The Daily Populous Friday March 6th, 2026 night edition
Authored by foreignpolicy.com and submitted by foreignpolicymag

Utilizing a proprietary Payne Institute open-source ledger and data-scraper tool that breaks out minerals and materials from demand scenarios, our team—drawing from the technical expertise across the Colorado School of Mines—conservatively identified the number of Iranian missile launches and drone attacks across the Middle East during the first 36 hours of the conflict.

The first 36 hours of the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran consumed more than 3,000 precision-guided munitions and interceptors, exposing a critical vulnerability in the supply chain. Much is unknown about the future of the war and its wider implications, but one thing is clear: the need to replenish munition stockpiles.

Iran’s launch of more than 1,000 munitions across the region prompted numerous intercept attempts by U.S., Israeli, and allied forces. As the Soufan Center has indicated, “Iran appears to be pursuing an asymmetric war of attrition focused on exhausting U.S., Israeli, and allied defensive resources.” The minimal use of Iranian air defenses is likely due to U.S.-Israeli superiority in electronically suppressing and physically destroying most of Iran’s air defense and command-and-control infrastructure.

Yet while the interceptions have been largely successful, they are also costly. The expended munitions, and the minerals required to build them, are a defense-industrial problem for the West, and especially the United States. Our calculations of U.S., Israeli, and allied expenditures show that the United States relied on a familiar mix: standoff strike missiles for early waves, suppression weapons against radars, ground-launched rockets for time-sensitive targets, and large volumes of precision-guided bombs. Israel’s arsenal shows a preference for the practical: large runs of guidance kits and air-launched munitions that can be produced in quantity, married to aircraft that can generate relentless sortie rates.

Add in regional partner defensive shots, and the result is a striking picture of high-end combat that is as much about volume as it is about elegance. Precision has not removed mass from war. It has simply moved mass into the parts of the weapon you cannot see.

The purpose of this analysis is to translate the conflict’s opening phase into an urgent signal of the need to ensure munitions availability—recognizing that this initial assessment cannot be immediately extrapolated for the future of this conflict. This raises a simple question that strategists and defense planners often forget: How quickly can the West refill its arsenals?

While emergency supplemental funding is required, it cannot instantly reverse decades of consolidated production lines and atrophied mineral processing capacity. It is constrained by time, chemistry, and industrial physics. The input of missiles is not just money; it’s a supply chain that starts with minerals, processing, and sub-tier capacity that does not surge on command.

The concern of U.S. Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about a lack of American munitions prior to the attack drove our Payne Institute research team to focus on this very issue. These concerns are not new; U.S. Navy operations in the Red Sea have already highlighted that missiles are being expended faster than they can be replaced, straining an already taxed defense industrial base.

Every weapon fired needs replacement, and creating that replacement requires a chain running from raw material, through refining and processing, into specialized components, and finally into certified production lines. The bottlenecks are not always in the places politicians think. The narrowest points are often in obscure corners: a sub-tier supplier with a single furnace; a capacitor supply dependent on a narrow set of inputs; a rocket-motor ecosystem that cannot expand without years of plant construction.

Even supposedly simple munitions depend on complex chains. For example, modern guidance kits for munitions are dependent on high-performance components that can only be made from rare earths, a market that China dominates. The West’s industrial base can surge some things such as raw material orders, contract awards, or funding authorizations quickly. It cannot conjure trained labor, qualified tooling, and certified production capacity overnight.

Defense planning, however, still behaves as if inventories are a rounding error. Deterrence is discussed in terms of posture and platforms, yet adversaries are watching a different set of indicators. They want to know how fast missile magazines and munition stockpiles get emptied and whether they can be refilled logistically in a timely manner.

In a world of simultaneous pressures, a prolonged campaign in the Gulf does not merely shape events there; it eats into military options elsewhere. A force that has burned deep into its interceptor stockpile must accept more risk in another theater or ration its defenses.

This is a polite way of saying the American military should be hoping the next salvo with Iran is smaller—and that China won’t do the math to figure out what is left of American precision-guided munitions to defend Taiwan. This is highly problematic; a 2023 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies determined, based on a series of war game simulations, that the U.S. military would run out of key munitions within a week of trying to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion.

That is why the first 36 hours of operations against Iran matter. They are a stress test of Western industrial endurance. A campaign that forces defenders to spend interceptors at a rate that outruns replenishment is not just tactically demanding; it is strategically corrosive.

