The U.S. Air Force Has a Maintenance Problem

The Air Force is experiencing surging maintenance delays, with 74 percent of aircraft missing their depot completion deadlines—up from 31 percent in 2019. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report reveals that the true extent of these readiness delays has been masked by officials altering target timelines after discovering unplanned maintenance. The unplanned surprises found when aircraft are in the Air Force’s depots for maintenance aren’t being reflected in the statistics that the service uses in the assessments of depot maintenance.

A GAO Report States The Air Force Isn’t Meeting Deadlines

This latest report shows that the Air Force “is not reporting the full extent of depot maintenance challenges and may not be able to make accurate comparisons across the fleet,” the GAO says. Air Force maintainers have masked the delays because officials often revise their target timelines after unplanned work is discovered. These unplanned delays are hurting the service’s aircraft availability for training and operations. Air and Space Forces magazine reports that, “Depot maintenance is the highest, most intensive level of military maintenance, covering repairs requiring the overhaul, upgrading, or rebuilding of parts or structures, according to U.S. law.” The Air Force has three major maintenance depots:

• Ogden Air Logistics Complex at Hill Air Force Base, Utah
• Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia
• Oklahoma City Air Logistics Complex at Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma

What Are The Primary Factors In The USAF’s Maintenance Delays?

Several systemic challenges drive this Air Force maintenance crisis. The Air Force has an aging aircraft fleet, with age-related wear and tear on highly complex aircraft making them more susceptible to unplanned repairs and a critical shortage of skilled technicians. Making matters worse, the Air Force has masked the true severity of these bottlenecks by shifting target deadlines to match the actual, slower performance of its maintenance depots.

An Aging Aircraft Fleet Presents Constant Challenges

Surging unplanned maintenance is a direct result of the aging of its air fleet. As aircraft age, depots routinely uncover unexpected issues like corrosion or structural stress cracks during routine maintenance. This unplanned work has increased significantly, making it difficult to stick to the original schedule. The masked metrics in the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that nearly three-quarters of Air Force aircraft experienced delays. However, the scale of the problem was hidden because officials regularly revised target timelines after unplanned work was discovered, making it appear as though depots were meeting their goals.

The Air Force’s Losing Battle Against the Private Sector

Workforce shortages are reaching critical levels. Maintenance depots struggle with critical staffing challenges because the Air Force can’t compete with the private sector on pay and benefits. The Air Force’s challenge of recruiting and retaining engineers and mechanics has been constant. The GAO Report highlighted, “The depots have taken some steps to mitigate this challenge by selectively using incentives and emphasizing the nonfinancial benefits of a federal career. “However, the Air Force has not fully addressed pay competition with the private sector because DOD has not conducted a comprehensive assessment of pay gaps for occupations affected by private sector competition. “Such an assessment would enable the depots to make informed decisions to address competition with the private sector for occupations critical to aircraft readiness.”

Creating A Pathway For Recruitment

A recent article in War on the Rocks suggests that to address maintenance workforce issues, the Air Force should launch a targeted recruitment campaign in high schools and technical schools that emphasizes service career opportunities and benefits. “Streamlined pathways for obtaining certifications, such as an Airframe and Powerplant (A&P), can make the Air Force more appealing in an increasingly competitive hiring field. Tying these certification programs to service commitments can ensure a steady influx of qualified maintainers.”

Supply Chain Issues Plague All Of The Services

Supply chain and parts delays aren’t just an Air Force problem but a Pentagon-wide issue. The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) lost thousands of vendors (roughly 22 percent of its total supplier community) over recent years, which has drastically increased pricing and lead times. However, complex aircraft, such as the F-35 and F-22, require highly specialized parts, technical training, and logistical support systems, and these systems have struggled to keep pace. Primary factors include contractor shortages, reliance on foreign-sourced parts, and cyber vulnerabilities. The USAF is actively mitigating these risks using AI

and predictive logistics frameworks.

