And the fact that these companies are landing contracts, may be indicative of faster production and delivery in a matter of several months, opposed to years, Montgomery said. But producing low-cost munitions isn’t necessarily a solution to the U.S. military’s current stockpile problem. “It's about transitioning your arsenal long term to a high-low mix. But some of these things can come soon,” Montgomery said. “So it doesn't impact the next stage of the war. But it could impact a 2027 end game. And it certainly will impact being ready in 2028, 2029 for Russia or China to do something.”

Strategic shifts

While industry is answering the call to build more affordable munitions, defense experts question whether the military is willing to use them. In March, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine declared that the U.S. military was pivoting from “from stand-off munitions to stand-in munitions” meaning a pivot from long-range weapons outside the battlefield to ones that need to be dropped within conflict zones. But CSIS’ Karako said there’s been no significant switch to plentiful GPS-guided, freefall weapons like Joint Direct Attack Munitions in the months since that statement. "We have 140,000 JDAMS, we have low-cost munitions today. The reason that we're not using them, and the reason that we're hemorrhaging our Tomahawks instead, has to do with extreme risk aversion,” Karako said. “That risk aversion calculus is not going to change just because you have some new entrance, low-cost, low-range missile. We have, today, plenty of munitions that we could use, but we're not using.” A month after Caine made his comments, a F-15E went down over Iran. The complicated rescue of the two U.S. airmen pushed President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to proclaim the military had “achieved overwhelming air dominance and superiority” over the hostile territory.

Airpower experts previously told Defense One that broad terms used by the administration painted an inaccurate reality of the dangerous situation U.S. pilots find themselves in over the region. That lack of total control also limits which munitions the military is willing to use. “Despite efforts to gain air supremacy over Iran, the U.S. was only able to gain localized air superiority over some parts. That reduced the ability to drop JDAMs instead,” Wasser said. “Switching to a strategy that relies on JDAMs would mean accepting more risk—or taking steps to further degrade Iranian capabilities to allow for greater U.S. use of the skies without threat.” Experts told Defense One the Iran war has exacerbated long-standing problems with how the military uses and buys munitions. And while it’s possible the Pentagon could weather this conflict, the resulting mission depletion will likely make future wars—particularly with China—a struggle. “These missiles will also be critical for a potential Western Pacific conflict,” an April CSIS report said. “Even before the Iran war, stockpiles were deemed insufficient for a peer competitor fight. That shortfall is now even more acute, and building stockpiles to levels adequate for a war with China will take additional time.” Until production on existing munitions and interceptors ramps up and the Pentagon buys a new mix of high- and low-end missiles, Karako said the military should look at the plentiful munitions it already has—and use them. “The more immediate thing that we could be doing is changing our tactics,” Karako said. “We've hemorrhaged our long-range stuff, and the thing that we could do is we could start using gravity bombs, but we're not willing to do that … Everytime CENTCOM fires a Tomahawk at somebody without air defense, an angel loses its wings in PACOM.”

As the U.S. military’s critical munitions are overused in the Iran war and underproduced at home, companies are eagerly pitching new low-cost solutions, and the Pentagon is keen to make big deals. But defense experts say those new, cheaper missile options—and the push to rapidly produce existing weapons—aren’t the short-term fix needed to overcome the long-existing problem exacerbated by the Iran war. However, they will provide the military much-needed options in the future. At the Space and Missile Defense Symposium last week, Boeing unveiled a low-cost seeker missile, with crucial hit-to-kill guidance technology used on the PAC-3 missile, made of commercial, off-the-shelf components. At the same conference, Northrop Grumman released its “cost-effective” 50 millimeter gun-based drone defense system to “address a critical short-range air defense gap.” And last month at the Farnborough International Air Show, Lockheed Martin announced a more affordable, proximity-detonation version of its Patriot missile. But those solutions will likely only have a significant impact on the Pentagon’s stockpiles if the Iran war drags on and if officials quickly award contracts. “The push for low-cost munitions is unlikely to have a material effect on the Iran War—at least not anytime soon,” said Becca Wasser, Bloomberg Economics’s defense lead. And, she said, making enough new weapons, at the right cost, is only part of the problem. “Getting to a lower cost for exquisite munitions will take time. It requires developing new weapons or adapting old ones, which means going through new testing and evaluation processes,” she said. “If the Iran war drags on for years, that’s when the drive for lower cost interceptors and munitions could have an impact,” because “wars of attrition require enormous amounts of material—and the lower price tag helps.”

Right now, the Pentagon is blowing through its prized Patriot and Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense missiles, and they won’t get replaced anytime soon, defense analysts say—even with novel framework deals. In the last year, top officials have been pushing those deals with major defense primes and are continuing the administration’s rallying cry for the firms to build and innovate faster. Some of those are starting to bear fruit. This week, RTX netted a seven-year, $22.9 billion Tomahawk missile contract with the U.S. Navy under a new deal, showing that the military is making big bets on legacy systems as it pursues newer options. But those legacy munitions still take time to manufacture. In a recent report, the American Enterprise Institute think tank found that it would take 27 years for defense contractors to produce THAADs at the current maximum annual rate of 96 interceptors a year to reach quantities the Pentagon wants.

