In a capital where politicians and policymakers often argue one side and then the other, Elbridge Colby has stood out over the past decade for his consistent and often single-minded position that the United States should shift its military and geopolitical world view toward countering the rise of China. Known to friends and colleagues as Bridge, Colby is something of national-defense royalty: his grandfather was William Colby, a legendary C.I.A. director who had served as the agency’s station chief in Saigon in the early years of the Vietnam War. During the first Trump Administration, Colby, then a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, helped devise the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which directed the department to reorient its focus from the Middle East to China (a perennial-but-never-realized staple of U.S. policy since the Obama Administration proclaimed a “pivot to Asia” in 2011). After Joe Biden was elected, Colby continued to argue that the world was returning to an era of Great Power competition, publishing a book, “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict,” writing op-eds, and leading a think tank, the Marathon Initiative, which he had co-founded with the promise to “develop the diplomatic, military, and economic strategies the nation will need to navigate a protracted competition with great power rivals.”

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022, Colby opposed the Biden Administration’s surge of arms, military assets, and munitions to aid the country in its fight. In Colby’s view, Europe needed to take the lead on its own defense, and the U.S. needed to conserve its weapons for China and the Pacific. As he wrote in an op-ed in November, 2022, “This military scarcity confronting the United States is felt not so much in overall number of soldiers or total expenditures, but rather in the critical platforms, weapons, and enablers that are the key sources of advantage in modern warfare—heavy bombers, attack submarines, sea and airlift, logistics, and precision munitions.”

Two weeks after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, Colby retweeted a warning based on comments by Samuel Paparo, a top U.S. admiral, that “conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are eating away at U.S. stockpiles of air defenses.” In December, Colby shared a tweet by Mike Waltz—who was soon to be Trump’s national-security adviser—in which Waltz proclaimed, “President Trump received an overwhelming mandate to avoid the U.S. being dragged into another Middle East war on his watch.” Later that month, Trump nominated Colby as his Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy—one of the Pentagon’s most powerful roles. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called him “the intellectual front man for a wing of the political right that argues the U.S. should retreat from commitments in Europe and the Middle East.”

Last summer, soon after the so-called Twelve-Day War, in which the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran, press reports accused Colby of using his new position to quietly orchestrate a freeze on key weapons shipments to Ukraine—a move that was said to surprise even the White House and which was quickly reversed. (According to a senior Pentagon policy official, last year’s disruption of U.S. aid to Ukraine was the result of “a process foul in the bowels of the Pentagon,” and the reporting that Colby directed—or even recommended—such a pause is “categorically false.”)

More recently, the White House made clear in its National Security Strategy that the Administration hoped to avoid in the Middle East “the ‘forever wars’ that bogged us down in that region at great cost,” and Colby’s office helped drive the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy, which came out in January and highlighted how the U.S. had been focussed elsewhere in recent years as “all the while, China and its military grew more powerful in the Indo-Pacific region, the world’s largest and most dynamic market area, with significant implications for Americans’ own security, freedom, and prosperity.”

Now, with the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran in a fragile and uncertain ceasefire, it’s clear that there was something to Colby’s arguments all along. Despite spending more than eight hundred billion dollars a year on defense, the U.S. is uncomfortably short on key munitions, weapons platforms, and even some ships and planes after six weeks of fighting Trump’s war of choice in the Middle East.

Trump’s Pentagon has made frequent use of Tomahawk cruise missiles—highly advanced multimillion-dollar missiles with the ability to strike targets a thousand miles away—throughout his second term, as part of military strikes conducted in a total of seven countries. Tomahawks were fired at Houthi rebels in Yemen last March; at Iran, during the Twelve-Day War; and at suspected ISIS militants in Nigeria in December. Other reports have indicated that the U.S. may have also used Tomahawks in Syria and Venezuela in recent months. An even steeper toll on U.S. stockpiles, munitions, and weapons systems has been incurred during the latest war in Iran. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C., estimates that the U.S. currently has between three thousand and four thousand Tomahawk missiles. (The exact number is classified.) Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the Washington Post reported that the U.S. used more than eight hundred and fifty Tomahawks in just the first month of the war in Iran—that’s as much as three billion dollars’ worth of a single weapon. Meanwhile, the 2026 U.S. defense budget funds the purchase of only fifty-seven new Tomahawk missiles. “If you’re in China, you are gleefully counting on a little hand clicker all the Tomahawks that are being expended,” Tom Karako, who directs the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. “Iran is not what the Tomahawk is for. Iran is what Small Diameter Bombs—gravity bombs—are for. Thousand-plus-kilometre cruise missiles are for when you have to suppress a wicked thicket of air defenses in China, because you don’t want to fly your bombers in without doing that.”