Having the “right stuff at the right place at the right time” in the Pacific theater is “a little bit of a maths problem,” says U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s strategy director for logistics and engineering. “Hawaii is 3,000 miles from the West Coast. Guam is 5,000 miles from Hawaii, and the first island chain”—which includes Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines—“is 1,500 miles from Guam,” Brig. Gen. Jim Bliss of the New Zealand Army said this month during the Indo-Pacific Security Forum. It’s “a vast ocean,” with “very, very little in the way of logistics nodes on land forward available to be used,” Bliss said. If troops and materiel aren’t “forward when the fighting starts,” it will be difficult to get them there in time, he said. It’s a problem that preoccupied many U.S. military leaders in the region. “Here in the Indo-Pacific, a robust domestic base is a hollow shell if we cannot project that power across the tyranny of distance,” said Gen. Xavier Brunson, the commander of U.S. Forces Korea, during a keynote speech at AUSA’s Land Forces Pacific conference. “We cannot win if our supply lines are 5,000 miles long.”The U.S. Army’s “delivers foundational sustainment capabilities to the entire joint force. And I’m fervent in my belief that nobody knows or senses or feels viscerally the scale of sustainment than our nation’s Army,” Indo-Pacific commander leader Adm. Samuel Paparo said at LANPAC.

Maj. Gen. Gavin Gardner, commander of the Army’s 8th Theater Sustainment Command, reiterated that point later in the conference. Pre-positioning equipment forward, with partners like the Defense Logistics Agency and Army Materiel Command, and building what the Army calls joint interior lines, “quite frankly, demonstrates our ability to overcome that 7,000-mile distance” from the continental United States to “where we think we need to operate.” Noting that he’d “rather get a root canal” than have to import things into Australia, Gardner said the Army has been prepositioning equipment there on a significant scale. Still, he said, the issue is not just “storage and distribution,” it’s also about the ability to repair things when they break—without sending them back to the continental United States. “We don’t want to” send it back, Gardner said. “We want to repair it forward. We want to repair it forward now, in what I call ‘competition’” so it’s ready when a conflict or crisis emerges. In the past, he said, the unit had to send a broken Army watercraft to the U.S. West Coast. But because of expanded contracts, “now, I can fix it in South Korea. I could fix it in Japan. I could fix it in the Philippines. I could fix it in Australia. I could fix it in Singapore. “That may sound like a small thing, but you know, that towing of a ship—two years in a row—all the way back from Australia—two years in a row—it takes a long time. That’s a 30-day sail in order to get it back,” he said, referring to the annual Talisman Sabre exercise.

Such a delay is untenable, USFK’s Brunson said. “We cannot shuttle broken equipment across an ocean for repair while an adversary evolves on our doorstep,” he said. On the Korean peninsula, Brunson said, “we’re already fixing forward and improving the concept.” Korean dry docks have “successfully overhauled” three U.S. ships, with two more in the queue. And by “leveraging special repair authority and weaponizing advanced manufacturing, we’re transforming our theater blueprint into a permanent deterrent.” Resilience “is no longer a support function, but has to be a warfighting function,” said Marine Maj. Gen. George Rowell, INDOPACOM’s director of strategic planning and policy. “It means sustaining combat power, command and control, and logistics, and being able to take hits in a degraded environment.” The way forward, Rowell said, is to “supercharge our defense industrial base,” and “innovate with non-traditional primes.”

["prime" is in reference to "prime contractor", the traditional ones would be your major MIC companies like your Lockheeds and Boeings, so this would be about looking into other companies - and of course, classic business bro bullshit of believing that enough "innovation" is going to magically solve your deindustrialization]

“China possesses over 50 percent of the global commercial shipbuilding capacity, while the U.S. has about 0.1 percent, making it imperative that we accelerate capacity through both established and emerging industrial partners.” A day after Rowell’s keynote at the Indo-Pacific Security Forum, Paparo told the audience at LANPAC that Allied forces won World War II “because industry built combat power at scale, a scale that the Axis powers could never match. And American sustainment delivered, from the factory floor to the fighting positions across the globe.” Now, Paparo said, “we set the theater,” by posturing forces and pre-positioning sustainment, and creating “a network of distribution centers” throughout the Indo-Pacific. But, he said, “we’ve got to be smart about how and where you’re pre-positioning ammunition stocks, because in this 21st-century warfare environment, you must [protect] those things that can’t be moved, and you must always be moving the things that you can.”

MOVE THEM TO WHERE, FUCKING AQUAMAN'S CELLAR!?

and also, protect them with what, all the air defense missiles you just used up against Iran?

