The first 36 hours of Operation Epic Fury and Israel's Operation Roaring Lion consumed over 3,000 precision-guided munitions and interceptors, according to a new analysis that lays bare the sheer scale of modern high-intensity combat and the industrial burden it creates.
As reported by "Hvylya", researchers from the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines have compiled a detailed open-source ledger of munitions expended during the opening phase of the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran - and the picture it paints is sobering for Western defense planners.
The U.S. offensive alone accounted for over 900 munitions, including 210 JDAM bombs, 120 Tomahawk cruise missiles, 90 HARM anti-radar missiles, and 70 JASSM standoff weapons. Israel fired more than 600 munitions, led by 280 Spice guidance kits and 140 smart bombs. On the defensive side, the U.S. expended over 330 interceptors, while Gulf partners burned through 280 Patriot and THAAD rounds defending their own territory.
The researchers said "precision has not removed mass from war" - it has "simply moved mass into the parts of the weapon you cannot see." The core problem is not just the volume expended but the supply chains needed to replace it. Most of these weapons depend on critical minerals where China dominates global production, including 98 percent of the world's gallium and roughly 80 percent of tungsten.
The strategic implications extend well beyond the Middle East. A 2023 CSIS war game concluded that the U.S. military would run out of key munitions within a week of defending Taiwan from a Chinese invasion. The authors warned that this is "a polite way of saying the American military should be hoping the next salvo with Iran is smaller - and that China won't do the math to figure out what is left of American precision-guided munitions to defend Taiwan."
Emergency funding alone cannot fix the problem. As the researchers said, the input of missiles "is not just money" but "a supply chain that starts with minerals, processing, and sub-tier capacity that does not surge on command." The bottlenecks often hide in obscure corners: a single furnace at a sub-tier supplier, a capacitor dependent on a narrow set of inputs, or a rocket-motor facility that cannot expand without years of construction. A force that has burned deep into its interceptor stockpile faces a replenishment timeline measured not in weeks but in years.