Using another proprietary Payne Institute tool, we converted the munition expenditure in Table 2 into a mineral replacement burden, expressed in kilograms of the most strategically exposed inputs. Table 3 identifies the critical materials required to replenish the weapons expended. Our recent research has demonstrated how these are some of the most defense-critical minerals, which are difficult to source in peacetime—and almost impossible in a crisis.

Replacing what was expended requires not just more production on an abstract scale, but significant amounts of specific minerals and materials for which China controls most of the supply. Beyond the quantities involved, there are numerous issues with the concentration of processing, long timelines for capacity expansion, and the fragility of sub-tier suppliers.

Beyond the sheer volume of munitions, the loss of high-value assets introduces another layer of complexity. The destruction of two advanced U.S. radars, the AN/FPS-132 in Qatar and the AN/TPS-59 in Bahrain, highlights a problem where the total weight of the “mineral bill” is less of a concern than the extreme fragility of the supply chain and the extensive timelines for replacement.

Per our analysis, for the AN/FPS-132, it will take five to eight years for Raytheon to build a new radar at a cost of $1.1 billion. Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin will require at least 12 to 24 months and an estimated $50 million to $75 million to replace the AN/TPS-59, based on the original Bahrain Foreign Military Sales contract adjusted for inflation. The biggest issue for the defense industrial base will be sourcing the 77.3 kilograms of gallium needed for both systems, a material for which China controls 98 percent of the global supply. This is not to mention the 30,610 kilograms of copper that will also be needed, a commodity facing surging demand from the technology sector.

The broader point is that the West’s theory of military readiness is incomplete. As the long conflict in Ukraine has already illustrated, war is being costed in the wrong units. The relevant metric is not merely how many launchers there are at the start of the war, but how many precision weapons and interceptors can be fired on days two, 20, and 200, and how quickly industry can replace them. This turns a battlefield question into an industrial one, and an industrial one into a minerals-and-processing question. Table 4 illustrates the daunting timelines for replenishing these critical weapon systems.

Individual bottlenecks slow down this replenishing. The BGM-109 Tomahawk, for example, depends on the F107 turbofan, solely produced by Williams International. Patriot PAC-3 production is split between the United States, Gulf partners, and Poland, which began producing PAC-3 MSE launch tubes at the WZL-1 facility in 2024. Some systems, such as the Popeye Turbo (also known as Crystal Maze II in its extended-range variant), are legacy assets being drawn down from a finite stock. Others are critically strained: Only around 25 GBU-57 MOPs have been produced to date, with Boeing as their sole assembler. The weapon is currently certified for delivery only by the B-2 Spirit—a fleet of just 20 airframes. The B-21 Raider will provide an additional delivery platform but will not reach operational status until 2027. The THAAD system requires a bespoke kill vehicle, which has no commercial analogue. All of these convoluted production processes are dependent on critical minerals that cannot be surged.

The mineral bill is the price of deterrence, and this is just the opening price. It cannot be waved away with press conferences, social media posts, or even congressional hearings. The West’s most sophisticated weapons are also its most dependent on long, complex supply chains, and the limiting factor in future conflicts will be the capacity to reload. The duration of the campaign against Iran now hinges on a critical question: Can the West replenish its arsenals fast enough for its strategy to matter?

SuperNewk on March 5th, 2026 at 23:29 UTC »

The issue is lifespan. We need to constantly use up munitions and replenish with new. Sure you can keep something 15-20 years but the upkeep is a lot. It’s cheaper to fire it then just build another

JeSuisKing on March 5th, 2026 at 20:36 UTC »

America sure has the pointiest sticks. The rest though...

foreignpolicymag on March 5th, 2026 at 16:32 UTC »

The first 36 hours of the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran consumed more than 3,000 precision-guided munitions and interceptors, exposing a critical vulnerability in the supply chain. Much is unknown about the future of the war and its wider implications, but one thing is clear: the need to replenish munition stockpiles.

Utilizing a proprietary Payne Institute open-source ledger and data-scraper tool that breaks out minerals and materials from demand scenarios, our team—drawing from the technical expertise across the Colorado School of Mines—conservatively identified the number of Iranian missile launches and drone attacks across the Middle East during the first 36 hours of the conflict.

Written by Macdonald Amoah, Morgan D. Bazilian, and Jahara Matisek