Marine Maj. Gen. Matthew Mowery, deputy commander of Marine Corps Forces Pacific, said the Marines set a goal of being able to sustain their own forces for 45 days within the first island chain. But he can’t build up an “iron mountain” of equipment and supplies. And ultimately, Mowery said, “If we think that…if and when deterrence fails, and a crisis goes to conflict, we think we’re going to have 45 days to bring in, you know, all of our equipment sets and bring those forces in—we have not been kidding ourselves, but we would be kidding ourselves. If you don’t have those forces here when the shooting starts, you’d better plan to live without them.” Maj. Gen. Ash Collingburn, commander of the Australian army’s 1st Division, echoed Mowery later that week. “If it’s not forward when the fighting starts, then it’s really hard to get” needed supplies and people forward, he said. “I see sustainment as the key challenge in the theater—across time, across distance, across contested lines of communication. If we want to campaign at the edge, we need to be able to sustain.”

The United Kingdom has long maintained an active military presence in the Mediterranean. In February, the Royal Air Force (RAF) dispatched six F-35B Lightning fifth-generation stealth fighters to Cyprus as part of its efforts to bolster the defensive readiness of British sovereign base territories and assets amid rising tensions in the Middle East. The short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) F-35 was deployed from RAF Marham, joining the approximately 10 Eurofighter Typhoon fighters stationed at RAF Akrotiri on the island in the eastern Mediterranean. Another pair of British F-35s is now on the Azores islands, but it isn’t part of a planned deployment. Instead, the aircraft have been stuck at Lajes International Airport since their arrival on March 9, 2026.

Two US-Made F-35s Didn’t Quite Make It Across the Atlantic

How the two F-35Bs managed to become stranded is almost comical, and London could take it as a sign not to move forward with additional acquisitions of the US-made stealth aircraft. The two fighters were part of the final batch of Lot 17 fighters scheduled for delivery to the UK in March. Five aircraft departed from Lockheed Martin’s factory in Fort Worth, Texas, and set out for RAF Marham, but just three completed the journey. All five stopped in the Azores, which serves as a refueling and staging base for US and NATO aircraft crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Two aircraft experienced technical faults and have remained at Lajes awaiting repairs. Of course, there are worse places for a military aircraft to go on vacation. The islands, which have been described as a mix of Hawaii and Iceland, are known for their scenic beauty, so pilots likely have no problem making a stopover for a day or two to rest and recover. A decades-old bilateral treaty with Portugal even covers US activity at Lajes. Last December, the former Danish F-16 Fighting Falcons that were sold to Argentina also made a stopover in the Azores. However, no one expected that the UK’s brand new F-35s would be essentially stuck on a lasting holiday on the islands. This also comes just a year after a British F-35B, operating from the flagship aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales during the Operation Highmast mission to the Indo-Pacific, was forced to divert to Thiruvananthapuram International Airport in India due to mechanical problems. The aircraft remained at the base for five weeks in June and July 2025, eventually flying back after repairs were completed at the airport. Just weeks later, another F-35B operating from the flattop diverted to Kagoshima Airport in south-western Japan after experiencing an in-flight malfunction.

...

The RAF Is Having Second Thoughts About New F-35s

The UK acquired 48 F-35Bs, but with the loss of aircraft ZM152 from HMS Queen Elizabeth in November 2021, the official number of operational F-35s stands at 47. However, according to July 2025 data from the UK’s National Audit Office, only about one-third of the fleet is currently considered fully mission-capable. Those numbers are even worse than those of the United States Air Force’s fleet of F-35As, the conventional takeoff and landing variants, which had a 67.15 percent mission-capable rate in 2024. The problem is made worse in the UK, as the RAF and Royal Navy lack the spare components needed to keep the aircraft flying. “The intensive demands of Operation Highmast, the 2025 Indo-Pacific deployment, had already consumed significant engineering effort and spare parts reserves,” the UK-based Navy Lookout reported, and added that the surge for the deployment required that spares be stripped from RAF Marham to ensure the 24 F-35Bs assigned to the carrier could be maintained accordingly. “The surge to 24 F-35Bs exceeded the designed capacity of the carrier’s Afloat Spares Pack, which was only sized to support 12 aircraft,” the report noted.

There has been speculation that the RAF would place a follow-up order for at least 27 F-35Bs to bring the fleet up to 74 aircraft, but some British lawmakers have pushed back on the planned acquisition. The mishaps last year and the fact that a full order can’t be delivered accordingly are certainly black marks against the UK buying even more F-35s. However, the UK doesn’t have many options. It may still move forward with an acquisition of the F-35A, which can restore the UK’s capability to deliver a US-owned B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb as part of NATO arrangements, explained Aerospace Global News. Finally, the UK remains committed to the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) with its partners, Italy and Japan, to develop a sixth-generation manned fighter. Critics of the F-35 have called for redirecting funding to the domestic GCAP rather than the American F-35 program.

