The defense of Taiwan is often discussed in terms of political will and force posture, but the analyses on this page insist on a narrower, harder question: whether the United States would have enough munitions on hand to sustain the fight wargames project. That question turns out to be entangled with other demands on the same stockpiles, including costs already incurred from the Iran war, and with surge capacity that may or may not scale in time. The result is a set of pieces that treat munitions not as a footnote to strategy but as a possible hard constraint, comparing formal wargame findings against the looser claims circulating in public commentary.
munitions shortfall estimates · replenishment timelines · Iran war stockpile costs · wargame consumption projections · surge capacity and sustainment · wargame findings vs. public commentary
The three headline figures the public debate treats as knowable — exact remaining U.S. munitions stocks, total Iran war cost, and Taiwan contingency munitions demand — sit on three different points of the reducibility…
Estimates for rebuilding U.S. missile stockpiles after the Iran war run from about two years to more than four, and the widely cited think-tank timeline does not restore Tomahawk inventories until late 2030 or 2031.
The documented Iran-war depletion and the multi-year replenishment estimates for THAAD and Tomahawk are the strongest-anchored facts in this debate and point toward a genuine, non-trivial reduction in near-term U.S. magazine…
The published wargame literature converges qualitatively — across at least two independently designed and adjudicated exercise series (CSIS's 2023 wargame and CNAS's 2022/2023 wargames) — on the finding that specific…
The true scale of the interceptor and long-range-missile drawdown available for a Taiwan contingency is unknowable from the open record because the Pentagon classifies exact inventories, and the two best public estimates…
The core, well-supported finding — that key U.S. long-range standoff and anti-ship munitions such as LRASM and JASSM would deplete within days to about a week of high-intensity combat in a Taiwan Strait scenario, based on…
The evidence supports treating the CSIS wargame findings as a credible, convergent directional signal that a real munitions sustainment problem exists in specific weapon categories, but it does not support treating the…
CSIS wargaming projected the full ~450-round LRASM inventory would be expended in under a week of a Taiwan air campaign — and as of April 2026, real-world Operation Epic Fury consumption against Iran had already cut…
CSIS wargaming, House Select Committee simulation, and DoD budget records consistently identify LRASM, JASSM-ER, and Tomahawk as munitions most likely to be exhausted early in a Taiwan Strait contingency.
A Taiwan Strait wargame turns a set of chosen assumptions about invasion timing, force levels, and weapons performance into simulated attrition numbers through repeated turn-based combat resolution — and every number it…
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