There “will be a window of vulnerability for several years until inventories return to their previous levels, and another several years before they get to the levels that war planners desire,” according to a May report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “These newer, lower-cost munitions absolutely should be part of the way we fix this. But we shouldn't be kidding ourselves that they're going to be ready quickly en masse, are operational, and our forces are trained and understand how to use them,” said Todd Harrison, AEI’s defense budget expert. “It will take years, some sooner than others. And I think it remains to be seen if they're going to be available in large quantities sooner than the reorders of the more exquisite existing weapons.”

Framework deals aren’t contracts

The Pentagon has already inked framework agreements for low-cost and traditional munitions. Overall, experts say they are a step in the right direction. “It's not a contract, but it helps give the companies a demand signal they can take to their boards and their shareholders, and…it reduces their risks, so they can make increased capital expenditures, or capex, investments,” said Jerry McGinn, a CSIS senior fellow and the director of the Center for the Industrial Base. McGinn teased an upcoming CSIS analysis that found publicly-traded companies with framework agreements increased their capex investment by 31 percent from the second quarter of 2025 to the same quarter this year. “They're clearly investing more and it's hard not to tie it to those framework agreements. But the challenge is that the framework agreement is an agreement…It's a best faith effort. It's not a contract,” he said. Congress still has to appropriate the money, the companies have to get on contract, and then they have to deliver, McGinn said. And none of that is guaranteed. McGinn said he’s keen to watch how many contracts come out of the framework deals. One of the first major contracts was a seven-year, $35 billion undefinitized contract with Lockheed Martin for THAADs, which leaves some aspects of the agreement open—to be finalized before the contract starts. Undefinitized contract actions, or UCAs, require special approval and are used for urgent work that all parties “agree needs to begin before final agreement can be reached on price.”

Lockheed Martin executives said they’re up to the task. “If you look at the framework agreements we've signed, we've leaned into the ask that the country has made of us. Lockheed Martin has never shied away from stepping up to the line and doing what's been asked,” Johnathon Caldwell, Lockheed's vice president of strategic and missile defense systems, told reporters at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium. “We're in an unprecedented era where speed matters, and we're able to bring capabilities to market in weeks and months, not years and decades. We're putting our money on the table, and our commitment.” It’s a tall order for companies to surge production capacity of those munitions, especially amid supply chain bottlenecks for major components such as solid rocket motors. But it helps that the Pentagon’s actually allocating and committing money to those problems, Bloomberg’s Wasser said. “The framework agreements are just that—-agreements, not contracts. Until these are on contract, you won’t see a lot of companies surging production,” she said. “All these efforts—sending the demand signal to industry, qualifying more [solid rocket motor] suppliers, ramping up missile procurement—help, but they don’t solve the problem.”

Low-cost munitions, long-term solutions

Lockheed’s more affordable version of the PAC-3 missile comes with some tradeoffs, and a timeline. “We basically modified the front end, modified the back end, took out the [Attitude Control Motors], so it's no longer hit-to-kill,” Jason Reynolds, Lockheed’s vice president and general manager of integrated air and missile defense, told reporters during a briefing at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium, adding that it integrates with existing munitions systems “at reduced range.” However, PAC-3 ACE isn’t expecting a first flight until early 2028, and won’t go to production until 18 months after that. “Everybody wants more air defense interceptors as quickly as possible, and anything that is as capable or nearly as capable as a PAC-3 MSC is a very attractive offer,” Reynolds said on the sidelines of the conference. There’s no doubt that a more affordable version of the highly-sought after PAC-3 is useful, said Tom Karako, CSIS’ director of the Missile Defense Project. But the question remains: Will the Pentagon buy it? “PAC-3 ACE is not a contract. It's a concept that they've had for a while and they rolled it out,” he said. “I think the time is right for PAC-3 ACE, but it's a concept, and if you're really attacking the root cause problem, you know the root cause here is the customer.” A few weeks after the PAC-3 ACE contract was announced, Boeing unveiled its Ultra Low-Cost Seeker. It’s a push to make the company’s precision-guided technology, which makes Patriot missiles deadly and expensive, more accessible and affordable. “The system uses commercial off-the-shelf components that Boeing adapted for military use,” the company said in a news release this month. “ULCS leverages our seeker expertise developed on programs like PAC-3 MSE, but delivers a different seeker capability that can be applied at low cost to numerous defensive and offensive products to address lower-complexity threats.” The seeker is still under development, and more flight tests are expected in 2027. Officials declined to provide exact figures on how much more affordable the new product was compared to existing technology.

Overall, there seem to be more options for cheaper replacements to hypersonic or cruise missiles than for top-tier air defense missiles like Patriots and THAAD weapons, said Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral and senior fellow for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. New entrants are also getting in the low-cost missiles game—and landing contracts. There’s Anduril's Barracuda, Zone 5 Technologies’ Rusty Dagger, and Coaspire’s cruise missile. “We’re seeing it in hypersonic missiles with a company called Castelion…But we're not seeing it in air defense weapons,” Montgomery said. X-Bow Systems revealed its modestly priced $100,000 drone destroyer at the Farnborough International Airshow. The company also landed a $11 million deal this week with the Missile Defense Agency to develop and test low-cost interceptors.