President Trump said Thursday that he plans to send 5,000 troops to Poland, a move that is intended to reassure an ally but which won’t forestall the White House’s effort to shrink the American military presence in Europe. “Based on the successful Election of the now President of Poland, Karol Nawrocki,” Trump wrote in a social-media post, “I am pleased to announce that the United States will be sending an additional 5,000 Troops to Poland.” Trump’s decision followed a surprise move by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this month to cancel the nine-month rotation of an armored brigade to Poland from Fort Hood, Texas. The decision by Hegseth drew sharp criticism from Republican and Democratic lawmakers and concerned Polish officials, who told The Wall Street Journal they weren’t consulted about the move. Hegseth’s move also surprised some officials because it was Germany—not Poland—that criticized the U.S. strategy in the war with Iran, drawing Trump’s ire. In early May, Trump responded to criticism from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz by ordering the withdrawal of 5,000 troops from the country, a process that the Pentagon said would take six to 12 months.

did Hegseth mix up the two countries in a drunken stupor or something?

A current and a former U.S. official said Trump asked Hegseth in a recent phone call why the troop deployment to Poland was canceled. Trump told Hegseth that the U.S. shouldn’t treat Poland poorly, given it is an American ally with close ties to the White House. There are currently about 10,000 U.S. troops stationed in Poland. White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said, “President Trump appreciates all the secretary has done—and will continue to do—in executing the America First agenda within our military and prioritizing our warfighters like never before.” The Pentagon also said Trump and Hegseth were on the same page.

uh-huh

“President Trump and Secretary Hegseth communicate constantly and are in lockstep regarding U.S. troop movements in Europe,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement. The Wall Street Journal first reported in April that Trump was considering punishing countries that didn’t support the war with Iran by removing U.S. troops. In his social-media post Thursday, Trump didn’t say which American units would be sent to Poland, whether they would come from elsewhere in Europe or whether he was prepared to reinstate the canceled deployment. Trump said earlier this month that he might send some troops to Poland from Germany. One option that has been under discussion in the Pentagon would shift the 2nd Cavalry Regiment to Poland from Vilseck, Germany. Such a step would give Trump a way to punish Germany while maintaining close ties with Warsaw. Nawrocki, an ally of the president, took office in August. Nawrocki posted a picture of himself on X with Trump in the Oval Office from his visit last year to Washington. He also issued a statement thanking Trump and calling the Polish-American alliance “a vital pillar of security for every Polish home.”

It would also keep overall U.S. troop levels in Europe on a downward trajectory, which is in line with the Pentagon’s longer-term policy to reduce the U.S. military commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and give European allies the lead responsibility for conventional defense. U.S. relations with Europe have been severely strained as Trump has mused about acquiring Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, and amid disagreements over the war with Iran. The brigade that had been headed to Poland for nine months—the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Cavalry Division—has more than 4,000 troops. Hegseth’s decision to halt its deployment provided a quick way to reduce U.S. force levels in Europe. The decision was so sudden, however, that Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and acting Army chief of staff Gen. Christopher LaNeve acknowledged during congressional testimony that they were only told the deployment had been canceled a couple of days before that decision was announced.

Poland’s deputy defense minister, Pawel Zalewski, who met with U.S. officials at the Pentagon on Thursday, said the U.S. planned to present options to Warsaw in coming weeks on ways “not to decrease American engagement in Poland.” Zalewski said his government was prepared to build infrastructure to house new troops and their dependents so the American units could be permanently stationed in Poland. “We have offered to the Pentagon to host American soldiers on a permanent basis, and we understand what it means,” Zalewski said in an interview. “It means that we have to build a small city for this unit, and we are ready for that. We will cover the cost.” While Trump’s move is expected to ease concerns in Warsaw, other adjustments to the U.S. policy toward NATO are in the works. The U.S. is reducing the number of forces it is prepared to send to Europe in a conflict under the NATO Force Model, which specifies the forces and assets countries would provide in crisis, U.S. officials said. That step, which the administration plans to brief allies on in coming days, is being taken so the U.S. can allocate more forces to the Pacific and Western Hemisphere, as stipulated in the Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy.

