The United States is running out of missiles. After five months of war with Iran, stockpiles of long-range weapons are so low, current and former U.S. defense officials told us, that they don’t believe the U.S. has enough to combat a threat in Asia. The remaining supplies, depending on the munition, are as low as 20 percent of what the Pentagon would like to have in hand. And stores of sophisticated interceptor missiles, such as Patriots and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles, are too depleted to give or sell the weapons to Ukraine or effectively defend against Iran’s launch of ballistic missiles. Even when troops see Iranian missiles approaching, they are forced to decide in a matter of seconds whether to expend a limited number of interceptors or hope for the best, the defense officials told us.  

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week pleaded with Republicans on Capitol Hill for billions of dollars to replenish America’s dangerously depleted stockpiles of missiles and other crucial munitions. Hegseth’s appeal was nakedly partisan—he ignored Democratic lawmakers entirely—but also long overdue.

The Pentagon this year has awarded tens of billions of dollars in contracts to replenish those arsenals. But signing contracts is not the same as delivering missiles. Those contracts will produce munitions over the coming years, not the coming months. The Trump administration has invested in the defense industrial base to accelerate production, as did the Biden administration, but for crucial systems such as the Patriot, supply is not projected to meet demand until about 2030. Meanwhile, Iran has ramped up production of its offensive drones and ballistic missiles, and enhanced their capabilities. The war is now being shaped as much by industrial supply and logistics as by economic considerations and the politics of the midterms.

President Trump raged at the assessment his national-security team gave him at Camp David on Friday, which showed that the U.S. military was running low on the munitions that would be necessary for Trump to order an escalation against Iran, a senior administration official familiar with the meeting told us. If the U.S. were to strike, Tehran would likely launch a barrage of missiles and drones against its neighbors in the region and the American bases they host.

The president barked at aides and had some pointed words for the Department of Defense’s leadership. (He is not presently considering staff changes, a White House official told us.) Trump has grown frustrated at his inability to escape the stalemate of the war; he’s seething at its toll on the economy and is desperate to move on. In a post on Truth Social earlier today, Trump said that reports of munitions shortages were false and that such “leaks” were treasonous. Manufacturers are shipping “large amounts” of munitions “as needed,” he wrote.

[Read: This may be Trump’s biggest error in the Iran war]

White House aides are concerned that Trump is losing his leverage in the conflict. He has threatened Iran many times but has rarely followed through; Tehran knows that. Tehran also knows that the U.S. is running low on munitions despite what Hegseth and the president say in public. Military leverage depends not simply on the U.S. ability to strike but also on its capacity to defend against Iran’s retaliation. Iran has displayed the confidence to further test the U.S., attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The White House has maintained that Iran would soon face an economic situation so dire that the regime would be forced to negotiate, and U.S. intelligence reports suggest that Iran is struggling. But the Trump administration has been surprised at Tehran’s resilience, and is no longer certain that the regime will reach the point where negotiation is its only option.

In the five months since the war started, the president has never faced such a weak position. The shortage of interceptors makes escalation dangerous. Nor would expanded strikes guarantee that Tehran will come back to the table.

That may leave diplomacy and concessions as the administration’s least risky option. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have repeatedly said that Iran will never be allowed to control any part of the Strait of Hormuz. But Trump is now considering a deal that gives Iran some control over maritime traffic. The proposed agreement between Oman and Iran, pending U.S. and Gulf approval, would reopen the strait by establishing a jointly managed framework for commercial shipping. Such a deal would give Iran the oversight of the crucial waterway it feels it has earned from the war, while also honoring Oman’s insistence on preserving freedom of navigation.

America’s stockpiles have been under strain for years, but became painfully clear after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The U.S. military fired hundreds of missiles, some costing millions each, during the Trump administration’s 53-day campaign last year against the Houthis in Yemen. That was followed by nearly two weeks of U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran and the interception of Iranian missiles and drones aimed at Israel. During the first 38 days of the Iran war, the U.S. launched thousands of munitions.  

Hegseth has repeatedly denied any shortage, including to Trump as recently as last week, one U.S. official told us. On Capitol Hill, the defense secretary did not make a compelling case for the funding he wants, particularly to legislators who face tough reelections partly because of the war’s unpopularity. Between American voters’ frustrations with rising gas prices and Hegseth’s mixed messages and past combative relationship with Congress, “there is no goodwill for the department here,” one congressional aide told us.