U.S. interceptor missiles and air-defense systems turn out to be similarly ill-provisioned. Last summer, during the bombing campaign against Iran, the Islamic Republic retaliated against Israel with large waves of ballistic missiles. The U.S. deployed two Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense systems, or THAADs, to Israel, which reportedly fired off more than a hundred and fifty interceptors—roughly a quarter of the number the Pentagon has ever purchased. Lockheed Martin, a defense contractor, previously made about a hundred interceptors a year, each of which cost close to thirteen million dollars. (A full THAAD battery, including missiles and radar, costs upward of a billion dollars.)

The U.S. has only eight THAAD batteries worldwide. At least one of them has been damaged by Iranian strikes in the current conflict, and the U.S. is now moving in components from a system in South Korea, where it had been considered a key part of North Korean deterrence. “The reports of some number of those eight radars being disabled—even if temporarily—ought to really concern you, because those are the kind of things that they’re small in number, they’re really good at what they do, and they’re going to be really important on a bad day with China,” Karako said. “And—oh, by the way—we didn’t have enough of them already.”

A 2023 war game developed by C.S.I.S., and later run for the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, found that, in a conflict with China over Taiwan, the U.S. would run out of key munitions in just a month—and, in the case of one missile, in three to seven days—a worrisome conclusion even before the giant depletion of stockpiles caused by the Iran war. “What we learned, in a protracted war—our defense industrial base does not have the resources it needs to win that war,” John Moolenaar, a Republican House member from Michigan, who chairs the committee, said in an interview on Fox News. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and the vice-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told me that he worries Chinese officials might be watching the U.S. war in Iran and thinking that the strength of the U.S. military isn’t all that they might have imagined. “They have to be seeing some of the full might of the U.S. and Israel, and that Iran is still standing,” he said. “I’m afraid that they may be amazed at the specificity of our ability to target, but it raises the question of our staying power.”

The crisis of American defense production has been slowly worsening since the start of the Russian invasion in Ukraine. “Official Washington added a new word to its vocabulary in the months after February, 2022, and that new word was ‘munitions,’ ” Karako told me. Jon Finer, who served as Biden’s principal deputy national-security adviser, said that the limited ability of the United States to meet the endless need for weapons in the war in Ukraine was the “the most jarring thing that I learned during the entire time I was in government.”

Heavy-duty munitions had long been an afterthought in the “global war on terror,” which prioritized close fighting, special forces, and weapons platforms such as the Predator and Reaper drones. “We adjust our industrial base to the kinds of wars that we are fighting,” Finer told me. “I think we got out of the mind-set where we were ever going to fight a very munitions-heavy war again. That was a bit of a failure of imagination.” At the same time, the nation’s weapons manufacturers—part of what is known inside the Beltway as the defense-industrial base, or DIB—have grown cautious after years of fast-shifting congressional priorities. “If you’re a defense prime, you have basically had to use a Ouija board and a divining rod to try to guess what number of munitions that the government will want to buy two years from now,” Karako said. “These are publicly traded companies—they have to maximize the return for their stockholders—and they can’t, unfortunately, as good Americans, build stuff on spec and hope that the government will show up and buy it.”