In Congress, frustration has been mounting over the Trump administration’s bypassing of lawmakers on the Iran war and now the troop withdrawal from Europe. Lawmakers and aides have been trying to piece together the Pentagon’s troop withdrawal plan. The first briefings on the withdrawal by Pentagon officials to congressional staff, including for the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, happened only this week and were conducted by career officials, not senior-level political appointees, people familiar with the matter said. Republican lawmakers have said they could take legislative action to preclude deeper force cuts in Europe, such as by inserting provisions in Pentagon spending bills, including the National Defense Authorization Act. “There will be more action in the 2027 NDAA to create even more guardrails than already exist,” Rep. Mike Rogers, the Alabama Republican who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, said this week. Asked whether lawmakers could signal their concern by limiting travel budgets for senior Pentagon officials, Rogers said: “It won’t just be travel budgets.” The latest National Defense Authorization Act stipulated that U.S. force levels in Europe cannot be reduced below 76,000 troops unless a comprehensive series of assessments are provided to lawmakers on the effects on U.S. security. Withdrawing any equipment with an initial purchase value of more than $500,000 would require similar assessments.

The war in Ukraine has been defined by periodic bursts of certainty that Russia is on the back foot, if not close to collapse, and that Ukraine, conversely, is inches away from victory. We appear to be in the middle of one of these moments of euphoria now. Finnish President Alexander Stubb has declared that Ukraine is “on top” and “in a much better place than it has been at any stage in this horrific war,” charging that Russia is unable to recruit enough soldiers to make up for those it’s losing. Ukrainians have “a growing self-confidence” on account of the territory they have supposedly retaken, as one former U.S. ambassador put it, and their growing confidence over military advances “is strikingly higher today than a year ago,” charged another. A spate of reports have it that the walls are closing in on Russian President Vladimir Putin. A Ukrainian military breakthrough is imminent, in other words, and Ukraine’s population remains committed to endless fighting. But this is hard to square with Ukraine’s growing recruitment crisis, most viscerally embodied by the growing violent resistance to its policy of forced conscription.

For years now, videos have circulated of ordinary Ukrainians being “recruited” for military service — or, put more bluntly, being snatched by sometimes masked men from the streets or their homes, and dragged into a minivan to be driven away. It is part of a war mobilization effort that has been wracked with controversy, including a series of bribery scandals going back years, widespread allegations of abuse, and the drafting of mentally and physically disabled men. Unsurprisingly, forced conscription has been unpopular. A petition calling for the end of mobilization in public places quickly passed the 25,000-signature threshold for a presidential response. Before long, recruitment officers started facing angry protests from local communities. Last year, Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets publicly labeled it a “coercive system” and revealed that complaints against enlistment officers with the Territorial Recruitment Centers (TRC) had exploded more than 33,000% since the start of the war — from just 18 in 2022 to more than 6,000 in 2025. As the war has gone on, civil disobedience against conscription practices has turned increasingly violent. The year 2025 was bookended by killings of draft officers. At the close of January, a man showed up at a military training center and shot dead a TRC officer who had “recruited” an acquaintance of his. In December, a draft officer was fatally stabbed in the groin by a man whose papers he asked to see, and who went on to attack three other officers before fleeing.

As the Kyiv Independent, hardly an antiwar outlet, noted in its report on the stabbing, videos of violent “recruitment” practices were “initially dismissed as an exaggeration fuelled by Russian disinformation networks,” but were in reality widespread thanks to Ukraine’s manpower shortage and a sharp drop in voluntary enlistment. December also saw a group of people attack TRC officers trying to check their papers, leaving one with a broken rib. The violence has only escalated this year. The end of this past January saw a man kill a draft officer and escape with one of the conscripts he was escorting. February saw at least two separate attacks on TRC officers in Kharkiv and in the Lviv Oblast, with the latter suspected by police of trying to help a conscript escape. A month later, a group ran a minivan driven by recruiters off the road and broke in to free the conscript they were transporting. The first week of April saw three stabbings in four days, including a recruiter pierced in the neck by a customs officer whose brother he and his colleagues allegedly tried to forcibly mobilize. A few days later, a group of teenagers attacked TRC officers to protect a man they were trying to conscript, and the month ended with a 48-year-old soldier going AWOL and firing an automatic weapon at a car that TRC officers and a policeman were in, sending two to the hospital. Only a few days ago, an alleged draft-dodger sent two more recruiters to the hospital in serious condition, stabbing them after they tried to check his papers.