[Read: A tragedy in Iran might persuade Hegseth to change course]

Still, Congress is ultimately expected to provide much of the funds the Pentagon says it needs to replenish its stores. But what the U.S. really needs is time. Depending on the weapon, replenishment to prewar levels could take as long as five years, Mark Cancian, who tracks munitions stockpiles for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., told us.

Another three years would get stockpiles “to a level where the joint staff and U.S. commanders in charge of the Asia Pacific would be comfortable,” Cancian said. In theory, that gives Beijing plenty of time to take advantage of American shortages with, say, an invasion of Taiwan.

“Claims of U.S. munition shortages are false,” and the amplification of them is irresponsible, Sean Parnell, Pentagon spokesperson, told us in a statement. “We have everything required to strike at the time and place of the President’s choosing.”

The problem predates the Trump administration. After the Cold War, the U.S. reduced the number, and slowed the pace of production, of vital munitions, figuring that long bouts of peace between short, conclusive wars would provide plenty of capacity. But the military has been almost constantly engaged somewhere in conflicts led by missile strikes: Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Nigeria. And Russia’s war with Ukraine has been defined by rapid advances in munitions. The Biden administration signed contracts to replenish Kyiv’s weapons but could not keep up with demand, Cancian told us.  

The U.S. raced to develop cheaper ways to tackle the Iranian-supplied drones that Russia deployed, and has made some progress. But the stores of interceptors such as Patriots and THAADs were rapidly expended. “There are no good alternatives for stopping ballistic missiles,” Cancian told us. “Without these defensive missiles, attacking missiles will land unopposed. That is what is happening in Ukraine.”

Before Russia’s invasion, the U.S. produced roughly 300 Patriot missiles a year, half of which went to allies. Production has since doubled, but badly trails wartime demand.

Had the Iran war been over in a matter of several weeks, as the administration initially predicted, the U.S. munitions problem would not be so dire. And the problem would be mitigated “if we knew when the war will end,” one defense official told us. “The real problem is that there is no long-term strategy—and we can’t plan around that.”

Before the shortages, the U.S. used its technological advantages to shape its strategy. Now the technological advances of its foes—and the strain they have put on U.S. stockpiles—are forcing Washington to reconsider its strategy again, this time without the long-held assumption that U.S. forces would enjoy an advantage in munitions.

Sign up for our newsletter about national security here.

For 2,500 years, military commanders have heeded the injunction of Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military strategist: Know your enemy. Yet the Trump administration’s greatest mistake in the Iran war may be its persistent failure to understand Tehran’s priorities and motivations—and how much punishment the regime is willing to absorb to prevail.

Iran’s decision Tuesday to launch ballistic missiles at U.S. troops in Jordan was a prime example. It befuddled Washington. U.S. officials had come to expect that their actions would drive the war, and Iran would react. But here was Tehran, escalating matters just after the United States had suspended its 13-day barrage of strikes against Iranian defenses and infrastructure. U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for military operations in the Middle East, described the move as a “surprise attack.”

Tehran characterized the missile strikes as self-defense against what the regime saw as the Trump administration’s broadening of the war. Around the same time as the Iranian attack, U.S. and Saudi forces launched joint strikes on Iran-backed militias in Iraq, Riyadh’s first publicly acknowledged military strikes of the conflict. Turki al-Maliki, a Saudi defense-ministry spokesperson, said in a statement that the militias had attacked the kingdom’s oil facilities and that Riyadh reserved the right to respond “at the appropriate time and place.”

This week’s events hardly represented the first time that the two sides had misread each other’s intentions. The convoluted and complicated war has swung almost weekly between peace overtures and fighting. Those misinterpretations appear set to continue, especially amid signs that others may be dragged into the fight. Egyptian officials earlier this week confirmed that a drone had set two gas vessels ablaze at Damietta, a port city on the Mediterranean near the Suez Canal. No group has claimed responsibility, but the attack raised fears that Iran has expanded its list of nations to target.

The memorandum of understanding that Washington and Tehran signed in the middle of last month quickly devolved into one of the war’s signature misunderstandings. The very first clause of the agreement promised to end the fighting, but the two sides had fundamentally different interpretations of their obligations.

The memorandum did not end the dispute over the Strait of Hormuz but rather, it papered over it. Washington believed it had secured 60 days of open, toll-free commercial navigation. Tehran read the agreement as preserving its authority to manage traffic through the waterway. As the dispute erupted, some Iranian officials believed that the U.S. had purposely drafted a vague agreement to trigger a violation that could be used as a predicate to resume strikes, a person familiar with their thinking told us. And the U.S. sought to use financial incentives, such as sanctions waivers and investment, to entice a government that was preoccupied with the assassination of its supreme leader. Was anyone really surprised that the pact fell apart? Certainly not President Trump, who professed that he “couldn’t care less” after each side had walked away.

