In this conflict, there has been an enormous, and I would say, a scary amount of missiles expended on the part of the United States, hundreds and hundreds on the part of Iran lashing out at basically all of their neighbors. And what was once an American idiosyncrasy, the pursuit of this missile defense capability, is now very much a global phenomenon. The demand signals, the supply and demand signal of long-range standoff and the means to contend with it, is very much a global phenomenon.
You used the word scary to talk about the sort of volume of activity that the U.S. has, or how much we fired already. What did you mean by that?
The scary part is the massive expenditure of these things. And I want to quote General Keane, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who said he was asked, 'Do we have enough?' And he said, 'We have enough for this conflict.' That is not the same as saying that we have enough for the other tasks that we have around the world, most significantly, deterring a conflict with China. And what they're doing right now is presiding over an extraordinary vaporization of our inventory in a very short window of time.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, you know, I think we're roughly maybe a little bit less than two weeks into the war, and we are recording this March 12th, 2026. And there, of course, an extraordinary number of questions about the timing and the duration of the war. We know already that the economic impact has been quite significant, particularly if you just look at commodity markets. But one of the questions that sort of may help determine timing or outcome, I guess, you know, we talked about this after the war in Ukraine started. Wars are about supply chains, in a large sense. And quite obviously wars are about size and scale of the arsenals and how fast they can be replenished.
Two things. I know war is logistics. And also war is a racket. And the only reason I know that is because I just literally downloaded the book. So I'll know more about that in a second. But you're absolutely right. I do not like talking about war or conflict or military stuff in general, but I do enjoy talking about supply chains. And there's one crucial supply chain that we haven't really discussed in detail ever before, but it keeps coming up more and more in this conflict.
Yeah, that's right. So obviously, you know, you see these numbers and I don't know how real they are, but they're extraordinary. You know, there's like, Iran can launch an attack against a military base in a nearby country, etc. So all this talk about the extraordinary efficacy of cheap drones and so forth, and then you hear about the extraordinary cost of missile defense. Right. So putting on our old international relations hat, a lot of what we used to study was this idea of asymmetric warfare. Right. And the classic examples that would come up would be guerrilla warfare where, you know, you have a less well-equipped army that is engaging in exhausting skirmishes against like a better-equipped, larger army. And it's a way of like offsetting their own weaknesses against the strengths of another force. Nowadays, we don't really have that kind of ground conflict. Right. Knock on wood. But you're seeing it, some people say, play out in this arena of missiles, which is really where all this conflict is playing out, is in the missile space. So you hear these stories about like Iran is launching these drones that cost, I think, $25,000 a pop. And people say some of them are putting mines in the Strait of Hormuz, which are also very cheap relative to some other tactics. And meanwhile, you hear things like, well, the U.S. missile defense system costs like millions of dollars per pop, literally per pop against a drone. And meanwhile, the U.S. is firing, you know, interceptor missiles or whatever that cost, again, millions and millions of dollars. Yeah. And you hear, and, you know, again, the math, the sort of missile math seems very lopsided. And then, of course, the question is just the pure numbers that you do have and what is the capacity to ramp up production, etc. All huge questions. Where do missiles actually come from? Where are they made?
That's right. There's a mommy missile and a daddy missile. Well, I was about to make a Judy Blume joke just then, but I decided not to. But, you know, anyway, we have a ton of questions, and we don't have the answers, but we're going to learn a lot. We have the perfect guest, someone who knows about this intimately, someone who focuses on this entirely. We're going to be speaking with Tom Kariko, a senior fellow and director of the Missile Defense Project at CSIS. And he is going to walk us through all of this and how to think about the supply chain of these armaments. So Tom, thank you so much for coming on.
Of course. Hey, great to be with you all.
Thank you so much. Why don't you tell us just to begin, what do you do? What is the focus of your work?
Yeah, well, look, since I'm at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, I would say it's the main defense think tank in Washington, D.C. It's been around since, you know, I think the sixties in the Cold War. And within CSIS, the department that focuses on hard power, focused on Defense Department-centric things, and within that, I run the Missile Defense Project. And so basically, think mud space, have cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, space sensors, you know, everything in that window of offense and defense is what my team kind of studies, writes about, comments upon, and hosts a lot of events and commentary.
Actually, before we even get into missiles, this is a question I wanted to ask, but why do we have defense think tanks anyway? Like, why do these exist? Because if you think about military conflict in the U.S., presumably there should just be one actor engaged in military conflict with other states at any one moment of time. And that's the actual U.S. government, the Department of Defense, Department of War. Why do we need private actors opining on military tactics, strategy, supply chains at all?