According to government figures, these incidents are just a handful of more than 600 attacks on enlistment officers carried out since the start of the war, with the number of assaults nearly tripling from 2024 to 2025, when 341 were recorded. The first four months of 2026 alone have seen at least 117 attacks, more than 20 times the five that were recorded in the war’s entire first year. How, then, does this square with polling that has tended to show, even recently, a Ukrainian population willing to fight indefinitely until military victory?

“Almost all of those polls are exclusively in the territory under the control of the Ukrainian government,” says Volodymyr Ishchenko, research associate at the Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. “That means they don’t poll Ukrainians in Crimea, in Donbas, in the occupied territories, in the EU, or Ukrainians who went to Russia as refugees, and there are millions of them.” “So up to one third of the total population of those who carry Ukrainian passports are not even polled,” Ishchenko adds. Other metrics point to a silent reluctance to fight. Ukraine’s own defense minister revealed this year that there were 2 million draft dodgers and 200,000 cases of desertion. While voluntary enlistment drove the war’s early months, conscription is now responsible for 70% of recruitment. Ukrainian nationals who fled to Europe at the start of the war have resisted European efforts to send them back, in some cases to be drafted at the Ukrainian government’s request. While affluent Ukrainians are able to bribe their way out of being conscripted, the commander of Ukraine’s National Guard has urged those who “have money problems” to join the military. According to one analysis of Ukrainian casualty figures, the vast majority of those killed in action come disproportionately from small towns, where poverty rates tended to be higher.

What’s at stake is more than whether Ukraine wins or loses. The prolongation of the war has created and intensified a severe economic and demographic crisis for Ukraine that threatens its future as a stable and functioning state. Last week, the head of Ukraine’s Office of Migration Policy estimated that 70% of those abroad may not return to the country, threatening labor shortages in critical sectors. The Ukrainian state, which already is kept afloat through massive loans from Europe, owes an unsustainable debt worth many billions of euros to the families of dead soldiers, whose numbers have ballooned. Much of this is unknown to Western publics. English-language reports about violent resistance to conscription are dwarfed by stories claiming Russia is faltering. Some Ukrainian-language reports about the country’s recruitment and demographic crises are simply never translated to English. And so, those who most ardently back Ukraine unwittingly cheer policies that ensure its gradual destruction.

The U.S. military has depleted much of its inventory of advanced missile-defense interceptors after expending far more high-end munitions defending Israel amid hostilities with Iran than Israeli forces used themselves, according to Defense Department assessments described to The Washington Post. The imbalance, according to three U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters, underscores the extent to which Washington has shouldered the burden of countering Iranian ballistic missile strikes during Operation Epic Fury, and raises questions about U.S. military readiness and security commitments around the world. The United States launched more than 200 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, interceptors in defense of Israel — roughly half of the Pentagon’s total inventory — along with more than 100 Standard Missile-3 and Standard Missile-6 interceptors fired from naval vessels in the eastern Mediterranean, said the U.S. officials, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters. By contrast, Israel fired fewer than 100 of its Arrow interceptors and around 90 David’s Sling interceptors, some of which were used against less sophisticated projectiles fired by Iran-backed groups in Yemen and Lebanon.

Military analysts said the data described to The Post offers a rare window into how the United States and Israel work together. “The numbers are striking,” said Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “The United States absorbed most of the missile defense mission while Israel conserved its own magazines. Even if the operational logic was sound, the United States is left with roughly 200 THAAD interceptors and a production line that can’t keep pace with demand.” The shortage of U.S. interceptors has alarmed U.S. allies in Asia, particularly Japan and South Korea, which rely on the United States as a deterrent to potential threats from North Korea and China.

get fucked compradors, maybe you should've been vassals to a country that actually fucking makes things

“That bill risks coming due in theaters that have nothing to do with Iran,” said Grieco.

yeah, that's, uh, kind of how imperial overextension works

U.S. and Israeli officials routinely tout their close cooperation and the strength of Israel’s multilayered air-defense system. But the Defense Department assessments suggest a more lopsided dynamic. “In total, the U.S. shot around 120 more interceptors and engaged twice as many Iranian missiles,” said a U.S. administration official. If the United States and Israel resume hostilities against Iran in the coming days, as President Donald Trump has threatened to do, the U.S. military is likely to expend an even greater share of interceptors because of a recent decision by the Israeli military to take some of its missile defense batteries offline for maintenance, said an administration official. “The imbalance will likely be exacerbated if fighting restarts,” the official said.

