|
War On Iran: Exorbitant Munition Spending + Lack Of Success = Iran Is Winning
There are a few new numbers out on munitions availability on either side of the conflict.
The Washington Post says (archived) that the U.S. has fired some 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles onto Iran. The total available stock of Tomahawks is somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000.
But the limit for the use of these long reach weapons is elsewhere. The missiles are usually fired from U.S. Navy vessels. They have limited loads of up to 72 Tomahawks each. When those are expended the vessels need to leave the scene to go to a friendly harbor for reloading. (Reloading large missiles at sea has been tested by is still in its infancy.)
The 16 or so destroyers and submarines the U.S. has around the Gulf are by now mostly ‘Winchester’, i.e. out of Tomahawk missiles to fire. But they can no leave the scene yet as their air-defense capabilities are still needed to take on Iranian missiles.
Air-defense missiles are also lacking. As the British Royal United Service Institute (RUSI) reported three days ago:
[O]ver a dozen munition types have been expended by the coalition at a rate that appears to be unsustainable. Already, Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger noted on 19 March that global stockpiles are ‘empty or nearly empty’ and that if the war continues another month ‘we nearly have no missiles available’.
…
Given that Iran has damaged at least a dozen US and allied radars and satellite terminals, the efficiency of interception decreases; using 10 or 11 interceptors for one missile or 8 patriot missiles for one drone becomes unsustainable.
…
[T]he US military is approximately a month, or less, away from running out of ATACMS/PrSM ground-attack missiles and THAAD interceptors. Israel is in an even more precarious spot, with its Arrow interceptor missiles likely to be completely expended by the end of March. While the war could proceed with other munitions, this implies accepting greater risk for aircraft and tolerating more missile and drone ‘leakers’ damaging forces and infrastructure.
RUSI provides some tables and background on the industry difficulties to replenish the stockpiles.
On the other side of the equation is the damage the USraeli campaign has done to Iran. Over 10,000 ‘targets’ have been hit but the main aim of defeating Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities is, despite President Trump’s claims, still far from being reached:
The United States can only determine with certainty that it has destroyed about a third of Iran’s vast missile arsenal as the U.S. and Israeli war on the country nears its one-month mark, according to five people familiar with the U.S. intelligence.
The status of around another third is less clear but bombings likely damaged, destroyed or buried those missiles in underground tunnels and bunkers, four of the sources said. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity given the sensitive nature of the information.
One of the sources said the intelligence was similar for Iran’s drone capability, saying there was some degree of certainty about a third having been destroyed.
…
The intelligence stands in contrast to President Donald Trump’s public remarks on Thursday that Iran had “very few rockets left”.
If one compares the numbers of attacks per day the USraeli side has a large advantage. It is currently flying some 300 missions per day dropping bombs and missile on Iranian targets. Iran is firing about 30 to 40 missiles per day. The question though is the quality of such strikes. The USraeli side has from the very first day on targeted civilian infrastructure like schools and medical clinics while the Iranian side has attacked military and military-industrial installations.
Today the USraeli strikes hit Iranian steel plants in Khuzestan and Mobarakeh near Isfahan. Iran announced that it will hit back at similar installations in Israel and the Arab Gulf states. It is this ability to retaliate that is protecting Iran from the potentially most devastating attacks.
Iran’s position is giving it escalation advantage.
The editors of the Iran-hating Economist acknowledge this when they urge the U.S. (archived) to accept that it has no way to win this war:
In short, for all the power and sophistication of the military onslaught from America and Israel, Iran feels it has the upper hand over Mr Trump. It has shown that it is more capable than America of both inflicting pain and withstanding it. Mr Trump launched his war, unforgivably, without offering a strategic rationale for it. Despite operational successes and his nonsensical claim of having already changed the regime in Tehran, he has yet to win any substantive gains from the fighting. As the political costs mount, Mr Trump will come under growing pressure.
…
Mr Trump must agree to a full ceasefire, and compel Israel to abide by it. Talks on reopening the strait and steering Iran away from its nuclear programme will be bitterly difficult. And any eventual deal will be worse than what could have been struck before the war began, because Mr Trump has unwittingly strengthened the hand of hardliners and made clear the leverage they have over the strait. The result is that for now, at least, the advantage lies with Iran.
Trump might of course chose the alternative and escalate the war. But the prospect of doing that are no better than the current position.
Meanwhile U.S. allies are suffering from the war the U.S. has started. Australia is in an especially bad position. While it is producing and exporting crude oil it is depending on imports of petroleum products from Asia. As these are no longer available it has to buy diesel and gas from other sources which are extraordinary expensive:
Transit times from the US Gulf Coast to Australia stretch to 55–60 days, with freight costs around $20/bbl, compared with typical Asia-Pacific routes that stood at $5–6/bbl before the crisis. The price dynamics of regional products briefly blurred that disadvantage: on March 18, delivered gasoline and diesel from Singapore and Houston converged at roughly $161/bbl. As of March 25, Singapore cargoes look more attractive again — around $153/bbl versus $164/bbl from Houston. But pricing is no longer the decisive factor. The issue has shifted to physical availability. With unsold cargoes in Asia increasingly rare, the US – despite longer routes and more expensive freight – might become the only reliable way out of this imports’ deadlock for Canberra.
Global crude oil supplies are still shrinking. U.S. gas and diesel prices are still increasing. One wonders how long it will take for Trump and the U.S. to prohibit all exports of petroleum products. That will be the moment when Australia will awake to the real value of its alliance with the U.S. of A.
