American missile stockpiles
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American missile stockpiles are, in John Kiriakou's reading, the hard physical limit under the rhetoric of the Middle East wars, and the place where he thinks the United States is most overextended.

Running out

The conventional wisdom in Washington, he says, was that the conflict did not continue in its earlier round "because we were out of Patriot missiles. We're just out of them." When naval assets were moved to the region, there were enough missiles to protect two carrier strike forces, but not to protect them and supply the Israelis at the same time. Production plants, he names Huntsville, Alabama and western Pennsylvania, went into overdrive to close the gap. He makes the same point about the other side of the exchange: a ceasefire was sought, he says, because the Israelis were running low on interceptors.

His assessment of the position now is that nobody in the administration expected the fighting still to be going on, "and we just can't produce these missiles quickly enough."

The two-front problem

Behind the stockpile question Kiriakou puts a structural one. The United States has never been able to fight a two-front war, a lesson he says should have been learned the hard way in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it managed even that at maximum production levels, which it is not at now, with an energy shortage on top.

The consequence he draws is a question nobody has answered: what happens if there is another anti-American attack that has nothing to do with Iran? "How do we protect ourselves? I don't know if they've thought of that."

He connects the production side to the politics of the defence budget: the widgets that go into a Patriot motor are made in small plants in places like Beaver County, Pennsylvania, and their existence in nearly every congressional district is what makes the budget untouchable.

See also

- The Iron Dome
- Pentagon District Strategy
- Strategic patience
- 2026 Iran war