During Moore’s time on Lincoln, the stigma surrounding mental health remained prevalent. There were mental health professionals aboard the ship, but if a sailor sought help, the service member could be taken off their job. “They’re terrified to disappoint the people around them,” Moore said. “If I don’t do my job, there’s only 30 people who can do it, right? So now there’s only 29 people.” Following the report on mental health issues aboard Lincoln, the Navy said it had not observed an increase in suicidal ideation or suicide attempts. The service did note, however, that additional counselors and resources were being sent to the crew. Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, visited Lincoln on Saturday and issued a statement claiming that the ship had the lowest number of mental health cases among the Navy’s 11 active aircraft carriers.

Lack of transparency

The Pentagon under the Trump administration has become increasingly tight-lipped over the information it provides to Congress. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth released a memo in October 2025 informing Defense Department personnel, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that authorization was required for any communication to leaders on Capitol Hill. Hegseth also dodged several questions from lawmakers during a July Senate hearing on the Iran War. When Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., asked the Pentagon leader whether previous statements about Iran’s military being “destroyed” and “made combat ineffective” were true, Hegseth declined to answer. Hegseth has also not held a Pentagon press briefing about the Iran war for more than 100 days, with the last coming on May 5. To alleviate concerns over short-term problems with current military operations like those aboard the Lincoln, Congress must be able to carry out oversight, lawmakers said. Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., told Military Times that the Pentagon should be sharing information that would allow political leaders to assess whether the president and defense secretary were deploying assets in the most mission-effective way. Invoking the War Powers Resolution would allow lawmakers to hold the current administration accountable, some Democrats have argued. The resolution requires the executive branch to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying military forces and allows lawmakers to enforce the removal of military forces within 60 to 90 days unless Congress has declared war or authorized military force.

Levin supports that approach, he said, and asked that his Republican colleagues stand up and ask tough questions. Republican members of the House and Senate armed services committees did not respond to Military Times’ requests for comment. “I think back to George W. Bush,” Levin said. “I disagreed wholeheartedly with Iraq, but you think about the steps that he took. You think about ... Secretary Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, others — their consistent engagement.” For the LCS sailor, planning deficiencies are already rearing their head. Though the ship did assist with the Navy’s blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, turning away more than a dozen vessels, it will now be sidelined longer than scheduled because of deferred repairs. It is one example, the sailor said, of there being no long-term plan for ship rotations. “‘We’re gonna keep you out here,” the sailor said of the impression made on them, “until your ship can’t operate or function anymore.’”

Following revelations from families about some U.S. service members aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln struggling with mental health after 250 days without a port visit, sailors, retirees and lawmakers told Military Times that troops were absorbing consequences of longtime flaws within the sea service that have been worsened by the current conflict. The Navy has struggled for years to meet high operational tempo demands, they said. Deployments are regularly extended, scheduled maintenance is missed and the shipbuilding pace remains glacial, leading to delays in delivery and an undersized fleet. The issues have spanned multiple presidential administrations but have been compounded by the handling of the Iran war and ensuing military operations, sources said, leading to dire circumstances for some sailors. Leaders have disputed the descriptions of deteriorating conditions aboard the Lincoln and denied reporting about quality-of-life concerns. Asked recently by reporters about families’ concerns over the length of the deployment, President Donald Trump dismissed the question, saying that it’s “not nearly long enough.” Asked about those same concerns, Adm. Daryl Caudle, the service’s chief of naval operations, told Military Times, “Sailors first is not a slogan — it’s a warfighting imperative.” “The sustained pace of operations in the Middle East has only reinforced that taking care of our sailors and maintaining combat readiness are inseparable,” Caudle said.

‘We need more ships’

Following outcry about conditions aboard the Lincoln, the Navy moved the Nimitz-class carrier USS George Washington from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East, where it arrived Wednesday. The ship is reportedly replacing the Lincoln, which will now steam toward its homeport of San Diego. The move temporarily leaves the western Pacific without a U.S. aircraft carrier, the presence of which is a key part of the U.S. military’s effort to deter China in the South China Sea and reassure regional allies. Operational tempo concerns, meanwhile, are nothing new for the service, according to retired Vice Adm. Fozzie Miller, who served as commander of U.S. Fifth Fleet and U.S. Central Command from 2012 to 2015. Miller joined the Navy in 1979. From his early days in uniform, the service’s goal, he said, was to operate at a level that was neither too harsh for the individual sailor nor too unbearable for the equipment vital to mission success. An adequate number of warships was integral to maintaining that balance. “We could use more carriers or less [operational] tempo,” Miller said. “It’s one or the other, but we’re a global Navy with global responsibilities, and so if we’re going to fulfill those, we need more ships.” Rear Adm. Thomas Moore, who led the Navy’s acquisition program and went on to become commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, told Congress in 2013 that the service is “an 11-carrier Navy in a 15-carrier world.” The demand is unlikely to dwindle, he said. Thirteen years since Moore’s statement, the Navy is still at 11 carriers. With the USS Nimitz scheduled to retire at the end of next year, that number may soon be 10.

note that the Nimitz was already supposed to have retired, and instead got its service extended

