Dwindling Weapons Stocks Forcing US to Cancel Weapons Sales to Allies

 

Hegseth Just Sent an Alarming Message to the Rest of the World
Fred Kaplan
Fri, April 24, 2026 




Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called Estonia’s defense minister on Monday with some bad news: Because of its own needs in the war with Iran, the Pentagon would have to delay delivery of six units of a high-tech weapons system that Estonia had contracted to buy from the United States government.

The weapon is the Army’s High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, each of which can fire six rockets or one missile at ranges of up to 185 miles. The United States had signed the contract to sell these weapons back in 2022, after they’d proved their worth in Ukraine. The first launchers were delivered last year, with the U.S. Embassy in Tallinn calling the purchase “one of the most significant capability upgrades in Estonian military history.”

But now, according to a story in Stars and Stripes, Hegseth informed his Estonian counterpart that delivery of the munitions—the rockets and missiles that fit into the launchers—will be delayed at least until the war with Iran is over, perhaps for longer still.

The implications of the delay are staggering on several levels.

First, the Pentagon’s civilian leader is telling a NATO ally—a tiny front-line nation whose military budget totals 5.4 percent of its GDP—that its defense needs to take a back seat to a war instigated by President Donald Trump, whose purpose has never been explained (in part because it has no real purpose).

Second, other allies, many of whom have been buying American-made weapons for decades, can infer from this slap in the face that they should start looking elsewhere, because the U.S. government cannot be relied on to keep its word—even when codified in a legal contract.

This is already beginning to happen. Largely as a result of Trump’s open indifference or hostility to NATO, the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, and Germany have been talking for a while about buying each other’s weapons rather than continuing to rely heavily on the United States.

Now even Estonia, one of America’s most loyal allies, is moving away. “This delay will not help out deterrence very much,” Stars and Stripes quotes Estonia’s defense minister, Hanno Pevkur, as saying. If the delay goes on much longer, Pevkur adds, “we would certainly have to review our decisions” about where to go shopping for armaments.

This holds enormous economic, as well as geopolitical, consequences. U.S. arms sales to foreign countries last year totaled $331.18 billion. In many cases, foreign sales offset a large share of the costs that the U.S. armed services incur in buying the weapons for their own arsenals.

Hegseth’s call highlights another gasp-worthy consequence of the war: the extent to which a mere 39-day bombing campaign against Iran—a country that is far from a major military power—has depleted America’s stocks of crucial weapons.

According to a study released this week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the U.S. military used up more than half of its pre-war inventory for four of the seven types of weapons that it calls “key munitions” for fighting a war—and it will take, in some cases, more than four years for the stockpile to be replenished.

Though the study was released a few days before news reports of Hegseth’s phone call to Estonia, it helps explain the secretary’s panic. A key example cited in the study is the Precision Strike Missile, the main munition of the HIMARS rocket system that Hegseth held back from delivery to our NATO ally. The U.S. military had 90 of these missiles before Trump started bombing Iran. During the five and a half weeks of war, it fired off 40 to 70 of them. (The study’s estimate is based on published sources; hence the imprecise range.) The study concludes it will take 46 months—nearly four years—for manufacturers to refill the U.S. inventory.

Similarly, the U.S. had 360 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense systems before the war started. In shooting down Iran’s ballistic missiles, U.S. service members fired off somewhere between 190 and 290—52 to 80 percent—of them. Rebuilding those stockpiles should take 53 months.

The military used between 1,060 and 1,430—between 45 and 61 percent—of its 2,330 Patriot air-defense missiles, which will take 42 months to replace.

In other, slightly less extreme cases, the military fired more than 1,000 of its 3,100 Tomahawk cruise missiles, more than 1,000 of its 4,400 armor-piercing Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles, between 130 and 250 of its 410 SM-3 air-defense missiles, and between 190 and 370 of its 1,160 SM-6s. The Tomahawks will take 47 months to replace, the SM-6s will take 53 months, and the SM-3s will take 64 months.

The study notes that the situation is not quite as dire as the numbers make it seem. Some of these weapons can be replaced by far cheaper, slightly less capable systems that the U.S. possesses in large quantity. However, for a few of the weapons—the Patriots, THAADs, and SM missiles, which are adept at shooting down short-to-medium-range ballistic missiles—there are no good substitutes.

It’s breathtaking to examine these numbers. The U.S. military budgets since 2020 have added up to more than $5 trillion. Yet its arsenal is facing such drastic shortfalls in some of its most critical weapons! How could this be?

A few lessons can be learned from this grim tale.

First, we should have been buying—and now need to buy—many more of these basic munitions.

Second, the Pentagon needs to find companies that, in lightning-fast contracts, can build weapons of this sort—artillery rockets, medium-range missiles, and air-defense weapons—for much, much lower prices. (It’s crazy to fire multimillion-dollar air-defense missiles at drones costing a few thousand dollars.)