Missile inventories have become a focal point in the ongoing US-Israel military confrontation with Iran. The Alma Research and Education Center estimates Iran’s ballistic missile count has fallen from 2,500 at the beginning of the conflict to around 1,000, and US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has pointed to the almost “complete destruction” of Iran’s missile industry and stockpile.
But according to US intelligence, Washington can only confirm that roughly a third of Iran’s missile arsenal has been destroyed by late March. Israeli officials, meanwhile, have blended depletion estimates with expectations of rapid recovery by warning that Iran could produce 8,000 ballistic missiles by 2027, while Russian and Chinese missile imports have further upended clear estimates about the true scale of Iran’s remaining arsenal.
Iranian officials do not publish precise totals, but insist their arsenal remains intact and safely underground. American officials have been similarly guarded about their own munitions.
As operational strains emerge, outside estimates, such as those from the Payne Institute, suggest that a third of US THAAD interceptor missiles had been spent by late March, and it could take years for the stockpiles of interceptors to be completely replenished.
According to government insiders, roughly 25% were already estimated to have been used in the June 2025 Iran strikes. Acknowledging shortages could embolden Tehran and expose the limitations of US missile defense policy, which is designed for short, high-intensity conflicts rather than prolonged engagements.
Partial and anonymous disclosures of munitions do not provide a definitive accounting, and missiles are just part of this pattern. It accompanies decades of disagreement over Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles and widely cited figures that contest Iran’s breakout period to build a nuclear weapon.
Israel has, meanwhile, embraced nuclear ambiguity through a longstanding policy of neither confirming nor denying its arsenal stockpile, thereby avoiding nuclear oversight while preventing attacks. Estimates by other countries, like those referenced in the British House of Commons, provide some insights into the subject, filling the gap.
Yet figures on weapons stockpiles produced by governments, think tanks, or open-source analysts are widely filtered and often distorted before reaching the public. They are used to deter enemies, reassure domestic audiences, secure allied support, or justify increased military spending or policy changes.
Rather than being neutral, they function as messages of statecraft, employing exaggerated or selective claims to advance political interests.
Ammunitions distortion
Governments have inflated military strength for centuries, with ancient states regularly overstating military power and troop sizes, when the use of simpler weapons limited the extent to which facts could be obscured.
That began to change with the rise of centralized state power under Napoleon Bonaparte, whose wartime bulletins became a template for state-backed deception. He projected overwhelming strength, but his opponents had little ability to accurately track supply lines or reserves, boosting domestic morale while confusing enemies.
The rise of industrial warfare in the mid-1800s further exacerbated this situation. Mass conscription, coupled with large-scale production, created militaries with vast, poorly understood stockpiles. Governments could misrepresent capability and supply, while even their own planning struggled to keep up with the scale of industrial warfare.
Naval powers maintained deliberate obscurity around shipbuilding programs, helping fuel the arms race, and in the lead-up to World War I, intelligence failures meant major powers consistently misjudged each other’s capacity.
It also became harder to define what counted as a weapon. During World War I, the British ship RMS Lusitania was carrying munitions and had defensive armaments for the Allies, but after its sinking by Germany, it continued to be presented as a purely civilian ship to shape public opinion.
In World War II, Nazi Germany underestimated Soviet munitions production and reserves, contributing to a postwar tendency in the U.S. to assume worst-case scenarios. The perceived “bomber gap,” highlighted after the 1955 Moscow Aviation Day, suggested the US had fallen behind in strategic bombers. It was followed by “missile gap,” with estimates later being revised downward by US intelligence. While a supposed “tank gap” took decades to disprove.
As Greg Thielmann, formerly part of the Arms Control Association, noted, “When estimates provide a range of possibilities—entirely reasonable from an analytical standpoint—the highest (or lowest) numbers in the range can be emphasized for political reasons.”
Former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev took this argument further, stating that “the number of missiles we had wasn’t so important… The important thing was that Americans believed in our power.” Numbers were fabricated to achieve deterrence through perception rather than expensive missile production.
