← Iran: The Latest
Iran: The Latest
The true cost of America’s hidden missile crisis & why US-Iran talks are deadlocked
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Venetia Rainey
The telegraph.
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David Satterfield
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Chris Park
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Venetia Rainey
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David Satterfield
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Venetia Rainey
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Chris Park
Acast.com. There is a window of vulnerability here until the United States can replenish its stockpiles. That will take some number of years. Short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran.
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Podcast Announcer / Acast Host
Today, President Trump says Iran's Supreme Leader,
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David Satterfield
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the attacks. The Pentagon is weighing a takeover of that island as a way to force the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran begged for this ceasefire and we all know it. Does anyone really think that someone can
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Venetia Rainey
tell President Trump what to do?
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Chris Park
Come on.
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Venetia Rainey
I'm Venetia Rainey and this is Iran. The Latest. It's Monday, 27th of April 2026. It's been 59 days since the start of the American and Israeli war with Iran and 20 days since the ceasefire between those countries was agreed. And that ceasefire is still holding. The same goes for the Lebanon Israel ceasefire, although that is looking much shakier. There were multiple violations on both sides over the weekend. Today we're going to be focusing on America and Iran. However, later on in the podcast, I'll be doing a deep dive into how this war has crated US Munitions stockpiles and the implications for countries around the world, from Europe to Asia. But first, let's look at the ongoing attempts to end the war conclusively. Now, over the weekend, there were almost, almost more direct talks in Pakistan, but they collapsed last minute after Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Aragchi left Islamabad and Donald Trump scrapped plans for his envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, to fly to Islamabad. Trump said, I see no point of sending them on an 18 hour flight in the current situation. It's too long. We can just do it as well by telephone. The Iranians can call us if they want. We're not going to travel just to sit there. We're now seeing Arakchi on a tour of ally countries. So after Pakistan, he went to Oman and he's now in Russia. He's in Moscow today to meet with Vladimir Putin to decode what's going on and whether we're any closer to peace than we were a couple of days ago. I'm joined by David Satterfield. David is a career American diplomat who served for more than four decades across the Middle east, including as ambassador in Lebanon and Turkey, charge d' affaires in Iraq and Egypt. He helped negotiate the 1995 roadmap for Israeli Palestinian peace, the 2000 Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon and the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement between the US and Iraq. And more recently, he was the US special envoy addressing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. He is now director of Rice University's Baker Institute. And for public policy. David, welcome to Iran. The latest. Let's just start with this weekend back and forth diplomacy almost happened, didn't Are we any closer to a deal?
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David Satterfield
There are two critical factors here that answer your question. Are we closer to a deal? The first is the status of the leadership in Tehran. It's very clear now that there are indeed at least differences of opinion on whether in fact there should be any deal struck or if so, on what terms regarding the nuclear program. And that means two different things. It means what is Iran prepared to do? What is the leadership prepared to discuss regarding an indigenous Iran based nuclear enrichment program? Is it going to agree to a freeze? If it agrees to a freeze, for how long? How do you define a freeze? And the second issue is the disposition of the significant quantity of enriched uranium, not just the highly enriched 60% uranium about which so much has been been Spoken. But rather the overall stockpile, which is much, much greater in terms of tonnage of uranium that has been enriched beyond the levels needed for nuclear power or radioisotope production for medicine. What's to happen to it? Is it to be diluted? If so, in country, out of country? How does it work now, Venetia. All of these issues formed the core of, back in 2014, 2015, of the discussions that produced the first Joint Plan of Action, then the Joint Comprehensive Plan of action, the JCPOA. It took years to negotiate and over 100 pages of text to decide what every single phrase, commitment, undertaking, meant. You can't do this in a day with two or three people involved jetting in and out for a few hours. It doesn't work. The second thing is, what is the US Prepared to settle for? I don't say what do we want? What are we prepared to settle for? And that's very unclear right now.