Sergey Poletaev in RT
Posted by: Princess Bodica | Mar 28 2026 2:52 utc | 381
That’s an interesting quote. The RT comparison between the war with Russia and the war with Iran has some force. In both cases the West committed itself to war on a gamble. We expected the Russians to fold at once under our Shock and Awe sanctions; and we expected the Iranians to fold at once as a result of our Shock and Awe initial attack.
Those were our plan A’s and we had no plan B’s ready. In both cases we thought they wouldn’t be needed. In the Iranian case we see Trump himself nonplussed that plan A hasn’t worked. Failure wasn’t supposed to happen, he’s saying, and he’s now at a loss because it has.
So both attacks, the sanctions war on Russia and the Blitzkrieg attack on Iran, were what the soldiers call shit or bust operations. In more elevated terms, both wars were gambles we had to win because the consequences of failure were catastrophic.
Scarcely needs saying on “b’s” site of all sites, but there was another feature both wars had in common. Western equipment turned out to be not up to the work demanded of it, neither in quality nor quantity. Western generalship, both at the strategic level and at the operational level, turned out to be defective. The Ukrainian war was run by NATO generals, often micro-managed by them, and those NATO generals screwed up at every possible opportunity. Such disasters as the Summer Offensive, Krinky, and Kursk demonstrated that pitilessly.
The incompetence demonstrated in the Iranian war equals that. “Let’s park our undefended troops and ground radar right next door to the enemy” isn’t what a Jomini or a Svechin would have regarded as operational art. Though since I know even less of “operational art” than the chair polishers of the Pentagon or Brussels – is that possible? – I’d go for a more homely comparison. Not even the village idiot would have done some of the things our Generals did in either war.
So the RT comparison between the Ukrainian war and the war with Iran has some force. It’s not, however, entirely a foursquare comparison.
The writer in the RT comparison seems to be aware that in the case of the Ukrainian war, Russia could not afford to ignore the threat posed by the Kiev forces on the LoC. Had the Russians just let things take their course in early ’22 then amongst other consequences there’d have been ethnic cleansing in the Donbass. That would probably have put paid to the Putin administration – many Russians already thought Putin was too “soft” in the Donbass – and would have led to the destabilisation of the RF.
On the other hand, any pre-emptive military move by the Russians to avert the threat of the Kiev forces getting into the Donbass must inevitable have led to the western “sanctions from hell”. . As it did. And those sanctions from hell were no joke for the Russians. Although they failed in the event, at the time even hard-boiled realists like Sleboda were reckoning on very severe economic and financial disruption.
Not good choices for the Russians and in the run up to February ’22 we see Putin casting around until the very last moment, attempting to avoid either of those choices by continuing to try for Minsk 2. That was the Russian plan A, with a devastating plan B ready to go in the background, a plan B we’ve been watching play out ever since. Actually, being Russian, probably with plans C,D, E etc ready too, depending on which way the cat jumped. But the main thing here is, the Russians did have various options open to them when responding to Western aggression in Ukraine.
That’s where the RT comparison breaks down. The Russians always had options. There was only one option ever open to the Iranians. Fight with all they had because if they didn’t immediate destruction awaited them.
And the comparison also breaks down when we consider the respective positions of Russia and Iran now. Russia still has the option of finessing the final outcome of the Ukrainian war. The Russians aren’t too bothered about how they stop the use of Ukraine as a Western attack dog, just as long as they get to stop it one way or the other. The Iranians do not have the luxury of alternative options. They have to put paid for good to Western power in the ME. They know very well that if they don’t, we’ll be back for more later.
The RT comparison fails another way too, on the all important PR side.
We talk grandly of “the West” or “the US” or “Brussels” as if we’re looking at monolithic entities. We’re looking at no such thing of course. We’re looking at a relatively small coterie of politicians, interest groups, and factions in control of the political, administrative and military power centres of the West.
That control goes for nothing unless those various Western politicians gain the acquiescence, if not the support, of the masses of people they are governing. That can only be done by ensuring the climate of opinion is in their favour.
In the case of the Ukrainian war that was ensured. A vanishingly small number of people in the various Western electorates knew what the true position in Ukraine was. We most of us believed, and still believe, that that war resulted from a Russian dictator seizing the chance to re-establish the old Soviet or Tsarist empire. There were none I knew, England or Germany, who believed otherwise. There were none I knew who did not believe we should therefore be resisting that Russian dictator with all our might. The coterie of Western politicians therefore had the enthusiastic support of the greater part of the various populations they governed.
Not so in the case of the Iranian war. When it came to the preliminaries to the two wars, very few of us knew, as one example, of the ultra atrocities during the ATO. Unless you kept away from the screens entirely, all of us knew of the atrocities in Gaza. When it came to the start of those wars, few of us knew of the true position on the LoC in February ’22. In ’26 all of us knew that the West had mounted a violent attack on Iran during peace negotiations.
The PR climate is therefore entirely different in the two cases and whereas in ’22, most of us were clamouring for the Russians to be hit with all we had, in ’26 many (including a component of Trump’s MAGA base) are dead against the Iranian war. There is also increasing concern across all the electorates of the West about the resources we are putting into that war and about the economic blowback on us.
For though the politicians and interest groups pay no attention to whether we are fighting a “just war” or not, most ordinary members of the public do. In ’22 we believed, almost all of us, that we were fighting a just war against the Russians. Now, few believe we are fighting a just war against the Iranians. It is that alteration in the PR climate that renders it inevitable that if they hold steady, the Iranians will win. I suppose the Iranians could always end up inhabiting a radioactive wasteland, but that itself would be no victory for our elites.
Posted by: English Outsider | Mar 28 2026 15:55 utc | 758
|