Political weapons claims
Wars based on weapons claims have not disappeared. In the lead-up to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, American and allied officials presented what they described as irrefutable evidence of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
Flawed intelligence and selective interpretation helped mobilize public and political support for the war, and by the time it became clear that such stockpiles didn’t exist, the invasion had evolved into a prolonged occupation.
While geopolitical motives were clear, economic incentives also shaped the narrative. A decade before the invasion, the so-called “last supper” meeting brought together Pentagon officials and major defense firms, encouraging consolidation as post-Cold War spending declined. The number of major contractors shrank from more than 50 to just five by the early 2000s, leaving a small, powerful group well positioned to benefit from renewed military demand after 9/11.
Now larger and more integrated, defense contractors could play more influential roles in shaping public narratives. The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, formed to build public support for the invasion—including about Iraq’s stockpiles—was headed by Bruce Jackson, a former vice president at Lockheed Martin.
Another reason not to take weapons data at face value is that even self-assessment is unreliable. The complexity of modern military systems made up of global supply chains, maintenance cycles, and sprawling bureaucracies makes accurate accounting difficult. A 2023 US Army audit found its own spare parts estimates were frequently incorrect, indicating that estimating an adversary’s wartime stockpiles is even less dependable.
The debate over weapons stockpiles to distort public discourse can also backfire. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq left lasting skepticism, making later US claims about chemical weapons in Syria harder to sustain politically.
More recently, the war in Ukraine has provided a steady stream of claims about munitions that are difficult to verify. Ukrainian shortages of artillery shells, air defense systems, and missiles are well-documented.
But Ukrainian public appeals often emphasize urgency in ways that also serve to pressure Western governments at crucial times. These shortages reflect real constraints and political choices about production and allocation.
Western countries have also been forced to reassess their own stockpiles. Germany, for example, found its weapons inventories were smaller or less operational than expected, prompting renewed investment.
German firms like Rheinmetall have since invested billions domestically, and in several EU countries, to increase 155-millimeter shell production from 70,000 in 2022 to 1.1 million by 2027, signaling its intention to meet demand, but perhaps more importantly, to signal Germany’s return to sustained military buildup.
Some Western equipment sent to Ukraine was also already slated for retirement. Transferring it reduces maintenance, storage, and disposal costs, while inflating perceptions of available supply and further complicating any realistic accounting of stockpile strength.
Russian figures are no clearer. Its officials have pointed to vast inherited Soviet-era reserves to sustain the war, but much of this equipment has degraded after decades of neglect. At the same time, external support, such as artillery from North Korea, alongside stronger-than-expected domestic production of tanks, aircraft, and missiles, has offset losses in ways that outside estimates have struggled to track.
Russian claims about Ukraine developing bioweapons with the backing of the US, and the counterclaims that followed, have spread through media and diplomatic channels. Doing so has helped undermine trust in the Biological Weapons Convention regulations and shown how quickly arms control and estimates can unravel when facts are contested.
“Over the past decade, Russia has stepped up its disinformation campaigns to erode trust in arms control across the nuclear, chemical, and biological domains. The new era of rapidly disseminated disinformation poses significant challenges to US national security and, more specifically, to arms control verification and compliance,” states the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Evidently, munitions numbers are subject to constant change. Estimates are revised and contradicted, while often being impossible to verify. Because static figures on how many weapons a country has can rapidly lose meaning, there is little reason to expect accurate public information about munitions or stockpiles in war or in peace.
States continue to have incentives to exaggerate strength, hide weaknesses, and justify spending, making public debates over munitions largely misleading. Production can jump or collapse, and entire categories of weapons can become more or less relevant as a conflict evolves.
The rise of mass-produced drones and 3D-printed weapons has further reduced the importance of official stockpiles promoted by leaders or media. Claims about munitions should therefore be read as signals instead of facts, which are meant to shape perception instead of reflecting reality.
John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and is republished with kind permission.
More proof that the West does not deserve to rule anything except its own incredibly dumbed down population. Leave everybody else alone with the Idiocracy. You have ample of that back home at the farm.
When the United States has expended most of its air-defence missiles in the Iran War folly, expect China to deliver an ultimatum to Taiwan, one country two systems, like Hong Kong and Macau, or quickly else.