Seth Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies talks about the US military’s ability to launch extended strikes in Iran and Iran’s ability to retaliate.
Emily Kwong, Host:
Practically speaking, how long can the US continue trade strikes with Iran? According to an estimate, about a week. A 2023 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies warned that a war with a major power could deplete some US munitions stocks. Now, with US strikes likely to extend for a few days, we called Seth Jones. He is the author of that report and chair of the Department of Defense and Security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Welcome to All Things Considered.
Seth Jones: Thanks, Emily, for having me.
Kwong: You wrote this report a few years ago. Is your assessment still the same, thinking about what’s happening now?
JONES: Well, the report focused on the challenges facing the US industrial base. One week’s particular focus will be on some of the key munitions the US needs for a war in the Taiwan Strait, such as long-range, anti-ship missiles, for example, or JASSMs, extended-range missiles. In the war we’re seeing in Iran, it’s a little different. The US is not using some long-range, anti-ship missiles. But in some areas like air defense systems – THAADs, Patriots…
Kwong: Right.
JONES: … the US will almost certainly begin to feel some pain on ammunition inventories. Just one data point about this – in 2025, the US military fired a quarter of all its THAAD missiles in a few days of operations against Iran. So we have already gone through a part of the last year.
Kwong: Not every American knows this. So the question, too, does Israel’s involvement in these strikes change in any way your assessment of what the US can do here?
JONES: Well, Iran – sorry – Israel has its own arsenal of weapons – offensive missiles, drones and air defense systems. But the reality is that neither Israel nor the United States has enough ammunition, offensively or defensively, for a war that could really last from weeks to months. This is…
Kwang: How long can it last based on…
Jones: It depends…
Kwang: …ammunition availability?
Jones: Yes. It depends on the type of missiles. – A good example, the US used, for example, GBU-31s. These are smart bombs. There is quite a large collection of these. But it’s the big ones like the GBU-52 – these are massive ordnance penetrators, bunker busters. These are in very short supply and come from B-2 stealth bombers. So the US has to choose what kind of munitions it can use in that case.
Kwang: So the US defense budget in FY ’25 was $2 trillion. That’s a lot of money. How can the US spend so much on defense and face the prospect of running out of ammunition stockpiles?
JONES: Well, if you look at the comparison of the procurement budget to what it’s spending on weapons right now — versus, say, the Reagan administration — it’s spending a significant amount less. And the US spends a lot of its defense budget on TriCare, a welfare system for servicemen and women. So the defense budget as a whole goes to various expenses.
Kwong: Right. Army is more than weapons. All people in service.
Jones: Exactly.
Jones: Yes. What do you know about Iran’s ability to continue hitting US targets? Do you know anything about it?
Jones: Yes. So there is a range of estimates that by mid-2025, Iran will have about 3,000 ballistic missiles, about 400 missile launchers and, later, a considerable number of drones, including Shaheds. These are one-way attack drones. In fact, the Russians used them in Ukraine. The challenge in assessing it now is that it is now a major focus of US and Israeli strikes. So the big question, or a big question, is how much damage have they actually done to Iran’s missile arsenal? I know going into the plan of this…
Kwang: Yes.
JONES: …US and Israeli planners were going to use that as a key targeting point for the first part of the campaign, and that’s what they did. And again, the question, how much …
Kwang: Yes.
JONES: … did they damage those missiles?
Kwang: Iran has responded so far by attacking US and Israeli military targets across the Middle East, as you said, but can Iran reach the continental US?
JONES: The only way Iran, at this point, can reach the continental US is if it can pull off some sort of terrorist attack by Iran’s proxy forces, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard’s global paramilitary force, or Hezbollah. That’s probably, at this point, the only way Iran can really pull off an attack inside the US, and we’ve seen it before. I mean, there was a big plot twist in Washington, DC a decade ago among the biggest DC restaurants. So there have been some threats. There were threats against President Trump during the election campaign. So it’s really a big consideration within the US homeland.
Kwang: Are you worried about that?
JONES: I mean, I think the target is the Iranian regime. Its leader has been killed. I think at this point the Iranians will do anything to fire back, be it missiles or this kind of asymmetric attack. So I think…
Kwang: Yes.
JONES: …at this point, frankly, anything is possible.
Kwang: There are allies that depend on America for protection. I’m thinking about Ukraine. I’m thinking about Taiwan. Will a depleted US stockpile put those allies at risk?
Jones: That’s a very interesting question. The US has war plans for North Korea, Russia and China. And the more it uses in this Iran war — the Tomahawks, for example, or some of these big bunker busters, these MOABs — it will be less for deterrence, and if deterrence fails, any kind of activity in Ukraine to support in Taiwan or elsewhere.
Kwong: That’s Seth Jones. He is the Chair of the Department of Defense and Security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Thanks for talking to us.
Jones: Thank you.
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