Lawmakers sound alarm about U.S. military shortage of defense missiles: 'Wake-up call'

In jarring testimony, a top U.S. military official told Congress this past week the U.S. is quickly depleting its stockpile of Tomahawk defense missiles and might not have enough for a potential long-term conflict.

The military has been using these missiles recently in strikes against the Houthis terrorist group in Yemen.

Acting U.S. Chief of Naval Operations James Kilby issued a warning about shortages of torpedoes and anti-ship missiles. 

Kilby suggested the Defense Department should seek out manufacturers who can build similar weapons to use as replacements while the U.S. rebuilds its stockpile.

"If we go to war with China, it's going to be bloody and there's going to be casualties and it's going to take plenty of munitions," Kilby said during a House Appropriations Committee hearing on Wednesday. "So our stocks need to be full."

Kilby noted that exercises in the Red Sea “have highlighted the strain on our munitions industrial base" in the U.S.

“Precision-guided, long-range munitions like Tomahawk, Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, the heavyweight torpedo, all those ammunitions we need to increase production on,” he said.

“But I’m also of the mind that we need to look at other vendors. They may not be able to produce the same exact specifications, but they might be able to produce a missile that’s effective, which is more effective than no missile,” he added.

Oklahoma Republican Rep. Tom Cole, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, warned that any conflict the U.S. might get involved in would have to be short-term because "we don't have enough munitions to sustain a long-term fight."

Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., said the missile shortage shows the U.S. has a manufacturing problem.

"We have been hostile to our manufacturing sector through our crazy energy policies and crazy EPA regulations and OSHA, right? We've driven so much manufacturing overseas, and that's what Trump has recognized, and it has now become a national security issue," he said on the John Solomon Reports podcast.

"We won World War II. When we started World War II, we didn't have the biggest Navy, we didn't have the most tanks, but we manufactured ourselves there, because we were the country that was producing manufacturing 60% of the world's GDP. That's how we won the great wars," he added.

Burlison said now the U.S. manufactures 11% of the world's GDP while China manufactures 40%.

"This should be a wake-up call, and this is why I'm focused on bringing back, doing everything we can to reinvigorate the manufacturing sector in the United States," he said.

In November 2024, Responsible Statecraft published an analysis about the rapidly depleting missile stockpiles in the U.S. 

"Moreover, while our proxy war on Russia has strained our resources, an outbreak of hostilities with China could easily increase the burn rate of our ship-based missiles by an order of magnitude over what we have been seeing in the Middle East," read the analysis. "And speaking of our supply of ship-based missiles, as of Feb 1, 2024, the U.S. Navy had used at least 100 of its standard series class missiles in the Red Sea."

Brent Sadler, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation who is a 26-year Navy veteran, said the missile shortage dates back many years.

"It goes back over 10 years when I was at Pacific Command, now Indo-Pacific Command, and it was General Mattis when he became Secretary of Defense Mattis during Trump's first term, he classified all the discussions, so the public has been kind of obscured from understanding how bad it is, but it's only gotten marginally better," Sadler said on the Just the News Not Noise TV Program. 

"And I think we saw that with the artillery problem with the 155 rounds that we couldn't produce fast enough to supply to Ukraine," he added.

Sadler said there was a "wake-up call" in Israel when the U.S. helped defend against an Iranian attack in October. He said ballistic missiles that normally take about one month to produce were "expended within minutes" on that one engagement.