The USS Harry S. Truman and USS Gerald R. Ford are currently sidelined for maintenance after deployments, the latter of which notched a post-Vietnam record 326 days at sea in May after it was extended to support operations in the Middle East. The Nimitz-class USS John C. Stennis is undergoing a years-long overhaul. The USS Ronald Reagan, also a Nimitz-class, is expected to be deployable by the end of August after a 17-month repair period. The Nimitz-class USS George H.W. Bush is in the Middle East. “We just don’t have enough aircraft carriers right now in this rotation to sustain all the things we want to do, and I think this is a long-standing problem,” said Steven Wills, a Navy surface warfare officer who retired after 20 years. In 2014, the Navy began implementing the Optimized Fleet Response Plan, or OFRP, deployment model, which places maintenance, training, evaluations and a single eight-month deployment within a 36-month cycle. The service says the framework is intended to produce a more comprehensively manned and trained force while providing predictability to deployment schedules for sailors and their families. In 2016, however, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that heavy operational demands led the Navy to increase ship deployment lengths and reduce or defer ship maintenance. Those decisions made deployments less predictable, ate into training time, contributed to declining ship conditions and increased the time ships required for much-needed maintenance. From fiscal 2014 through 2019, Navy ships spent more than 33,700 additional days in maintenance beyond intended scheduling, leading to fewer vessels available for training or operations.

An upended supply network

While the Navy has long struggled with carrier availability, current U.S. leadership has created more operational tempo issues through poor planning and insufficient wartime support, according to lawmakers and a sailor who deployed in support of the Iran war. “Logistics was a complete failure the entire time out there — food, supplies, parts,” said the sailor, who served aboard an Independence-class littoral combat ship and was granted anonymity due to fear of reprisal. Iranian attacks damaged the Navy’s longstanding logistics hub in Bahrain in February, disrupting the regional supply network supporting ships operating in the Middle East. The Navy shifted the new logistics hub to Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that sits more than 2,000 miles away from the service’s carrier strike groups in the Middle East. Diego Garcia’s distance proved to be problematic, the sailor said, with the hub requiring the LCS to place a food order 30 days in advance. Those orders were nearly impossible, however, with an influx schedule exacerbated by poor planning, the sailor added. Sailors were unable to resupply from the hub, instead grabbing whatever could be salvaged from replenishment-at-sea oilers. “There’s no excuse for why, if we’re at war, we can’t get an expedited food order,” the sailor said. Rep. Mike Levin, D-Calif., told Military Times that the logistical issues described by the sailor were due to preparation failures. “I’ve spoken to a lot of people who’ve been deployed, and you know, the basic problem seems to be that if they were going to use Bahrain as a hub to restock, to get food and to provide rest and all that,” Levin said. “If that was the idea, well, clearly that didn’t work out. After February, March — [the administration] should have thought of that.”

‘People can break, too’

At least two sailors attempted to jump overboard from the USS Abraham Lincoln, families of Lincoln sailors previously told Military Times. While the individual mental circumstances of the incidents remain unknown, the frantic operational tempo of combat operations inevitably takes a natural toll on service members, according to one sailor who has deployed to the Middle East aboard an aircraft carrier during the current conflict. “Just like machines, people can break, too,” said the service member, who was granted anonymity for fear of reprisal from leadership. “They need rest.” Time to rest was not always available. Losing sleep was sometimes part of ensuring safety. If equipment broke, sailors would, at times, work well beyond normal shifts until it was fixed. In some instances, completion of the task could mean the difference between life and death. In a 2021 review, the GAO found that just 14% of Navy officers surveyed slept at least seven hours per night during a recent deployment, while 67% reported five hours or less. GAO also found that the Navy routinely assigned fewer sailors to ships than workload studies indicated were needed to safely operate them. By 2023, surface-fleet sailors were averaging 5.25 hours of sleep every 24 hours, below the Navy’s standard of providing at least 7.5 hours of sleep opportunity. GAO identified crew shortfalls and mattress problems as challenges to managing fatigue. For its part, the Navy has implemented measures to try to address the issue, including initiating a study involving about 1,600 sailors wearing Oura rings to monitor sleep and other biometric indicators while underway.

But lack of sleep, according to personnel, has been just one detriment experienced during the conflict with Iran. Service members have also faced food shortages onboard the carrier, the sailor said, with quality that fluctuated between bad and horrible. “It was either undercooked, overcooked or unrecognizable at all,” the sailor said. As extensions piled on, a decline in morale took on a recognizable tone at the phone center or in conversations at the galleys. Humor darkened even more than usual, and port visits meant less and less. “These things have been happening on deployments for always,” said Parker Moore, a nuclear reactor operator who served aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln before its recent deployment. “It is bad, but it is always bad.”

A small number of gamblers have made $8 million placing military and defense-related bets on the Polymarket prediction site, most placed by about 150 accounts that almost always bet correctly. The researchers say they suspect the accounts are linked to military insiders who could be flagged for law enforcement as “the most likely potential insiders,” researchers said in a new report. When the most successful of those accounts bet on unlikely military events, researchers found, they won virtually every single time. “Traders acting on specialized, non-public information possess an edge that is valuable only within a limited set of markets, and that produces win rates difficult to attribute to luck,” researchers with the Anti-Corruption Data Collective said in a new report released Thursday. The researchers studied the small number of bettors who met two criteria: ”The concentration of their betting within less than 100 markets and two topics, and unusual accuracy (over 75%) of their longshot bets.” The same research group published a report in April that found a high risk of insider trading on military-related Polymarkets after observing that “longshot” bets on military operations won 52% of the time, which was four times more often than other types of markets.

