WASHINGTON, D.C. – In a testimony to Congress, a top U.S. military official said that the United States may not have enough Tomahawk defense missiles for a potential long-term conflict.
According to Justthenews, the U.S is quickly depleting its stockpile of missles due to its recent usage of them in strikes against the Houthis terrorist group in Yemen. Acting U.S. Chief of Naval Operations James Kilby issued a stark warning about the shortage of torpedoes and anti-ship missiles.
During his testimony, he suggested that the Department of Defense (DoD) should seek out manufacturers who can build similar weapons to use as replacements while the country rebuilds its stockpile. During the House Appropriations Committee hearing Kilby said, “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. So, our stocks need to be full.”
He noted that exercises in the Red Sea have “highlighted the strain on our munition industrial base” in the U.S. He added, “Precision-guided, long-range munitions like Tomahawk, Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, and heavyweight torpedo, all those ammunitions we need to increase production on.”
He continued, “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.”
Oklahoma Republican Rep. Tom Cole, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said 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 that the missile shortage shows the U.S. has a manufacturing problem.
Burlison recently said on the John Soloman Reports podcast, “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.
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 percent of the world’s GDP. That’s how we won the great wars.”
He said that now the U.S. manufactures 11 percent of the world’s GDP while China manufactures 40 percent. Burlison said, “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.”
Back in November 2024, Responsible Statecraft published an analysis about the rapidly depleting missile stockpiles in the U.S. According to that analysis, “…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. And, speaking of our supply of ship-based missiles, as of February 1, 2024, the U.S. Navy had used at least 100 of its standard series class missiles in the Red Sea.”