[Read: War by any other name]

Even before the war began, in late February, the two governments were talking past each other. The U.S. believed that Iran was fragile and the regime susceptible to collapse after nationwide protests. The regime believed that nothing short of its total capitulation to U.S. demands would prevent a war. Trump ordered the war to begin while talks were still under way, and his administration believed that the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on the conflict’s first day would quickly be followed by the collapse of the state. Instead, five months in, the regime remains intact and seems to have enough confidence to endure any U.S. response.

This could put the two sides on a path to escalation, each remaining convinced that more military pressure will force the other to abandon its objectives. “America’s calculation is that escalation would lead to surrender. Iran’s calculation is that escalation would lead to deterrence,” Vali Nasr, a professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told us.

Trump promised on Fox News earlier this week to “beat the fucking shit out of them.” Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, meanwhile, said that the base in Jordan would remain a target because “as long as threats against Iran persist, resistance will persist.” (The Jordanian military said that all five missiles fired Tuesday were intercepted.) But neither side seems able to answer the question that matters most: What if escalation doesn’t work?

Escalation is “a means to an end, but we don’t know what the end is,” Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli intelligence officer who specializes in Iran, told us.

Part of the confusion may stem from the fact that Trump himself appears to be of (at least) two minds about how he wants to proceed. He has vacillated between backing more military action and giving peace talks a chance. The U.S. cannot begin to understand its enemy if it has yet to settle on its own aims—or how to achieve them. Trump has repeatedly sought to back away from the conflict, but during a meeting with senior advisers last Friday, he seriously considered ramping up attacks. He opted not to, but the plans remain on his desk, a senior White House official told us. A pause in U.S. strikes that began Saturday was over by midweek following Iran’s attack on the base in Jordan.

The U.S. is seeking to understand an enemy that is changing and adapting. Iran appears intent on reintroducing the element of military surprise, driven by the belief that it can outlast Trump and that negotiations no longer present a viable path. The regime operates differently under its new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who replaced his late father. Iran is no longer content to let proxies across the region fight for its interests. It wants to use its missiles and drones to fight for its long-term security. And it is willing to endure strikes by the U.S. to the point that American military commanders are running short on viable targets it can hit to stop attacks on the strait.

“They are willing to sacrifice themselves and the public for the future of the regime,” Citrinowicz said. He doesn’t believe that Iran wants to fight an endless war any more than Trump does. But Tehran thinks Trump faces constraints, including the economic damage stemming from the strait’s continued closure and the tepid response of Gulf States. Iran’s position, in contrast, has been strengthened by support from the Houthis in Yemen, who recently began targeting Saudi interests and threatened to close the Bab al-Mandab Strait to commercial shipping. Iranian leaders, Citrinowicz said, “believe at the end of the day, they are able to shape the situation on the ground to their own benefit.”

A number of influential MAGA allies—including Laura Ingraham and Steve Bannon—have publicly and privately called for the White House to rapidly wind down the war, believing that the conflict has demoralized Trump’s base and will hurt the GOP in the midterms. Republicans facing tough reelection fights have expressed fears to the West Wing that an escalation in the conflict would lead to even higher gas prices, which could doom their November chances. Yet at same time, Persian Gulf allies have made clear that they find Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz untenable—especially if the regime charges tolls. That would, in effect, mean that the same countries battered by Tehran’s missiles would be stuck paying for Iran to rebuild.

Perhaps as a result, Washington has lurched among military, diplomatic, and economic strategies, hoping that one, or some combination of them, would compel Tehran to yield. Yesterday, the Trump administration announced a new round of sanctions that aim to put economic pressure on Iran by targeting companies and tankers tied to its maritime trade. The U.S. also hopes that an escalation of military strikes will do enough to tip the regime either into collapse or capitulation. But even the threat of escalation can come with a cost: Brent crude climbed nearly 8 percent after Trump’s profanity-laden remarks, briefly breaking $91 a barrel yesterday.

Officials told us that Trump was noncommittal when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during his Tuesday visit to the White House, urged the president to ramp up attacks on Iran (among the ideas being considered is to strike the land routes that Iran has been using to resupply its forces). Netanyahu expressed deep skepticism that Iran would ever agree to a reasonable peace deal. U.S. officials believe that some factions in the Iranian power structure favor making a deal, but whether they have the authority to do so is not clear. The officials also believe that Iran’s economy will continue to weaken to a point at which Tehran will be forced into a deal.