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Venetia Rainey
There's been some reporting today by Axios that I'm sure you've seen that Iran has given America a proposal that it could reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the war and postpone negotiations over its nuclear capabilities to a later stage of talks. Now, we know the Americans think the nuclear issue is crucial here. They've repeatedly said they want Iran to suspend all uranium enrichment for at least a decade and they want to remove all enriched uranium from the country. We had Trump speaking over the weekend saying it's very simple. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Otherwise, there's no reason to meet. So given all of that, do you think there's any chance of this Iranian deal getting any traction?
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David Satterfield
Well, that's its own negotiation. What does reopen the Strait mean? What it means for every country in the global trading community, that includes China and all of the Gulf states, is status quo before February 28th. No tolls, no taxes, no charges, no Iranian diktat as to where ships must go. It becomes an international transit point again. Now, if that's what's on the table, and that's all that's on the table, what does President Trump do? Therein lies his our, the world's dilemma, which is this campaign, which started with the ostensible goal of eliminating, quote, Iran's ability to have a nuclear weapon, a worthy objective now has become simply restoring global transit through the Strait back to the way it was seven weeks ago. Can it be done? What does Iran want? That remains to be seen. Now, the President's having a national security meeting today, Monday, and he'll need to discuss. If we put aside the nuclear issue for now, can we simply discuss the opening of the Strait? Look, if we were talking about this, say, a week ago, and you had asked me, so what are the shaping elements in this negotiation? The answer is time. Time and the global market. Right now, there's a global energy crisis of literally unprecedented dimensions. This is not the 73 oil embargo. It's far greater than that. Over the next very few weeks, it's going to morph into not just a more intense energy crisis, it's going to move into other sectors as well. 50% of the world's feedstocks for fertilizer, 30% of the world's aluminium, 17% of polymers that's used in plastic manufacturing around the world, and crucially, 30%, 1/3 of the world's supply of helium, an irreplaceable element in all semiconductor chip manufacturing. Taiwan is already on the verge of a crisis with respect to that manufacturing sector. This is going to go far beyond gas and oil. It's going to move into a very, very different, much more profound global economic impact. The Iranian calculation has always been, we have time, the world does not. We are patient. The world cannot be patient. We can absorb pain, endless pain, because the character of this security state, the hard men who control this government and are prepared to kill to stay in power, the world doesn't have a capacity to absorb pain. So take it to today. What does Donald Trump do if the terms of this deal are, as you would suggest, and his own rhetoric would suggest, unacceptable? Does he maintain the blockade? Simply that no escalation, but the blockade stays in place. I do not believe that Iran will yield on its terms simply because of the economic pressures on Iran of a blockade. They are capable, at least in the medium term, of absorbing that. Now, if that's correct, what then does the President do? Because the global pressures, the domestic US Pressures, are going to be building steadily.
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Venetia Rainey
Do you think there's a way for him to spin some kind of deal like that into a victory for America?
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David Satterfield
I stand in awe of the President's ability to rhetorically spin virtually anything at any time into historic, if not biblical level successes.
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Venetia Rainey
Fair enough. What do you make of the change, potential change in format that we've seen of these talks? We obviously had direct negotiations earlier this month. They were supposed to be direct over the weekend, but then, as I mentioned earlier, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff were called back or were never sent, rather. But we're now seeing instead, Abbasa Ragchi, the Foreign Minister Shuttling around to these various Iranian allies and meeting with negotiators from Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Qatar. Does it suggest that they're trying to shift to a more indirect form of communication where it's a bit less out of the media spotlight?