While ‘whales’ often lose, ‘orcas’ almost always win

The collective’s new report hones in on 152 accounts, which researchers analyzed and found certain behaviors that “support our hypothesis that they are the most likely insiders.” The accounts, which researchers called “orcas” or “highly specialized, incredibly successful bettors,” were compared to whales, who spend the most on a wide range of markets to “devour enormous profits,” mostly at the expense of “small fish” bettors who tried their luck but end up “losing out badly to the fat larger competition.” The collective found that half of the orca accounts made their first long-shot bet within two days of making their Polymarket account and waged higher bets more often on high-risk, low-probability markets. The 152 orca wallets placed $2 million on military longshot bets and won 97.2% of the time for $8 million, or over $52,500 per wallet. Despite spending overall less money on bets than others, orcas still made a return of 132% compared to whales and small fish whose losses were as high as -2%. At least half of the orcas doubled their money.

The trends could pose larger national security implications, the report said. The collective observed orcas placing bets first that were then followed by whales (a group which also may include bot accounts) and small fish. As an example, orcas made a series of longshot bets around Feb. 16, 2025, and again 48 hours before the U.S. began its March strikes on Iran. Those bets were followed by whales and potential bots. “Because every Polymarket trade is visible on a public blockchain in real time, an insider betting on confidential military information is effectively broadcasting that information to foreign adversaries,” the collective said. “Copycat behavior amplifies these signals, making them virtually impossible to contain.” The collective also pointed out that Polymarket allows users to bet with cryptocurrency tools that make tracing an account to its owner next to impossible. As a result, pinpointing “potential suspicious activity,” like government officials or military personnel using non-public information for monetary gain, may not be possible. The report recommended that Polymarket require government-issued identification for all bettors. The group’s findings come amid ongoing insider betting cases involving U.S. and Israeli military personnel. In April, U.S. Army Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a special operations soldier, was arrested and charged for making more than $400,000 in Polymarket bets related to Venezuela and the U.S. raid and capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Van Dyke was on a Navy vessel that helped stage the raid. In April, he pleaded not guilty and last month his lawyers asked for the case to be dismissed, arguing that federal prosecutors were trying to stretch current laws to make them fit his case. Several Israelis have also recently been arrested on suspicion of placing Polymarket bets based on classified information, including an arrest this month of an airman accused of using sensitive military information to bet on Iran and Yemen attacks. In May, Israel charged its first airman with similar crimes, and as part of his defense, the officer claimed that “The entire Israel Air Force is involved in gambling.”

The Trump administration says large volumes of oil are slipping through the Strait of Hormuz. The trackers whose job it is to count the world’s oil shipments see much less Energy Secretary Chris Wright said last week the U.S. military had helped ship over 15 million barrels* of crude and oil products out of the waterway last Tuesday. He put the average oil exports through the strait over a seven-day period at more than 8 million barrels a day. Earlier this month, Wright said the seven-day average stood at around 9 million barrels a day. The count from commercial ship trackers tells a different story, with estimates ranging from roughly 2 million to 6 million barrels a day. Industry figures on the amount of crude oil and oil products being loaded onto ships in the Persian Gulf and delivered to buyers don’t corroborate the U.S. claims.

There are lots of reasons the numbers can diverge. Many ships are crossing the strait at night with their transponders off, making them hard to track by radio signal or satellite imagery. Big tankers can carry 2 million barrels apiece, so missing one or two can make all the difference. Measurement periods also make a big difference, as do assumptions about how full ships are when they cross. Wright has said private data firms are undercounting ships that move covertly through the waterway. Still, a persistent gap remains between Washington’s estimates and what the market can independently verify. “What’s remarkable is how similar tanker trackers’ numbers are. You’d expect someone to have figured out a way to validate the White House numbers if there was a way,” said Rory Johnston, founder of Commodity Context, an oil-market research firm. “As of yet, I haven’t seen anyone do it.” U.K. Maritime Trade Operations, which is affiliated with the Royal Navy, cited U.S. Navy data in a report over the weekend that said the U.S. facilitated 74 transits through Hormuz from Thursday through Saturday, or around 25 transits a day on average. The numbers don’t specify how many were oil tankers or how many barrels they carried. The UKMTO hasn’t independently verified the U.S. data, but believes it to be accurate, a person familiar with the matter said.

“Commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remained at reduced levels,” UKMTO said in its report. “Independent tracking data indicated suppression with single-digit numbers transiting in both directions.” The discrepancy echoes the oil market’s familiar bane of “missing barrels”—volumes that show up in one set of figures but can’t readily be accounted for elsewhere. Such debates ultimately get settled in physical markets, where the oil is either available or it isn’t. So far, markets are relatively relaxed, with benchmark Brent crude futures elevated around $90 a barrel but well off their wartime highs, indicating the market isn’t desperate for supplies. Earlier in the war, a yawning gap emerged with physical market cargoes priced well above Brent futures, signaling immediate supply pressure and traders’ optimism that the war would be over soon. That gap—once as large as $36 a barrel—has narrowed to less than $6 in recent months, according to Argus Media, a price-reporting agency. Futures prices for oil that flow out of the Gulf, such as a grade of crude known as Dubai, have come down from $160 a barrel in late March to around $97 a barrel Friday, according to Argus Media. But the discrepancy does matter in terms of setting expectations for oil traders and for judging who is winning the economic war of attrition that Washington and Tehran are fighting, with oil as a key weapon.