In a statement, the Pentagon defended the balance of military resources used between Israel and the United States. “Ballistic missile interceptors are just one tool in a vast network of systems and capabilities that comprise a layered and integrated air defense network,” said Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman. “Both Israel and the United States carried the defensive burden equitably during Operation Epic Fury, which saw both countries employ fighter aircraft, counter-UAS systems, and various other advanced air and missile defense capabilities with maximal effectiveness.” The Israeli government also defended the approach. “Operations Roaring Lion and Epic Fury were coordinated at the highest and closest levels, to the benefit of both countries and their allies,” the Israeli Embassy in Washington said in a statement. “The U.S. has no other partner with the military willingness, readiness, shared interests, and capabilities of Israel.”

capabilities such as "sending a bunch of our lieutenant generals (all 19 years old btw) to stand out in the open and, to everyone's shock, get droned"

Since the start of the conflict on Feb. 28, the U.S. and Israel have worked together closely, killing Iran’s supreme leader and scores of senior Iranian military and political leaders while laying waste to Iran’s navy and air force. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was central to persuading Trump to go to war, promising an offensive that would inspire regime change and rid the country of its ability to develop a nuclear weapon, said U.S. officials. But tensions have grown between the two allies as the war has proven more challenging than either leader anticipated. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has choked global energy supplies and ramped up inflation. |Despite Trump’s claims that Iran’s missile arsenal has been “mostly decimated,” Tehran retains about 70 percent of its prewar stockpiles of missiles, according to U.S. intelligence. Much of Iran’s highly enriched uranium probably remains in the nuclear facilities bombed by the U.S. and Israel last year. On Tuesday, Netanyahu and Trump held a tense phone call about the path forward, said U.S. and Middle Eastern officials. The Israeli leader’s persistent pressure to restart the war has irritated some U.S. officials, particularly given the strain that renewed fighting would impose on the Pentagon’s munitions supply.

and are these "irritated" officials going to actually fucking do something about it?

“Israel is not capable of fighting and winning wars on its own, but nobody actually knows this, because they never see the back end,” said a second administration official. It’s unclear whether the United States’ munitions shortages factor into Trump’s deliberations over restarting the war. Earlier this week, Trump said he called off an imminent military strike on Iran at the behest of America’s Arab allies who urged him to consider a peace deal with Iran that would restrict its nuclear program in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz and ending the war. “We’re in the final stages of Iran. We’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday. “We’ll either have a deal, or we’re going to do some things that are a little bit nasty.” In preparation for a potential resumption of hostilities, the United States moved more naval assets near Israel to provide additional protection from Iranian threats.

If fighting does resume, the extent to which Iran’s allies in the region may join in will be a significant factor, said U.S. officials. During the last round of fighting, Israel could generate only 50 percent of the airstrikes by the end of March compared with the beginning of the war because its aircraft and pilots were “worn down” by operations against Houthi militants in Yemen and airstrikes targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon, said a U.S. official. “The sortie degradation is important,” said Grieco. “The IDF was worn down by Gaza, Lebanon, and the question I have is whether Israeli commanders underestimated their ability to sustain operational tempo.”

lol. lmao. can't even sustain a month of bombing without losing half of your fucking capability to just maintenance and stress.

Given that Israel uses a lot of the same planes that the US does, I feel like it's not unrealistic to assume the US itself also suffered similar degradation in their sortie rates, probably somewhat less since the US hat more planes in total at least. Now imagine what would happen in a war against China, against a far more capable air defense network, and with US bases getting even greater quantities of missiles and drones thrown at 'em.

According to officials, the two countries agreed in advance to a ballistic missile-defense framework that effectively ensured that high-end interceptors such as THAAD and ship-based missiles would absorb the bulk of ballistic threats to Israel. Israel relies more heavily on lower-tier systems such as Iron Dome and David’s Sling to counter projectiles from groups such as Hezbollah and the Houthis, while conserving its more sophisticated interceptors. The result, officials said, was a “significant” drawdown of U.S. stockpiles while Israel was able to maintain its higher-end air defense stockpiles. The dynamic seemed to clash with Trump’s “America First,” mantra, said Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian CATO Institute. “Since Trump took office again, Israel’s position makes sense: our priorities first, our resources last,” he said. “Why Trump has tried to make this America First is less clear.” After the Pentagon last year reportedly disclosed having only 25 percent of the Patriot air defense inventory needed to fulfill existing U.S. defense plans, it should’ve been a wake up call, said Logan. “Why this wasn’t a screeching siren to Trump officials is a mystery,” he said.

