TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The war in Iran has highlighted the importance of maintaining defense supply chains and raised questions about the sustainability of high-intensity conflicts.
The US and Israel launched more than 3,000 precision-guided missiles in the first 36 hours of the conflict against Iran, Foreign Policy Magazine reported, while Iran has fired 1,000 munitions in the region.
The magazine speculated that the US preferred to use different missile types for specific missions: standoff strike missiles for initial launches, anti-radar munitions, ground-launched rockets for time-sensitive targets, and precision-guided bombs.
Meanwhile, Israel has guidance kits and air-launched missiles that can be produced in large quantities and loaded onto aircraft that are capable of conducting a high rate of sorties.
The rapid expenditure of advanced munitions during the initial phase of the conflict underscores how quickly modern warfare can deplete stockpiles of precision weapons, Foreign Policy said. The bottlenecks are often easy to miss or ignore, such as a lower-level supplier with a single furnace or a small-scale rocket-motor supply chain that would take years to expand.
The magazine listed specific examples. For example, the BGM-109 Tomahawk missile uses the F107 turbofan, only produced by Williams International. Boeing is the only assembler of GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators. Just 25 have been produced to date.
As the US continues to deplete its missile arsenal at a concerning pace, it should be cautious not to allow China to take advantage of this situation and attack Taiwan, Foreign Policy said. It cited a 2023 Center for Strategic and International Studies report, saying the US military would exhaust missiles within a week of a Taiwan Strait conflict.
Another issue is the loss of high-value assets. The magazine pointed out that the destruction of the AN/FPS-132 radar in Qatar and the AN/TPS-59 radar in Bahrain would take five to eight years and 12-24 months to repair, respectively. A major hurdle would be sourcing the 77.3 kilograms of gallium required for both radars, of which China controls 98% of the global supply.
The magazine argued that the key metric is not just how many missile launchers there are at the start of the war, but how long munitions can last during the conflict and how quickly they can be replaced.
