War in Iran is Chewing Through American Missile Stockpiles

Tom Karako (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

Tracy, I think we're roughly maybe a little bit less than two weeks into the war in Iran. We are recording this March 12th, 2026 And there are, of course, an extraordinary number of questions about the timing and the duration of the war. We know already that the economic impact has been quite significant, particularly if you just look at commodity markets. But one of the questions that sort of may help determine timing or outcome, I guess, you know, when we talked about this in the after the war in Ukraine started, wars are about supply chains in large sense. And quite obviously, wars are about size and scale of the arsenals and how fast they can be replenished.

Tracy Alloway (1:05)

Right. Two things I know. War is logistics and also war is a racket. And the only reason I know that is because I just literally downloaded the book. So I'll know more about that in a second. But you're absolutely right. I do not like talking about war or conflict or military stuff in general. But I do enjoy talking about supply chains. And there's one crucial supply chain that we haven't really discussed in detail ever before. But it keeps coming up more and more in this conflict.

Joe Weisenthal (1:31)

Yeah, that's right. So obviously, you know, you see these numbers and I don't know how real they are, but they're extraordinary, you know, that's like. Iran can launch an attack against a military base and an innate nearby country, etc. So I'll just talk about the extraordinary efficacy of cheap drones and so forth. And then you hear about the extraordinary cost of missile defense.

Tracy Alloway (1:54)

Right. So putting on our old international relations hats.

Joe Weisenthal (1:58)

Yeah.

Tracy Alloway (1:59)

A lot of what we used to study was this idea of asymmetric warfare, right? And the classic examples that would come up would be guerrilla warfare, where you have a less well-equipped army that is engaging in exhausting skirmishes against a better-equipped, larger army, and it's a way of offsetting their own weaknesses against the strengths of another force. Nowadays, we don't really have that kind of ground conflict, knock on wood, but you're seeing it, some people say, play out in this arena of missiles, which is really where all this conflict is playing out, is in the missile space. So you hear these stories about like, Iran is launching these drones that cost, I think $25,000 a pop for some of them, or putting mines in the Strait of Hormuz, which are also very cheap relative to some other tactics. And meanwhile, you hear things like, well, the UAE's missile defense system costs like millions of dollars per pop, literally per pop against a drone. And meanwhile, the US is firing interceptor missiles or whatever that cost, again, millions and millions of dollars.

Joe Weisenthal (3:05)

Yeah. And you hear, and again, the math, the sort of missile math seems very lopsided. And then of course, the question is just the pure numbers. And how many do you have? And what is the capacity to ramp up production, et cetera? All huge questions that are-

Tracy Alloway (3:20)

Where do missiles actually come from?

Joe Weisenthal (3:23)

Where are they made? That's right. Anyway, we have a ton of questions and we don't have the answers, but we're going to learn a lot. We have the perfect guest, someone who knows about this intimately, someone who focuses on this entirely. We're going to be speaking with Tom Karako, Senior Fellow and Director of the Missile Defense Project at CSIS, and he's going to walk us through all of this and how to think about the supply chain of these armaments. So Tom, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Tom Karako (3:47)

Hey, great to be with y'all.

Joe Weisenthal (3:49)

Thank you so much. What do you tell us, just to begin, what do you do? What is the focus of your work?

Tom Karako (3:53)

CSIS, Center for Strategic International Studies, I would say is the main defense think tank in Washington, DC. It's been around since I think the 60s in the Cold War. And within CSIS, there's sort of the department that focuses on hard power, focus on defense department centric things. And within that, I run the Missile Defense Project. And so basically think mud to space, UAVs, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, space sensors, everything in that window, both offense and defense, is what my team kind of studies, writes about, comments upon, and hosts just a lot of events and commentary.