news

Taiwan is concerned that the Iran war is depleting stocks of long-range cruise missiles that would be vital for the US to help defeat any Chinese invasion, making the country more vulnerable. The US is estimated to have fired hundreds of so-called Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs) during weeks of conflict in the Middle East, as well as ship-launched Tomahawk missiles. Defence experts said both would be crucial in any conflict over Taiwan because they can be fired from outside the range of an enemy’s air defences, diminishing the risk for an attacking aircraft or naval vessel. “My concern is first and foremost that US forces are using up a lot of munitions which one assumes they would need so that an assault on Taiwan could be blunted,” a senior Taiwanese defence official told the FT. “This erodes deterrence.” If the US was “spending too much time on other [battlefields], so much so that they pour too much capacity into those, in the end it will really create an imbalance”, said a Taiwanese national security official.

China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and threatens to attack it if Taipei refuses to submit under its control indefinitely. While the US is ambiguous over whether it would intervene in a war over Taiwan, Washington considers any effort to determine Taiwan’s future by non-peaceful means as of grave concern. The US is committed by law to provide Taiwan with defensive weapons. It is also legally obliged to maintain its own capacity to resist coercion that would jeopardise Taiwan’s security.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimated last week that US forces fired 786 JASSMs and 319 Tomahawk missiles in the first six days of the Iran war — several years of production in both cases.

I'll post my own amateur estimation in a bit, but I feel like this number may be rather too large. Still, we'll see.

“All these munitions were acquired for the China fight, and they would be absolutely critical in that fight,” said Eric Heginbotham, an expert on Asian security issues at MIT, who co-organised a series of war games since 2023 about a potential US-China conflict over Taiwan. “No one really calculated on using up large portions of the inventory on an unrelated war, or a war of choice, especially one of this scale.”

YOU'RE THE GLOBAL IMPERIAL HEGEMON like it's literally the whole point of your existence that you have to be able to fight a whole bunch of wars in different locations! you can't actually be the hegemon if you can't fight two wars (and the current Iran one, not to downplay the suffering being inflicted by the empire, isn't even such a large-scale war comparatively speaking)! the moment that happens you're no longer a global hegemon, but a regional one (could be a pretty large region, but still)

this is like a Roman governor in Gaul or Germania complaining "no-one really calculated on large portions of the legions having to be sent East to fight Persia! how are we supposed to fight all these Germanic tribes?" (and, well, you know what happened to the Roman empire...)

In a Taiwan war game CSIS and MIT jointly held in 2023, participants simulated expending the entire US arsenal of JASSMs in just a few weeks, to sink People’s Liberation Army ships in port to decimate its invasion fleet and to hit Chinese air bases. While the Pentagon does not publicly specify for which conflicts it acquires certain weapons, military analysts widely agree on the importance of missiles including the JASSM. “Potentially large quantities of long-range, penetrating cruise missiles would be critical in many US-China conflict scenarios,” said Tyler Hacker, a research fellow specialising in long-range strike at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington defence think-tank. “As of right now, JASSM is the US military’s primary conventional air-launched, long-range cruise missile.” The US does not publicly disclose stockpile numbers or deployment locations for most missiles. The air force procured 5,569 JASSMs up to 2023 and an additional 1,140 and 450 were procured in 2024 and 2025 respectively, according to budget documents. But it is unclear how many have been received as contractor Lockheed Martin has been delivering only a few hundred a year, with deliveries lagging about three years behind procurement.

It is also unknown how many have been used in tests or earlier conflicts, or have expired. Expert estimates for the total JASSM stockpile range from 3,500 to 6,500. Stand-off munitions such as the JASSM or Tomahawk would be the most important tool for US forces to try to exhaust China’s missile arsenal in the opening phase of a conflict. China’s integrated air defence system would put any jet that attacked its coastal bases at risk of being shot down. China also has a large arsenal of anti-ship missiles that aim to sink approaching enemy vessels. Analysts call the JASSM missile a “very enticing weapon” because of its highly accurate terminal guidance. “When you calculate what munitions to use, there is a strong tendency to optimise on reducing risk to your own forces in the present context,” Heginbotham said. “That means you will almost always use more of the Gucci long-range stuff without thinking too much about the next war.”

truly dark internet-brainrot times when an "expert on security issues" is referring weaponry as "Gucci stuff"