The U.S. Navy for months has successfully guided some tankers through a protected route along the Omani side of the strait, eroding Iran’s control and easing the pressure on global oil markets. Iran responded in July by attacking ships using the route, sinking an agreement to open the waterway. On Monday, it threatened to fine or detain 46 ships it said had broken its rules for transiting the strait. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have also managed to route millions of barrels a day around the blockade by piping them across the desert to the Gulf of Oman or the Red Sea. Mohsen Rezaei, a top Iranian official, said late Sunday that those routes will be threatened if the U.S. continues its campaign of squeezing Iran’s economy. Kuwaiti, Iraqi and Emirati officials said some tankers are getting through under separate arrangements with Iran, meaning not all of the traffic is moving under U.S. protection. Ship trackers say roughly a third of the vessels that have transited the strait during August have used the Iranian-administered route along the northern reaches of the waterway.

With the war knocking out large volumes of supply, oil prices and the global economy are unusually sensitive to how much crude might come to market. Kpler, a ship-tracking firm, estimates that exports of crude and oil products through Hormuz have run at about 2.3 million barrels a day so far in August, down from 4.9 million barrels a day in July. Huax, another tracker, puts a current range for crude and refined products at 2 million to 5 million barrels a day. Johnston’s latest seven-day average of confirmed transits is about 4 million barrels a day, though he expects that to be raised to 5 million to 6 million as ships that made dark crossings turn their transponders back on after they clear the strait and their voyages can be reconstructed. Data from Vortexa, another tanker tracker, runs closer to the administration’s numbers but only across a short window. It says its seven-day average recently peaked at 9.2 million barrels a day. But its 28-day moving average, which the company says is more representative because it smooths out short-term spikes and volatility, remains at around 6 million barrels a day, underscoring how dramatically the picture can change depending on the dates selected.

The biggest problem for trackers is that many tankers are going dark. Ships normally broadcast their identity, position, speed and direction through AIS transponders, a radio-based automatic identification. But with many vessels switching off their AIS before crossing Hormuz, analysts have to reconstruct the voyages using satellite imagery and other clues. “So many ships are transiting dark, which makes it difficult to tally total tanker movements in real time,” said Bridget Diakun, maritime intelligence and research director at Lloyd’s List Intelligence. “We are partially waiting for AIS to come back on, but we also need to wait for satellite imagery to be available to validate sailings through Hormuz.” Satellites can help identify ships at berths in the Gulf and then in areas beyond the strait where ship-to-ship transfers occur. But satellite imagery just captures points in time and isn’t great for tracking the chokepoint itself, as it misses the bulk of the movements at night, she said. Detecting a ship doesn’t settle how many barrels moved. Analysts need to establish whether it was laden with oil or sailing empty. A very large crude carrier, or VLCC, is capable of holding roughly 2 million barrels, but that doesn’t mean it is full. The U.S. military has wider sources of information given its active presence around the Gulf, advanced sensors and communications with ships in transit. “I can’t get to 10 million barrels a day from the vessel and cargo picture available to me,” said Arsenio Longo, the founder of Huax. “The military may well be seeing vessels through radar, aircraft or other surveillance that commercial feeds miss.”

There is another way to check: Oil can’t move through the strait if it isn’t first put on tankers somewhere in the Persian Gulf. Those figures also don’t line up with the U.S. transit claims. LSEG puts crude and product loadings inside the Persian Gulf at about 4.4 million barrels a day in July and 1.9 million so far in August. The data provider says Iraq, which lacks a major bypass route, loaded just 1.1 million barrels a day so far this month, less than a third of prewar levels, while Kuwait loaded 0.5 million, one-fifth of its prewar rate. Kuwaiti officials say they are exporting more, around 1 million barrels a day. The ultimate check on Washington’s numbers is whether the barrels ultimately surface somewhere. Even if tankers disappear while crossing Hormuz, much of that oil should eventually show up in data on barrels unloaded to buyers or middlemen. So far, the U.S. government’s claimed volumes aren’t fully showing up in other countries’ import volumes. According to LSEG data, an average of 11.6 million barrels per day of Middle Eastern crude and refined products have been or are scheduled to be discharged in Asia. That number includes oil exports routed around Hormuz by pipeline, not just barrels escorted through the chokepoint.

A Pentagon questionnaire sent to NATO allies to assess their support for the US administration has ruffled some feathers in Europe, with a senior Estonian lawmaker telling Breaking Defense it’s a “novel” but flawed strategy that could divide the alliance and give adversaries an opening to exploit. Bloomberg first reported on the document on Aug. 14, saying that it included questions about governments’ public support for US policy, their level of engagement with US defense contractors and their position on the use of US military bases in-country, including whether use of the bases was allowed for Iran conflict operations. The questionnaire was reportedly linked to the ongoing US force posture review for the continent. “It is an unnecessary stress test and way to handle this,” Marko Mihkelson, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Estonian Parliament, told Breaking Defense this week. “To do your review on force posture, you can handle it in a way that serves both US national interests and those of allied countries. I don’t see the questionnaire as doing or serving this.”

damn, almost as if your interests don't actually matter to the Americans... wonder what word we have for that, when a country's interests are subordinated to those of another, hmm...

