.0 and 4.0 uh is not looking good before the uh the lame duck session after the election. So I think that's um it's it's it's it's it's problematic. I'll also say you know um there is and you mentioned the lowcost uh cruise missile. I think that's again a a real win and I think a very positive development. We're talking about drone dominance and these like on that front I do see the department doing some some very positive steps. But I also think there's there's more potential for let's just say advanced manufacturing. And I toured a facility last week in Southern California that is no kidding 3D printing uh missile bodies and they're getting on contract to 3D print missile bodies. That's cool. That is a a potential step function uh in terms of production rates that's you know not just doing more of the same. I mentioned all the the new facilities being built more more efficient facilities being built in Arkansas and other places. Uh but it's things like that that are uh very give you a little bit of optimism uh amidst all the reasons for be pessimistic. Well, why don't you close us out, Mark? >> Sure. Um I will tell one little story and then uh we'll wrap this up. The little story is an irony. Uh the Iranians have been using their Shahed series, you know, Shahed 136s. Um the Iranians gave those sold those to Russia and then Russia built a plant >> and then the United States copied it in its Lucas drone. >> So the irony is that Iran developed a drone that both the Russia and the United States have copied >> ostensively. Um the US Lucas cost less than the original Iranian uh the OG. I don't know if that's true or not, but that was a news report. So, >> great. Well, why don't we wrap this up? We've come to the end of our time. Let me give a few uh perspectives. Historically, munitions have received far less attention than the platforms that launch them. Uh now, uh they've jumped to the top of the priority list. And indeed, the status of munition inventories has become a driver of national policy, as we discussed, reportedly being a major factor in the administration's decisions about whether to conduct additional bombing. Inventory depth is going to be a consideration in every conflict and skirmish in the next half decade. The rebuilding process has begun, but it will take years. that it will succeed only with sustained commitment from Congress, the Pentagon, and industry alike. CSIS will continue to track munitions inventories and what they mean for the nation. This is Mark Canian and Tom Carico from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Thanks for joining us. [music]