The rebuilding of military capabilities, including replacing missile sites, launchers and production capacity for key weapons systems destroyed during the current conflict, means that Iran remains a significant threat to regional allies should President Donald Trump restart the bombing campaign, according to the four sources familiar with the intelligence. It also calls into question claims about the extent to which US-Israeli strikes have degraded Iran’s military in the long term. While the time to restart production of different weapons components varies, some US intelligence estimates indicate Iran could fully reconstitute its drone attack capability in as soon as six months, one of the sources, a US official, told CNN. “The Iranians have exceeded all timelines the IC [intelligence community] had for reconstitution,” the US official said.

Drone attacks are a particular concern for regional allies. If hostilities resume, Iran could augment its missile production capability — which has been significantly degraded — with more drone launches, to continue firing at Israel and Gulf countries that are well within range of both weapons systems. Trump has repeatedly threatened to resume combat operations against Iran if the two countries fail to reach a deal to end the war, including saying publicly on Tuesday that he’d been an hour from restarting bombing, meaning these military capabilities could come into play. Iran has been able to rebuild much faster than expected due to a combination of factors, ranging from support it is receiving from Russia and China to the fact that the US and Israel did not inflict as much damage as the two countries had hoped, one of the sources told CNN.

love how "the Iranians actually, y'know, have a lot industry" doesn't enter the discussion at all, always the same shit with westerners...

For example, China has continued to provide Iran with components during the conflict that can be used to build missiles, two sources familiar with US intelligence assessments told CNN, though that has likely been curtailed by the ongoing US blockade. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CBS last week that China is giving Iran “components of missile manufacturing” but declined to elaborate further. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun denied the allegation during a press conference, calling it “not based on facts.” Meanwhile, Iran also still maintains ballistic-missile, drone-attack and anti-air capability despite the serious damage inflicted by US-Israeli strikes, according to recent US intelligence assessments, meaning the quick rebuilding of military production capacity isn’t starting from scratch. A spokesperson for US Central Command declined to comment, saying the command does not discuss matters related to intelligence.

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told CNN in a statement that “America’s military is the most powerful in the world and has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the President’s choosing.”

if I keep declaring "I'm the toughest guy around" surely it will become true!

“We have executed multiple successful operations across combatant commands while ensuring the U.S. military possesses a deep arsenal of capabilities to protect our people and our interests,” Parnell added. CNN reported in April that US intelligence assessed that roughly half of Iran’s missile launchers had survived US strikes. A recent report increased that figure to two thirds partially due to the ongoing ceasefire providing Iran with time to dig out launchers that might have been buried in previous strikes, according to sources familiar with the intelligence. The US intelligence assessment total may include launchers that are currently inaccessible, such as those buried underground by strikes but not destroyed. Thousands of Iranian drones still exist — roughly 50% of the country’s drone capabilities — two sources previously told CNN the intelligence indicated. The intelligence also showed a large percentage of Iran’s coastal defense cruise missiles were intact, consistent with the US not focusing its air campaign on coastal military assets though they have been hitting ships. Those missiles serve as a key capability allowing Iran to threaten shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

Taken together, recent US intelligence reports overwhelmingly suggest that the war has degraded Iran’s military capabilities, but not destroyed them, with the Iranians demonstrating they can effectively limit the long-term impact of the war by quickly reconstituting after those strikes. That includes rebuilding its defense industrial base, which CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper said on Tuesday has been largely eliminated. “Operation Epic Fury significantly degraded Iran’s ballistic missiles and drones while destroying 90% of their defense industrial base, ensuring Iran cannot reconstitute for years,” Cooper testified during Tuesday’s hearing before the House Armed Services Committee. But Cooper’s testimony stands in stark contrast to US intelligence assessments examining Iran’s ability to rebuild its military capabilities and the timeline in which they are able to do so, with two sources telling CNN the intelligence is inconsistent with the descriptions provided by the CENTCOM commander. One of the sources familiar with recent US intelligence assessments told CNN that the damage to Iran’s defense industrial base has likely set its ability to reconstitute back by a matter of months, not years. And some of Iran’s defense industrial base remains intact, which could further accelerate the timeline for reconstituting certain capabilities, the source noted.