It is not unusual for NATO countries to receive questionnaires, Mihkelson said, but they usually come from NATO headquarters rather than being sent unilaterally by one nation. Still, news of the survey was not a huge surprise, he said, considering “the way the current [US] administration there handles things.” The Estonian lawmaker added that a better approach would have been to raise these issues at a NATO North Atlantic Council (NAC) meeting, where every ally sends one or more leaders to discuss the alliance’s collective security decisions. Mihkelson said he hasn’t personally seen the questionnaire, but said he understands it requires answers by Aug. 27, when the next NAC meeting is expected to take place at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels and be attended by the US Under Secretary for Defense Policy Elbridge Colby. Bloomberg and Al Jazeera reported that some current European officials have criticized the questionnaire, though most appear to be taking a more circumspect public approach.

A NATO official confirmed to Breaking Defense that Washington is working with allies on its force posture review but deferred to US authorities on specifics regarding the document. A spokesperson for the Norwegian Ministry of Defense told Breaking Defense that they were informed at the ministerial meeting in Brussels in June that such a request would be forthcoming and that they were “reviewing the questions and will respond to the US on the issues raised.” The Finnish President Alexander Stubb said in a press conference on Monday that he did not view the US move “as pressure, [as] it is the way the current US administration operates,” according to a Bloomberg report.

??? what is this guy even saying? it's not pressure since, well, they just do it to everyone!

Additionally, a spokesperson for the German Ministry of Defense said in an email to Breaking Defense that Berlin “has also been invited by the US to take part in its force posture review.” The spokesperson added that it has provided the European country with an opportunity “to continue its already close and trusting dialogue with the US” on common defense policy interests. Several other NATO nations did not respond to a request for comment. One vocal critic was Ivo Daalder, former US ambassador to NATO from 2009 to 2013. He said on X that the questionnaire “puts fealty above common interests,

DANG, what was the word for someone who has to swear fealty to another guy! Ugh, I really wish I could remember...

divides allies among themselves, weakens collective defense, and ultimately could destroy NATO.” A US official declined to directly address the questionnaire but told Breaking Defense, “President [Donald] Trump has made clear his deep disappointment about NATO allies’ lack of support throughout Operation Epic Fury, which is making the entire world safer by denuclearizing Iran. “The United States has thousands of troops stationed in Europe to protect Europe, but requests to use NATO bases during this conflict were denied,” the official said. “The United States expects to be able to use its bases in Europe to advance global and European, security.” An unnamed senior European defense official pushed back on that logic on Wednesday, telling Al Jazeera, “This administration has been confusing NATO topics with unilateral US military operations. … This questionnaire also reflects this confusion. NATO has nothing to do with the Middle East.” In the meantime, as European capitals weigh how to answer America’s queries, Mihkelson said other capitals will be watching closely: Moscow and Beijing. “It is critically important for us in this time, a time of not living in peace time, with a major war waging in Europe, that both in words and deeds to not make any steps to create an image that would indicate to Moscow or Beijing that NATO is not united or focused on deterring threats growing on our borders,” he said. “This is critical to avoid a miscalculation by either of those countries on visible division lines.”

The aircraft carrier USS George Washington transited the Arabian Sea today after arriving in the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) region yesterday, the command announced via X. The move was designed to relieve the overworked USS Abraham Lincoln and comes as the U.S. continues to maintain a naval blockade of Iranian ports amid ongoing tensions with Tehran. However, the deployment also leaves the U.S. bereft of aircraft carriers in the western Pacific, at least for the moment, highlighting the strain on one of its most important assets for American power projection. Extended deployments across multiple carriers are putting extreme stress on the carrier force and could have major cascading effects as maintenance required to reset these ships after deployments draws on longer than originally planned. At the same time, delays in carrier production could also exacerbate the future availability of the force. The need to redeploy the Washington from Yokosuka, Japan, where it is based, to the CENTCOM region was sparked by concerns about the condition of the crew of the Lincoln. That carrier reportedly endured grueling conditions amid round-the-clock operations without any liberty port calls since deploying last year. The issue sparked outrage from those worried about the mental and physical health of the sailors and Marines aboard, as well as pushback from U.S. officials who claimed the media was blowing the situation out of proportion. The addition of the Washington comes as the Lincoln has departed. That means there are now two carriers in the Middle East at the moment. The USS George H.W. Bush arrived in the region on April 23. While the U.S. and Iran have stopped firing at each other, the region remains a tinderbox. Both Washington and Tehran are claiming control over the Strait of Hormuz, and negotiations to end hostilities have broken down.