Yeah, that's a good question. That's a fair question. And I think I would answer it with what folks coming out of DOD always say, which is it's the world's largest bureaucracy. And quite literally, they don't have time to think. That is what senior officials say all the time. And when you go in, you also tend not to have new ideas. And so it's kind of an opportunity for idea generation. And this is not my formulation. This is what you frequently hear from people who go in and out of government, that they need that idea generation in a way to be contracted out by those people who have time. And so now, having said that, a lot of people who go into government come from the think tank world, come from the policy world as well. I think I would put it rather. And they go out, they think, they write some things, they reflect on things and study things, and then they kind of perhaps go back into government.
Let's talk about from the outside perspective. You know, you try to estimate the size of the arsenal of various different weapons that the U.S. has. How transparent is the government about the size of stockpiles, and how much is one job from the think tank world, from the outside, an exercise in triangulation, inference and so forth to be able to understand these things? And then just like besides the sort of approach you take to measuring these things, what are some of the numbers that we're talking about right now?
Yeah, so look, it's going to vary case to case, but I would say in many respects, although it's the government's job to keep a number of things secret so that the bad guys don't know exactly what we have or how many we have, rather, I would nevertheless say that to a very large extent we are a democracy and a lot of detail is available in the budget books that go over to Congress every year on the budget request, the annual budget request comes out. And so there is a pretty good amount of tracking. If you want to understand what kind of Defense Department you have, look at the money. And so there's a decent amount of information out there about, you might say, the garden-variety missiles and the garden-variety capabilities that have to be deliberately appropriated by Congress and then also built by industry. And so while exact numbers are kept sensitive, you can get pretty close in terms of these dollars and this number of rounds, you can get pretty close.
For those who haven't been following this as intensely as you have, can you paint a schematic of the kind of missiles we're talking about when we talk about the situation in Iran right now? And what exactly are the different missile types being used for? I know guys love talking about missile names. Right. And being like armchair military strategists. So some people might know this already. But for the benefit of those of us who have, you know, we just see a missile and it's a missile, what are the different types that are currently being deployed?
Yeah, well, look, first of all, you know, what's a missile? There's basically platforms and there's projectiles, you know, aircraft, ground vehicles, ships and this sort of thing. But basically since the 1960s, there's been a high degree of emphasis on essentially guided missiles, precision-guided munitions of various kinds, and also standoff capability. And so, you know, indirect fire cannons, guns, this kind of thing began to be replaced by much more over-the-horizon capabilities that could fly out of good ways, come back down, and especially in terms of terminal guidance, could then find a ship on the ocean or find using terrain mapping or what have you. So basically, since the precision guidance revolution in the seventies especially, just made an enormous amount of progress. And frankly, this technological progress is no longer a monopoly of the United States, as it perhaps once was. It's ubiquitous. Even folks like Iran and North Korea and that kind of thing have it. And so that's the baseline. And so there's different kinds of missile reach. And a missile, logically speaking, is simply that which is sent. There's ballistic missiles that fly gravity's rainbow, mostly unpowered for most of their flight, cruise missiles that are essentially aerodynamic and use lift and drag to travel, some kind of jet engine or what have you. And then there's these new classes of things that are kind of blending. You know, people talk about hypersonic gliders that may start off with a ballistic push, but then have the maneuver, the speed of a ballistic missile, but the maneuverability of a cruise missile or aircraft, you might say. And so it's a rich and diverse spectrum that has emerged over the years. And as a former Biden administration official said, and I like to repeat, missiles truly have become weapons of choice. It's the thing for which we reach early and often in a conflict, and largely because of the combination of that precision guidance and that standoff capability. And so when the first Trump administration wanted to go hit Syria, you know, they sent 59 Tomahawks. That's a cruise missile to go get them. And in this conflict, there has been an enormous and I would say a scary amount of missiles expended on the part of the United States, hundreds and hundreds on the part of Iran lashing out at basically all of their neighbors with a combination of ballistics. And a lot of these drones are essentially cruise missiles. When you're over $1,000 a range, you know, it's essentially a cruise missile beachhead, for instance. And then you have the missile defense world. And, you know, it wasn't that long ago when in polite society it was conventional wisdom that it was impossible to hit a bullet with a bullet. Over the past, especially five years, that has been completely and utterly refuted. And in conflict after conflict, in Ukraine, in the Red Sea operations, in the defense of Israel, a couple of times now, we've seen an extraordinary degree of missiles being defeated by a combination of effects, not just missile on missile, but combination of effects. And now, you know, we're kind of surprised when we miss some of these things. And what was once an American idiosyncrasy, the pursuit of this missile defense capability, is now very much a global phenomenon. After the Ukraine conflict, especially in Europe, the European Sky Shield Initiative, Germany buying an Israeli Arrow 3 system for ballistic missile defense. It has been a sea change. The demand signals, the supply and demand signal of long-range standoff and the means to contend with it, is very much a global phenomenon. I'll say that the top two priorities for aid for Ukraine over the past four years were what, long-range fires, missiles, and Arrow missile defense. They went so far as to put the Patriot launcher on their currency because it basically kept them sovereign.