Mark Cancian, author of last week’s CSIS report on weapons use and cost in the Iran war, said the number of JASSMs and Tomahawks being fired was likely to have fallen considerably after the US had established air superiority. But analysts said other munitions in use against Iran such as the Joint Standoff Weapon, a glide bomb, could also create critical shortfalls for a potential Taiwan conflict. Admiral Samuel Paparo, the top US military commander in the Indo-Pacific region, warned more than a year ago that expending munitions elsewhere imposed costs on the US’s readiness in the Indo-Pacific. The region “is the most stressing theatre for the quantity and quality of munitions, because [China] is the most capable potential adversary in the world”, he said in November 2024.

First, let's look at the bombers themselves. For the B-1B - 12 have been deployed to RAF Fairford, from a total fleet of 45 (although I think it might actually be 44 since one crashed in 2024? I'll use the 45 number for my calculations, for now) - except, the B-1 has a dreadful readiness rate, 43.44% in 2024 (it was 52.8% in 2019, so that's an over 9% drop in just 5 years, without there being any major military operations involving the B-1s, AFAIK - so you can expect this current war to also have a pretty significant impact on readiness rates). So, on average only around 19 planes are actually mission-capable at any given time, meaning the current deployment is of over 60% of the actually airworthy B-1 fleet. Now, they're not actually flying all 12 on each mission, they seem to go for 2-3 at a time, so they're letting the planes rest, but this is just against Iran.

Oh, and btw, the available fleet can dip down significantly lower than even that in certain moments, if they just get dealt a bad hand with a ton of planes happening to go into maintenace all at once - USAF has only 6 Fully Combat Ready B-1B Strategic Bombers, Jul 31 2019 (and this was when the fleet was 61!).

The B-52 is somewhat better, at a 53.77% readiness rate in 2024 - so out of a fleet of 76, that's around 40 being available, with 6 of them currently being based at Fairford. The B-2 had a 55.04% rate in 2024, with the fleet being 19 (after 2 crashes), leaving 10 available. So, in total, the US has around 70 strategic bombers available at a given time, with over half of those being ancient Cold War legacy tech (admittedly modernized a bunch, but there's only so much you can do on an existing airframe), and that's a number likely to go down as a consequence of the wear-and-tear of this war, and as some bombers are just retired altogether. I don't foresee B-21 production scaling up very fast, given, like, everything about the claims of rearmament and reindustrialization from the last few years and how they actually seem to be turning out.

Timothy Mitchell in his Carbon Democracy also examines another energy switch, this time from coal to oil as the main source of power and energy. Contrary to "progressive" narratives of oil just Being Better, the switch to oil was again motivated by control and power rather than price. You see, the problem with coal is that it's heavy and physical, and relies on trains to be moved around. You had to physically move coal from place to place on railways, and railways require a lot of workers. You see where this is going. The bourgeoisie realised real quick that coal puts way too much power into the hands of railworkers, who could disrupt the entire economy of a nation by going on strike, blocking coal and thereby closing factories. Coal requires workers to move, and the workers in charge of moving that coal, which now powered the entire economy, had too much power. This had to be broken, and the solution was oil. Again, oil was not cheaper than coal. Oil was just less liable to disruption, because rather than rail you just needed to build a pipeline. Pipelines required no workers. Oil derricks, too, required few workers to operate, as opposed to coal mines. And a disruption to a pipeline can be fixed quickly; oil flows, it does not need to be transported via the rail network, and there's no group of workers who can go on strike and shut down the entire country. Again, this switch was about power and control, not price.

Now, with Iran shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, we see that one country can control the flow of oil to the entire world, and this makes the global economy far too vulnerable. You might be thinking wait, didn't this already happen in the 70s? Yes, the oil shock of OPEC already demonstrated this, but during that time there was no alternative to oil at all. Regardless of price, you couldn't buy another energy source besides coal, but at this point coal can't power cars and jets and all sorts of other things. So this kind of energy transition didn't happen. But now you can get cheap renewables and electrify everything. China will sell you solar panels at low cost with no issue. You can buy EVs, you can electrify factories, and thereby take energy control back from oil. Long term I think this kind of trend is inevitable, just like the above two cases. The third Gulf War is highlighting this path, and many countries will take it. Whether the West does so however remains to be seen...