The number is 850. That’s how many Tomahawk cruise missiles the United States has fired at Iran in roughly thirty days of war. Each one costs about $2 million. Each one is irreplaceable in the short term. And the Pentagon is running out. The U.S. military entered Operation Epic Fury with an estimated 3,100 Tomahawks in its inventory. One month in, a quarter of the entire stockpile is gone. Officials at U.S. Central Command have begun using a word that sends chills through any operations officer: “Winchester.” In military slang, it means you’re out of ammunition. This is not a theoretical problem for some future conflict. It is happening now.

The Math That Keeps Generals Awake

Here’s the problem in one sentence: America fires Tomahawks at a rate of roughly 28 per day but builds them at a rate of roughly one every four days. The annual procurement rate before the war was about 90 missiles. The Navy’s FY2026 budget request asked for just 57. Nobody anticipated burning through a quarter of the national stockpile in a single month against a single adversary. One Pentagon official told the Washington Post that the number of Tomahawks remaining in the CENTCOM theatre was “alarmingly low.” Another said the military was approaching Winchester for its regional supply. The implication is stark: if the war escalates or a second crisis erupts — say, in the Taiwan Strait — the cupboard may be bare.

Raytheon Scrambles to Scale

RTX — the parent company of Raytheon, which manufactures the Tomahawk — recently announced a framework agreement with the Defense Department to surge production to 1,000 missiles per year. But ramping up a precision weapons production line is not like turning up a dial. It takes time to source components, train workers, and qualify new suppliers. Even at 1,000 per year, it would take nearly a year to replace what has been fired in a month. And that assumes every missile goes to replenishment rather than being consumed by ongoing operations. The Tomahawk has been in service since 1983. It has been modernised repeatedly — the current Block V variant can hit moving ships and be retargeted in flight — but the fundamental constraint is industrial capacity. The defense industrial base was sized for peacetime procurement, not wartime consumption.

What Happens If They Run Out

The Tomahawk is not just a weapon. It is a planning assumption. Every air tasking order, every strike package, every escalation option in the CENTCOM commander’s playbook assumes Tomahawks are available in quantity. They are the opening move in any major strike — launched from ships and submarines hundreds of miles from the target, suppressing air defences before manned aircraft enter the fight. Without them, the Air Force and Navy would need to put more pilots over defended airspace, accept higher risk, or reduce the tempo of strikes. None of those options is attractive when the adversary has ballistic missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles, and an air defence network that has already downed American aircraft.

The Iran war is proving what analysts have warned about for years: the United States has a munitions problem. The stockpiles were built for deterrence and for short, sharp interventions. They were not built for a sustained campaign against a peer-level air defence network. Thirty days in, the bill is coming due. Sources: Washington Post, CBS News, The War Zone, Military Times, 19FortyFive