12 August 2026

This week, multiple news outlets reported key munitions used in the US war with Iran had heavily depleted US stockpiles, including of Patriot interceptors and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSMs). President Trump roundly rejected these reports, posting online that “the U.S. has massive amounts of ‘munitions,’ especially of certain types” and threatened “long term jail sentences” for leakers of this information.

Yet recent analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said that the United States has depleted roughly 50% of its inventory of missile interceptors like Patriot, THAAD, and almost all of its land-based PrSM strike missiles since the war began. And USSC Research Fellow Tom Corben highlighted the compounding factor of years of below-target production rates in analysis earlier this year. For Patriot missiles in particular, CSIS estimated the US inventory before the war with Iran was 3,100 and now sits at 800. Corben’s analysis showed a current estimated production rate of only 600 Patriot interceptors per year, though the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin have since taken steps to increase Patriot output, including announcing a new framework agreement last week that will boost Patriot production.

The Washington Post reported that members of the administration said that Trump turned his ire on Secretary of War Pete Hegselth, because the President thought the munitions issue “had been fixed.” While the Trump administration calls these reports “FAKE NEWS,” their focus on ramping up missile production to provide “the weapons our warfighters need at the pace the threat demands” indicates a clear sense of urgency regarding the scale of the problem. The Pentagon’s Deputy Secretary issued a memo to industry leaders last week calling for plans to “drive significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules and/or increased production for critical capabilities.”

It’s not just in the Middle East where these challenges are being felt. A new report released today by the USSC analyses the consequences of these developments for integrated air and missile defence cooperation between Australia, Japan and the United States in the Indo-Pacific. Trilateral cooperation on munitions supply chain initiatives and co-development, sustainment and production of key integrated air and missile defence capabilities could offer one of the strongest solutions to US and allied industrial base limitations.

Ultimately, whatever the US solution to its munitions production challenges, those decisions will have ramifications across the globe, and US allies and adversaries alike are watching closely.

Lead image: A US Army air defence artilleryman conducts maintenance on an MIM-104 Patriot missile system in the Middle East, 1 June 2026. Source: US Army

"The 'leakers' of these treasonous statements are being hunted down. Long term jail sentences will be sought!"

President Trump on Truth Social | 6 August 2026

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Report excerpt: Southeast Asian Approaches to US-China Tensions and Possible Responses to a Taiwan Conflict

A recent major research report co-authored by USSC Director of Foreign Policy and Defence Dr Lavina Lee and Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Dr John Lee published by the Hudson Institute Washington DC and supported by the SP Grants program of the Australian Department of Defence examines how Southeast Asian maritime countries think about deepening US-China competition and how they might respond to a conflict over Taiwan.

This is an excerpt of Chapter 1: The strategic mindset of Southeast Asian states.

In the American and Western tradition, proactive statecraft is defined as shaping the strategic environment to render it more favourable to a nation’s interests and values. However, the Southeast Asian notion of statecraft tends to be quite different, with many in the region starting from the premise that their nation, and Southeast Asia more generally, structurally lacks agency to influence strategic outcomes. In other words, shaping the external environment is not the object of statecraft. In fact, it is treated almost as an externality or independent variable, with the structure essentially given or imposed and not affected by other variables that Southeast Asians can manipulate.

Hence, proactive statecraft does not involve shaping the emerging regional hybrid order to Southeast Asian states’ liking, but maximising the rights, privileges, and gains they can extract from the hybrid order while managing risks and minimising threats. As a result, these smaller Southeast Asian states do not always focus on which principles or systems they prefer but on positioning themselves best to negotiate rights, privileges, and gains from the two great powers, regardless of what principles or systems are on offer—and to manage risks and threats in the process.

How Southeast Asian nations hedge and balance against China’s disruptiveness and assertiveness is therefore not always the most important question; rather, it is how they hedge and balance against China’s disruptiveness and assertiveness and US demands. Southeast Asians argue that just as some elements of Chinese policies and behaviour should be countered and constrained, some elements of US behaviour should as well. Indeed, they believe that the US attempt to prevent the partial emergence of a hierarchical authoritarian order is futile and could be as dangerous and disruptive to the region as assertive Chinese behaviour.

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