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David Satterfield
Venetia, I think something else is going on here. What Iran is doing is a classic negotiating tactic for them. They're seeking to demonstrate they have allies, they have assets, they have places where they can go and regard it as legitimate and authentic. It adds to their strength. Now, there is no doubt that Qatar, Pakistan very much want a resolution here because each of their own fundamental state interests are being harmed by continuation of this situation. Russia is in a quite different position. No country in the world has benefited more from this situation than has Vladimir Putin and Russia. Because they're the default supplier of oil and gas, they no longer have to discount their products dramatically. They can charge full price and beyond. Putin has zero interest in seeing this situation come to a close. He has every interest in seeing it continue because he must get as much income as he can while this golden moment for him endures. So he's perfectly happy to see the Iranians come to Moscow. There will be smiles all around. He will certainly endorse a continued hardline Iranian position, not because he cares a whit about Iran, because he sees this as beneficial to the Russian Federation and to his own power. Indirect talks versus direct talks. the end of the day, you've got to sit at the table across from your interlocutors. There is much that indirect passage of messages can do to create a context, a broad outline of what's being proposed. But look, the cancellation of Jared and Steve Witkoff's visit to Islamabad was because Arachi indicated he was leaving. He wasn't prepared to sit with them. That, in turn, is a reflection, not so much of US policy, but rather what's happening in Tehran. That the need now for the Tehran innermost circle to determine negotiating positions has complicated things. And I must tell you, this is not new. When I and my colleagues negotiated with Iran on several other occasions over the past almost 20 years, we encountered the same phenomena we had. And Iraq, she was an interlocutor at that time. In some of these talks, you had professional, polished Iranian negotiators, but they were not deciders. They had to refer back to the IRGC leadership and the innermost clerical circle. Well, now it's an IRGC innermost circle, not clerical. We're seeing the same phenomenon right now. I would argue that until Iran is prepared to have Direct talks over issues, whether it's opening the strait or the nuclear issues. This is going to be a very complicated thing to resolve. President's default, President Trump's. Just keep the embargo going and calculate the Iranian level of pain will be reached. I think that is not likely to produce a satisfactory outcome against the tolling of the clock on the global and US Economy.
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Venetia Rainey
So what does need to happen for us to reach a satisfactory outcome for us in the West?
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David Satterfield
Well, the Iranians have laid that out over the course of the last 48 hours, which is let's just talk about reopening the strait. That is complex enough. Are they demanding some form of payment, that is tolls in the strait? Are they demanding some form of sanctions relief or release of frozen assets? The 20 billion plus in frozen payments due to them? We don't know that. That's not yet come out in all of this. What's their price tag? Just for the strait and Venetia on this, let me make a point that other observers have made, but really needs to be reinforced. This started out, as I said, as a campaign against the acquisition of a nuclear weapon with which Iran could threaten the region, hold hostage the world, project its power. Well, it doesn't have a nuclear weapon. Indeed, it was not developing a nuclear weapon at the time this campaign started. What does it have demonstrated now? Something actually with far more potency than a nuclear device. It has shown it can close the Strait of Hormuz and the strait cannot be reopened by force, not by the US not by any combination of kinetic assets. That is an extraordinary development. It is much more impactful globally than a nuclear device would be. It doesn't bear with it the negative consequences for Iran of an actual pursuit of a nuclear weapon. This is something which will shape power projection, Iran's ambitions. Gulf reactions, global reactions for time to come. It is an extraordinarily negative outcome to what has happened since February 28th.
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Venetia Rainey
I wonder if there's a counter argument in that not all military options to reopen the Strait of Hormuz have been exhausted. We haven't seen US Warships actually sail into the Strait of Hormuz. We haven't seen attempts at military escorts, for example. Is there more that could be done?