For now, there are no good options for Trump and there is no clarity as to how two sides in a widening war can find off-ramps, particularly if they continue to misinterpret each other’s actions.

[Graeme Wood: The U.S. is subtly shifting its Iran strategy]

Trump could declare victory, noting that the U.S. and Israel killed the ayatollah, and vow to attack again should Iran resume its quest for a nuclear weapon. Or he could try to return to the terms of the MOU. But the administration would likely have to sign on to some aspects of Iran’s interpretation of it, such as its retention of control of the Strait of Hormuz. Or Trump can escalate, hitting Iran’s missile capabilities to make the targeting of U.S. bases and Gulf partners more difficult. But he would have to do so at a rate faster than Iran can reconstitute its forces. And he faces political opposition to a more prolonged conflict: A CBS News/YouGov poll released earlier this week found that a majority of Americans are not optimistic about the war and feel that its objectives are not clear. More than two-thirds of respondents said the Trump administration should end the war now.

Both sides seem to agree on one thing: There is no end in sight to the war. U.S. defense officials told us that they believe conflict will continue into 2027. Iran is signaling that it plans for a fight even longer than that.

Sign up for our newsletter about national security here.

When President Trump plucked Pete Hegseth from Fox News to be his secretary of defense, Pentagon officials scrambled to get with their new boss’s pugnacious program: Lethality and battlefield swagger were in; “wokeness” and operational restraint were out. Hegseth’s subsequent purge at the Defense Department included the dramatic downsizing of staff dedicated to avoiding civilian casualties in war. They had been part of a military-wide system built up after tens of thousands of ordinary people were killed during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress mandated some of the enhancements. But Hegseth fired or reassigned almost all of the staff working on the program.

Now the Pentagon is considering restoring as many as half of the roles that were cut as the military reckons with the human impact of its five-month, on-again, off-again war with Iran, in particular an air strike in the first hours of the conflict that killed almost 170 people, most of them children, at a school in Minab, in southern Iran. The potential reversal, which hasn’t previously been reported, now awaits Hegseth’s signature.

A Pentagon inspector-general report this spring found that the department’s  deep cuts in civilian-harm protections may have violated laws designed to safeguard noncombatants. Democrats are urging the Defense Department to reverse course. Hegseth’s comments and service history suggest that he will do otherwise. A Pentagon official—who, like other officials, spoke with us on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations—said in a statement that the setup for preventing civilian harm is “currently undergoing a strategic reassessment to inform its future reorganization” and would remain in compliance with congressional requirements, but that no final decisions have been made.

Hegseth, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the National Guard, arrived at the Pentagon early last year with a record of railing against what he characterized as unnecessary shackles on battlefield operators, such as military “jagoffs” (a play on judge advocates general, known as JAGs) and international law. His on-air advocacy for troops accused or convicted of war crimes helped forge his bond with Trump. Within months of his taking office, the Pentagon had slashed the number of total staff working to prevent and investigate civilian-casualty incidents by about 90 percent.

Hegseth brought the same gloves-off mentality to the war in Iran, which remains in a protracted limbo that has crippled maritime commerce and thrust Persian Gulf allies into open conflict with Tehran. “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars,” Hegseth told reporters early in the conflict. “We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.” Trump also has made repeated threats to strike bridges and power plants, actions that under many circumstances could constitute war crimes.

[Read: The forever negotiation]

Hegseth has said that Tehran positions its military assets alongside civilian sites such as hospitals and schools. Iran has also struck apartment buildings and energy facilities across the Gulf and killed at least 18 U.S. troops in the region. But the strike on the school in Minab appears to have been the worst on civilians in a U.S. operation since the Gulf War in 1991. Immediately after, U.S. defense officials professed disbelief that the U.S. military could have hit a school. They wondered whether the Israeli military had done it. Trump suggested that Iran was responsible. But the strike had involved a Tomahawk missile, a weapon Iran does not have. And an initial examination found that although Iran’s military had once occupied the building, that was no longer true. The U.S. government had possessed intelligence about the site’s conversion into a school; that information never made its way to the strike’s planners, defense officials told us.

At the recent G7 summit in France, Trump told reporters that “nobody did that on purpose” and said that the findings of an official Pentagon investigation—the only one of its kind so far in the Iran war—should eventually be released. Hegseth has repeatedly said that the U.S. military does not intentionally target civilians and has promised to make the investigation’s conclusions public, but he has not said when or whether that will include all of the report.