The Pentagon has tried to revamp its famously slow and sclerotic acquisitions pipeline. Last summer, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg began leading the newly formed Munitions Acceleration Council, which focussed on rapidly growing the production of a dozen weapons that the Pentagon believes would be key to a future conflict with China—including Patriot interceptor missiles and joint air-to-surface standoff missiles, known as JASSMs. (In early April, before the ceasefire, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. was redeploying stockpiles of JASSMs from the Pacific to the Middle East, a move that would leave around four hundred and twenty-five of the missiles, out of a prewar stockpile of more than two thousand, for the rest of the world.) Later in the fall, as part of what the Department of Defense dubbed an “Acquisition Transformation Strategy,” the Pentagon laid out how it aimed to rebuild the nation’s defense production; one of the main strategies is to give companies “bigger, longer deals, so they’ll be willing to invest more to grow the industrial base that supplies our weapons.”

In September, the Army awarded Lockheed Martin a nearly ten-billion-dollar contract for the production of Patriot interceptor missiles, the largest in the company’s history; in early January, the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin announced a deal to more than triple the production of the missiles, each of which costs about four million dollars, from six hundred to two thousand a year. Michael Duffey, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, called the deal “a fundamental shift in how we rapidly expand munitions production and magazine depth, and how we collaborate with our industry partners.”

On April 3rd, as the war in Iran approached its sixth week, the White House released a budget request for 2027, which called for $1.5 trillion in defense spending—a more than forty-per-cent increase that, by itself, would be larger than any other nation’s annual defense budget. Much of that money would go to increased investments in munitions and missile-defense systems; Trump said that such spending on “military protection” should take priority over funding for health care and other safety-net programs. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things,” he said. “They can do it on a state basis.”

But Iran’s reliance on cheap drones has also exposed the ways in which expensive U.S. systems are ill-matched for many facets of modern warfare. For decades, U.S. war planners had assumed that Iran would be reluctant to fully close the Strait of Hormuz with naval mines because doing so would render it impassable to Iran’s own oil-tanker fleet. But Iran was ultimately able to choke the global economy by enforcing a closure largely with drones aimed at foreign tankers. “The idea of an operation to quote-unquote open the strait is a little bit of a misnomer, because even troops on the coast are not going to do anything about drones fired from apartment buildings, mountains, and whatever else inland,” Finer said. “We never imagined a scenario in which the Iranians were under so little pressure to open the strait for the rest of the world, because they are able to get more of their own product out than they were able before.”

Deborah Lee James, who served as Secretary of the Air Force from 2013 to 2017, told me that she hopes the weaknesses the current war has exposed in procurement systems will help spur a moment of innovation. She noted the former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s mandate for a “crash program,” in 2007, to rapidly manufacture armored troop transports that could withstand the blasts of improvised explosive devices, which were killing and maiming U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defense manufacturers such as BAE Systems and Oshkosh manufactured tens of thousands of mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicles at a cost of nearly fifty billion dollars before the program was ended in 2012. “I think this has now gotten that type of attention,” James said. “This is going to, I hope, be an MRAP moment for the United States when it comes to counter-drone [technologies].”

The Pentagon, though, has continued to project confidence that, despite the past month and a half of fighting in Iran, the U.S. military is still well positioned to deter China in the Pacific. “The Department is laser-focussed on ‘deterrence by denial,’ ” the Pentagon official said. “Our goal is very simply to convince our counterparts that whatever their ambitions are from a military standpoint, they just are not going to be able to achieve them with the kind of confidence they’re looking for—and so they are better off not trying.”

Ultimately, President Xi Jinping’s decision about whether to move against Taiwan will almost certainly be driven by internal considerations—how much confidence he has in his own military leadership, which has faced repeated purges in attempts to root out corruption, and how much progress the military makes in building advanced sea, aerial, and amphibious capability. But some defense analysts believe that the so-called Davidson Window, the period when China could be ready to seize Taiwan, might begin as early as next year—meaning that every missile fired against Iran is a missile unlikely to be replaced by then. “We are vaporizing many billions of dollars of offensive and defensive munitions, specifically the kind that you would want to have in large quantities to deter or fight a war with China,” Karako said. “The biggest danger is that this sets us up for provoking China to do something for which we now have fewer strike missiles and many fewer missile-defense capabilities.” ♦