Nearly every solid-fuel missile in the American arsenal depends on ammonium perchlorate - and the entire U.S. supply comes from one factory in Cedar City, Utah, a vulnerability the Iran campaign has thrust into sharp relief.

As reported by "Hvylya", a Payne Institute analysis of munitions expended during the first 36 hours of the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran found that replenishing the stockpile requires 124,040 kilograms of ammonium perchlorate - a solid rocket oxidizer critical to nearly every missile the U.S. fired, from Tomahawks to THAAD interceptors.

The sole U.S. producer is AMPAC, operating out of Cedar City. There is no backup facility, no second source, and no rapid path to building one. The researchers identified this as one of the "narrowest points" in the defense supply chain - the kind of bottleneck that politicians rarely see because it hides "in obscure corners" of the industrial base.

Ammonium perchlorate is far from the only single-point-of-failure. The Tomahawk's F107 turbofan engine is produced solely by Williams International. Only around 25 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators have ever been built, with Boeing as the sole assembler. The THAAD kill vehicle has "no commercial analogue." The researchers said these "convoluted production processes are dependent on critical minerals that cannot be surged."

Modern guidance kits illustrate the layered nature of the problem. They depend on "high-performance components that can only be made from rare earths, a market that China dominates." The West's industrial base, the researchers said, "can surge some things" quickly - "raw material orders, contract awards, or funding authorizations." What it cannot conjure is "trained labor, qualified tooling, and certified production capacity overnight."

The researchers described the mineral bill as "the price of deterrence" and warned that it "cannot be waved away with press conferences, social media posts, or even congressional hearings." The West's most sophisticated weapons, they concluded, "are also its most dependent on long, complex supply chains, and the limiting factor in future conflicts will be the capacity to reload."

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