With the ongoing blockade, as well as CENTCOM’s efforts to move millions of barrels of oil through its preferred southern route close to Oman, there is still a need for the aviation assets provided by carriers and the strike and defensive missile capabilities provided by their escort ships. This is especially true for contingency operations, deterring Iran, and pressuring them to conform to Washington’s demands. As we noted earlier in this story, all this leaves Adm. Samuel Paparo, the commander of U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), with no carrier coverage in theater to deter or counter potential PRC or DPRK aggression. Carrier gaps in the Pacific were rare up until 2024, which marked the first time in decades that the U.S. had no flattops in Asia. Though the U.S. military has been largely focused on the Middle East, the PACOM region remains the top concern among many within the national security apparatus, as China is America’s top pacing threat and North Korea remains unpredictable and dangerous. Russian operations in the Pacific are another issue, among a slew of others. The extended deployment of the Lincoln, and the need to replace it, didn’t just create an issue, albeit temporary, for PACOM. Typical carrier deployments last about six to seven months, a period designed to ensure the ships can maintain readiness and the crews do not get worn out. When that doesn’t happen, it creates a cascading series of problems that affect not just the ships and crews, but the facilities that have scheduled repairs and lined up workers to make them happen.

The bottom line is that the longer these vessels stay out on cruise, the longer they have to stay in on deep maintenance, and past a certain point, the magnitude of this relationship skyrockets. Extra days out can turn into extra weeks in the yard, and so on. With yard facilities at a premium, especially those capable of dealing with a supercarrier, critical schedules can quickly implode, with work stacking up across multiple vessels, resulting in them being sidelined much longer than planned. You can read all about this in our past feature linked here. For instance, after returning from a historic 11-month deployment, USS Gerald R. Ford transited to Pier 5N at Norfolk Naval Shipyard in July to begin its first post-deployment Planned Incremental Availability (PIA). Ford’s PIA will take longer than initially expected due to the stress from its journey, including a fire in the laundry room that raged for more than 30 hours and will require an additional, concurrent availability. This will likely extend its time in dry dock, a situation experienced by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower after it had an epic deployment. Of note is that the damage to the Ford meant it had to depart the CENTCOM region in March at the height of the war on Iran. That left just one carrier on station, which, ironically, was the Lincoln.

There are several other issues being faced by the carrier force as the Navy has had to juggle maintenance schedules to make up for construction delays. The future Ford class USS John F. Kennedy is not scheduled for delivery until March 2027. JFK just completed Acceptance Trials Aug. 15, following a four-day underway period off the Atlantic Coast. The Navy had originally planned to take delivery of the Kennedy in 2022, but that was delayed until March 2027 “to support completion of Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG) certification and continued Advanced Weapons Elevator (AWE) work,” according to the Navy’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget request. To offset that, the decommissioning of the USS Nimitz was pushed back. The entire Ford class program has been running years behind schedule and now the U.S. Navy is reportedly evaluating changes to the Ford class that could add further delays. This includes moving the island superstructure further forward on the flight deck and abandoning the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) catapults and Advanced Weapons Elevators (AWE) on the Ford class, starting with the future USS Doris Miller. As for what carrier capacity is actually available today, four are currently offline or waiting to enter maintenance availabilities.

The USS John C. Stennis moved to complete a Refueling and Complex Overhaul (RCOH) period at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia in May 2021. When the contract was awarded to Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) in February 2021, work was expected to be completed by October 2025, and the downstream effects of the extended delay have rippled across the fleet. Nimitz class aircraft carriers typically complete RCOH, a lengthy modernization and maintenance period that includes a nuclear refuel, at the halfway point of their expected 50-year service life. The Navy is rethinking its approach to speed up future such overhauls and cut down on labor requirements, beginning with USS Harry S. Truman. Truman is pierside in Norfolk, Virginia, waiting to enter RCOH following the Stennis, as only one shipyard on the East Coast is capable of conducting such invasive maintenance. USS Ronald Reagan is the only carrier on the West Coast that is unavailable to deploy today. It was previously forward-deployed to Yokosuka, Japan, completed a hull swap with USS George Washington in mid-2025 and is currently in dry dock at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility in Bremerton, Washington. When the contract for the Drydocking PIA (DPIA) was awarded in 2025, work was expected to be completed by August 2026, and the timeline appears to be on schedule. According to Stars & Stripes, Ronald Reagan is expected to wrap up the 17-month DPIA and return to service by the end of the month.

This leaves three carriers that could be pushed toward the Pacific in an emergency, one of which is largely ready for deployment. The USS Theodore Roosevelt, USS Carl Vinson, and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower are in various states of readiness and working up in preparation for future deployments. Theodore Roosevelt, which completed COMPTUEX in May before participating in large-scale exercise RIMPAC 2026 over the summer, is expected to deploy in the very near term, and is the most likely to be sent to the Pacific. Also homeported out of San Diego, Carl Vinson pulled out of port on August 10 and is underway training off the West Coast. As of publication. Dwight D. Eisenhower finished a 16-month post-deployment PIA and completed sea trials in April, and most recently returned home on July 27 after conducting an ammo onload with dry cargo/ammo ship USNS Medgar Evers. Lincoln, as we noted earlier in this piece, is heading home to San Diego after leaving the CENTCOM region, but when it will return to service is unknown. There is an upcoming DPIA scheduled for the carrier, according to Fiscal Year 2027 budget documents, but the timeline is unclear. Based on the history of other lengthy carrier deployments, that could be delayed as well. So, it’s likely another carrier strike group will be heading toward the West Pacific soon and the gap won’t be a prolonged one, but after multiple prolonged deployments, America’s carrier force may be set up for a larger availability crisis down the line.