And these are the top two. Yeah, it's one. I've got one in my office. It's the currency, not the missile. Right. I'm still trying to buy a Patriot, but they won't. Forget the bond market. That was already extremely helpful. But just to go back, you used the word scary to talk about the sort of volume of activity that the U.S. has, or how much we fired already. What did you mean by that? Unpack that statement a little bit, you know.
So let me just say that missile defense will not win a war for you, but its absence will lose one or could lose one pretty quickly. And so I said a moment ago that Ukraine, the missile defenses helped keep Ukraine sovereign. Right. If not for being able to thwart these incoming air and missile attacks, they would have been a very different situation. Like back from last summer, in the hundreds of missiles, 650 projectiles from multiple parts of the Middle East coming at Israel all at once during the 12-day war. If those hundreds and hundreds of objects had arrived all at once, as they were intended to do, in a place the size of New Jersey, it would have been catastrophic. Surprisingly enough, almost everything was defeated. And so it is. It is. Missile defense buys time to end the threat by other means. It does not end the threat itself. Now, what I said last summer after that conflict ended, the Trump administration basically threw the Iranians a lifeline and said, hey, we're going to stop. I said that's going to be a mistake, because what's going to happen is the Iranians are going to rebuild and then we're going to come and we're going to do this again in a year or so. And I was wrong because it didn't take a year. It's only nine months. And why that matters and why it's scary is because it's not about... it's about capacity. Capacity of defensive interceptors buys time, but it takes a heck of a lot of time to produce that capacity. And so this gets to the specter of going up and coming out on this, the specter of going Winchester, of running out of defensive interceptors. And that would be a very bad day. And so when you talk to hundreds and hundreds of missiles are going to require hundreds of interceptors. That was last year, again this year. And so that's the scary part is the massive expenditure of these things. And I want to quote General Keane, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who said he was asked, do we have enough? And he said, we have enough for this conflict. That is not the same as saying that we have enough for the other tasks that we have around the world, most significantly, deterring a conflict with China. And so we have now cut in very substantially to our total inventory of missile defense interceptors. The numbers, the complete numbers have not been released. We've done a study on this from what it was last year, and it was a lot. And so why that matters right now, we're moving Patriots and perhaps some THAAD missile defense systems from South Korea and Japan to the Middle East. That's significant because their job is to be in the Pacific and to deter, to provide a defensive deterrent to Chinese adventurism or to North Korean adventurism or what have you. And so, you know, we've been saying, different administrations have been saying pivot to the Pacific since the Obama administration. We're still kind of waiting for that to happen. We keep lurching back to Europe and to the Middle East. In fact, a lot of the administration officials in this Pentagon have been among those who said, hey, we've got to focus on China, we've got to focus on the Pacific. And what they're doing right now is presiding over an extraordinary vaporization of our inventory in a very short window of time. And so what I worry about, you've heard of the Davidson window, the former head of Indo-Pacom, who said, hey, he worries that China would be ready to move against some of their neighbors by 2027. What I worry about most is that this extraordinary expenditure of stuff is not going to be replaced in a year. Absolutely not. And that in fact this may be a self-fulfilling prophecy of encouraging, of tempting China to do something very bad.
Joe, I haven't heard the term going Winchester. I'm Winchester for years and years and years. You know, it's running out of ammunition. Yeah. The only reason I know this is because my dad made me watch, like, an inordinate amount of military movies growing up. But anyway, I'm very curious about something you said, which is that you can't win a war with missiles and it's missile defense with, oh, I'm sorry, with missile defense, but with offense, presumably you can. Right. Which seems to be the strategy right now.
Well, and so let me speak to that. Yeah. The joint force of the United States and working with Israel hit, you know, I think it's up to 5,000 targets within the first several days of the war. Well, they were doing so from afar. They were doing so from standoff. And so while they're not releasing the numbers of the Tomahawk missiles or the JASSMs, some of the LRASMs and such, and not releasing those, one may easily surmise that a significant number of those targets were serviced by these long-range things of which we have finite quantities. And so the offensive strike capabilities is also even more important as a deterrent. And we are chewing those up by at least the many hundreds, and it may, I suspect, turn out to be thousands. And that's also part of the scary part.
