The United States military has expended more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles in four weeks of combat against Iran, burning through one of its most prized precision weapons at a pace that has alarmed senior Pentagon officials and set off urgent internal discussions about replenishment, the Washington Post reported Friday.

Officials familiar with the matter told the newspaper that the number of Tomahawks remaining in the Middle East had fallen to “alarmingly low” levels, with one official saying the supply was closing in on “Winchester” — military slang for nearly out of ammunition.

Within days of Operation Epic Fury, which began on February 28, U.S. Navy destroyers and submarines launched hundreds of the missiles against Iranian targets. In the opening 72 hours of the war alone, approximately 400 Tomahawks were fired — nearly 10 percent of the total stockpile.

The scale of the drawdown is raising difficult strategic questions that extend well beyond the current conflict. Analysts told the Post that 850 missiles amounted to roughly a quarter of the U.S. military’s total Tomahawk inventory. Yahoo! Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, put the implications bluntly: firing more than 800 Tomahawks against Iran “would leave a large gap for a conflict in the Western Pacific,” adding that “it would take several years to replenish.”

Each missile costs approximately $1.89 million, with an additional $197,091 for the single-use launch canister — bringing the total to just over $2 million per shot. Wionews At that price, the 850-missile expenditure represents a bill of roughly $1.7 billion for Tomahawks alone.

The production pipeline offers little immediate relief. Raytheon, the manufacturer, has historically produced the missiles at annual rates of around 90, though production is now being ramped up to around 1,000 per year. Scaling to meet wartime demand, analysts warn, could still take years.

The Pentagon pushed back on the Post’s reporting. Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said the military “has everything it needs to execute any mission at the time and place of the President’s choosing and on any timeline,” accusing the media of being “obsessed with portraying the world’s strongest military as weak.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has previously declared that the U.S. has “no shortage of munitions” and that supplies would “sustain this campaign as long as we need to.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt similarly asserted there was “more than enough munitions, ammo and weapons stockpiles to achieve the goals of Operation Epic Fury — and beyond.”

Still, the internal alarm reflects a well-documented vulnerability. Heavy reliance on Tomahawks in the Iran conflict will force Pentagon planners into painful choices — whether to relocate missiles from other critical regions, including the Indo-Pacific, and whether to launch an expensive long-term manufacturing surge.

Trump has already moved to address the production gap on the political level. On March 6, the president announced his administration had held a “very good meeting” with U.S. defense manufacturing companies, including Raytheon, and said the companies had agreed to “quadruple production of ‘exquisite class weaponry’ as rapidly as possible.”

The Tomahawk, a long-range cruise missile capable of striking targets more than 1,000 miles away, has been a cornerstone of American military operations since its combat debut in the 1991 Gulf War. Its value lies precisely in its ability to eliminate the need to send pilots into heavily defended airspace — a quality that made it the natural first-strike weapon of choice when Operation Epic Fury began. The question now being debated inside the Pentagon is how long that weapon of choice will remain available at the current rate of use.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)