Inside Iran, the death toll in Minab—168—has become a defining symbol of U.S. aggression. State media and government officials regularly invoke the incident and commemorate it in public ceremonies. During the FIFA World Cup, members of Iran’s team wore #168 pins and posed before rows of children’s backpacks.

Military operations are judged almost instantaneously by audiences around the world, making public perception an important strategic consideration, Geoffrey Corn, the director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University, told us. Corn is a proponent of embedding experts on avoiding civilian casualties in military targeting teams. The most important thing the United States could have done soon after the Minab strike, Corn told us, would have been to publicly address what happened: Was the strike based on faulty intelligence? Outdated information? A missile malfunction, or some other error? “Because if you don’t, you’re ceding the narrative to anybody who wants to condemn you,” Corn added. “You are setting the conditions for strategic failure.”

The need to improve protections for civilians was a lesson learned at the cost of many innocent lives over two decades of U.S. counterinsurgent wars.

In September 2006, the Pentagon formally added legitimacy, restraint, and perseverance to its Principles of Joint Operations, defining legitimacy as “the legality, morality, and rightness of the actions undertaken.” The conclusion from Iraq and Afghanistan was that battlefield success alone was insufficient; military force had to be perceived as not only lawful but also just and prudent if it was going to achieve lasting results. Corn pointed to the United States’ reputational damage caused by the Trump administration’s lethal campaign against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean, and the global outcry against Israel over the tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza.

[Read: The results are in on Trump’s boat-strike campaign]

Civilian-harm mitigation within the U.S. military ramped up during the campaign against the Islamic State. Watchdog groups such as the United Kingdom–based Airwars began working closely with U.S. Central Command, providing on-the-ground information for U.S. forces who often struggled to assess the results of their strikes. After a U.S. drone mistakenly killed 10 civilians during America’s 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, then–Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered up the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan to formalize those practices across the Pentagon.

Over time, Centcom and other combatant commands built up these operations. Experts on civilian patterns of life and other advisers helped military targeters assess risks before strikes were launched and investigated casualty reports after. The Pentagon opened an office to train personnel across the ranks and incorporate lessons into future operations. (The gap between official and outside estimates on civilian casualties has at times, however, remained wide: Airwars estimated that more than 8,000 civilians died in the campaign against the Islamic State from 2014 to 2018; the official toll is roughly 1,500.)

Some of that structure still exists, but is much diminished. The U.S. military, meanwhile, has been engaged everywhere—Yemen, Somalia, Venezuela. In the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, the U.S. says that it has killed 221 people in small boats over 11 months; the U.S. alleges that the crews are smuggling drugs but has presented no evidence. Human-rights groups estimate that more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in Iran in the U.S. and Israeli air campaign.

“Over the last year, we have seen a total disconnect between the willingness to wage wars all over the world, at an unprecedented pace and scale, while at the same time all but abandoning their leading role in setting up the systems and approaches needed to better protect civilians,” Emily Tripp, the head of Airwars, told us.

The leadership of the Pentagon’s combatant commands have uniformly voiced support internally for the restoration of the personnel, a U.S. official told us, because they value the additional safeguards. Commanders learned over the years that civilian casualties fueled insurgent recruitment, eroded local support, and undermined political objectives. Advances in intelligence, surveillance, and precision targeting also have helped reduce the risk of hitting civilians. (Civilian-protection advisers were never given the power to overrule or veto actions proposed by commanders; they could only advise and provide additional information.)

“Restoring personnel dedicated to civilian protection—and actually allowing them to do their jobs—is one critical step towards preventing future harm,” Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told us.

Even if Hegseth endorses the proposal, future success may depend on whether he embraces a different tone. “If there is a change in attitude from the top, that could be significant,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is now a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, told us. “But if this is a box-checking exercise, it won’t make a difference.”

[Read: The timidity of America’s top generals]

Hegseth and Trump have both, at least so far in the Iran war, used much more belligerent language than their own military commanders have. The White House, early on, posted images of U.S. strikes alongside the caption “No pause. No hesitation.” Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of Centcom, had a contrasting message for troops in a memo this spring. “Our commitment to the law of armed conflict is not a constraint on our lethality,” he wrote. “It is the source of our legitimacy.”

A Hegseth endorsement of the proposal to restore protections against civilian harm would mark a rare acknowledgment that his radical reforms at the Pentagon may, at least in one area, have gone too far.