WarTalk: Out of Ammo for Real + Are CCAs Dumb?

**Jordan Schneider** (0:00)
Hey, Jordan. Good morning.

**Bryan Clark** (0:02)
Good morning.

**Jordan Schneider** (0:03)
How you doing? So I'm gone for the next three Fridays, so we're going to have a little August recess.

**Bryan Clark** (0:12)
That's good.

**Justin McIntosh** (0:14)
It really matches up with Congress, which is good. Yeah, exactly.

**Bryan Clark** (0:16)
We should follow their schedule.

**Jordan Schneider** (0:18)
Yeah, I think that's all right.

**Justin McIntosh** (0:19)
Then we would never produce an episode. We would constantly record, but never actually release.

**Bryan Clark** (0:25)
That's right. Lots of activity, little performance.

**Justin McIntosh** (0:29)
Jordan would just be out there all the time. It's coming. The next episode is coming.

**Jordan Schneider** (0:32)
It's going to be great. Should we do, let's do Iran in like two minutes, and then we'll talk about Asia things.

**Justin McIntosh** (0:44)
Can we add in that we're chasing leakers again?

**Bryan Clark** (0:50)
Oh, yeah.

**Justin McIntosh** (0:52)
Just for like, it doesn't need to be a super big one, but like that's becoming the new stomping talking point on the hill about the munitions stockpiles. There's no issue, but the leakers who are leaking it, that's right, they should go to jail.

**Bryan Clark** (1:07)
This isn't exactly, this is not really a thing. We have plenty of munitions, but by the way, the people that are talking about this should be prosecuted.

**Justin McIntosh** (1:16)
Says the guy who puts an Atlantic reporter in. A top secret signal chat.

**Bryan Clark** (1:23)
That's right. I don't know. I've never talked to that guy before. I know I possibly had his signal ID in my contacts list.

**Justin McIntosh** (1:30)
So Bryan, just talk us through the munitions piece, like where we're at.

**Bryan Clark** (1:34)
Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. So we've been at war for now six months, and because we didn't want to put forces at risk because we didn't really get buy-in from everybody, that this war was a good idea and go to execute it. We've been using our high-end munitions, so long-range munitions like Tomahawk and Lrasm, and Jassm-Er to try to go after these targets in Iran. So they allow us to keep our ships and our aircraft farther away from the target, and keeps everybody safer. Now, of course, those munitions were designed really to go after the Chinese threat because we anticipated having some big war with China in the future, so we've been stockpiling them in an effort to be prepared for that. But now we've expended almost all of them, apparently, in the war in Iran. So Tomahawks, for example, in the first couple of months of the war, we shot 850 Tomahawks out of a projected inventory of about 4,000, maybe a couple of years ago. So we've used some in the war against the Houthis, and then we used another 850 early on in this war. And we're probably down to a couple thousand or less Tomahawks in an inventory, which means you really can just... So if a fleet includes 100 surface combatants that carry 30 or so Tomahawks apiece, you don't even have enough to fill out the fleet that we currently have, much less any reloads that might be necessary. And that's if you use every weapon in the inventory. So Tomahawks alone are just basically at the very bottom of their inventory. And then Jassms, I gather the joint air, the joint anti-ship strike missile, and then Lrasms, which is a different variant of it, long-range air to surface weapon. They are both essentially at zero inventory.
Atacms, so the Army's launched essentially all of its Atacms. So the advanced tactical ground-based munition that's being replaced by PrSM.
They've used essentially all of it.

**Justin McIntosh** (3:34)
They've also fired almost all the Prisms. Right.

**Bryan Clark** (3:36)
And we fired all the small number of Prisms that we're going to be, that we're using to follow on from Atacms. So we've expended the inventory of all these preferred long-range munitions because we've been trying to keep US forces out of harm's way. And because the Iranians have taken advantage of precision weapon technology and air defense systems, it's no longer an easy proposition to go in and drop bombs on them. We can't just drop gravity bombs and have it be a low-risk operation. So we're now at the point where we don't have any of these standoff munitions, which means not only can we, we can't continue the fight against Iran at the scale that the president wants to, we also are not prepared for any conflict elsewhere, especially against China.
And then on the air defense side, we've burned through the entire military those.