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David Satterfield
Venetia? We've been through this, the US and our allies, including the UK over the past decades. There were escorts through the strait, but not under the present circumstances. And let's look at why US Naval warcraft escorting or moving through the Strait are a less than an effective and efficient outcome. All you need is a little inflatable Zodiac boat zipping along at or below wave height with a plastic mine. They don't have to plant the mine on a hull. They don't have to detonate anything. It is the thought that they could which has produced the current closure of the strait. It's not the attacks which have taken place on shipping themselves. Those are just reinforcements. It was the dropping by Lloyd's and other major underwriters of insurance on shipping and the refusal of crews to go through the strait that produced this closure weeks and weeks ago. A kinetic response to this is not something that really is going to be an efficient or, I would argue, a successful outcome. The president can, of course, undertake further military actions in the strait towards other islands in the Gulf or against, as he has proclaimed, Iranian infrastructure. It's doable. But if he does, how does Iran respond? That's a problem because Iran possesses what we would call escalation, dominance. It means, yes, you can escalate against us Iran, but we can escalate against that in a more profound and hurtful measure than you can on us. That's the challenge of an asymmetrical conflict such as the one we've gotten into here. The president does not have good options here. It's frustrating, intensely frustrating. I could draw the opposite circumstances in Gaza, in Lebanon with Hamas, with Hezbollah, Yemen with the Houthis, all of whom have been struck kinetically for long periods of time with massive quantities of ordnance and in the case of Gaza and Lebanon, ground forces. Yet it has not removed or diminished the ability of those groups to either remain in control or dominance or project threat. That's the dilemma of modern asymmetric warfare.
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Venetia Rainey
David Satterfield, thank you very much for joining us on around the latest. That was David Satterfield, director of Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. We're going to take a short break now. Coming up afterwards, why America is running out of key missiles as a result of the Iran war and what it could mean for a potential future conflict with China.
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Venetia Rainey
Welcome back. You're listening to Iran the Latest with me, Venetia Rainey. If you're interested in enjoying this podcast, we would love to hear from you. You can send us an email on battle lineselegraph.co.uk or leave a review underneath this episode on Spotify and YouTube or on the podcast's main feed. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts, we'd love to hear what you think now. The Hawkeyed amongst you will probably have noticed a bunch of articles coming out last week in the American press about the US Having used up loads of key munitions and missiles. I mentioned it briefly on the podcast last Thursday with Sophia, but we wanted to get into it in more depth. So I'm joined by the two analysts who put out the original research for Centre for Strategic and International studies in Washington, D.C. senior advisor Mark Cancian, formerly a colonel in the U.S. marine Corps Reserve, and Research Associate Chris Park. Before we get into the nitty gritty of each of these key munitions and we will run through each of them in turn, I just want to put to you guys. Caroline Levitt, Trump's press secretary, was asked about some of this reporting last week. She said the entire premise of stories suggesting the US had depleted supplies earmarked for use against China is false. So I just wanted to put that Trump administration denial in there. Chris, could you talk a bit about how you conducted this analysis?
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Podcast Announcer / Acast Host
Yeah, I mean the starting point for all the numbers we've included in our report comes from numbers released by the US Department of Defense. And I mean we can start with how we got to the munitions number, the inventory number, which is, you know, the annual DoD budget justification documents list how many the Department of Defense intends to procure and also how many we have that have been delivered in past years and past months, as well as future deliveries projections for when these missiles will enter US inventories. So that's the starting point of our analysis. From that we subtracted some amount for, you know, lot testing, you know, for non operational uses and also known usage in past campaigns, you know, for Tomahawks. That was all the many of the campaigns we fought since the first Gulf War that we've used Tomahawk missiles for other missiles, the 2026 Iran war was one of the first times we've used these missiles in war. So you know that that was the approach we've used for the missile inventory calculations, for calculations on the number of missiles expended in this war. The 2026 Iran war, that too also came from the US DoD release numbers, where the most recurrently released numbers was the number of targets struck. And from that number, we've combined that with some of the numbers released by our Gulf Coalition partners, our known historic patterns of usage for some of these systems, as well as some of the publicly reported figures about usage to come up with a general estimate of how many missiles we have expended in this war. And if you read the report, we give the high and low range, and that just goes to stress the final actual numbers used will be highly sensitive to the actual mix of munitions and the Coalition's contribution to air defense in this campaign.
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Venetia Rainey
Let's get into the details then. Because the munition which seems to have been depleted the most heavily and has a very broad range as well, we should say is the TAD interceptors, at least 50%, but possibly as high as 80%. These cost 13 million each, $13 million each. They're ground launched against ballistic missiles with a longer range and a higher intercept altitude than the Patriot missiles, which we'll get onto later. Just tell us a bit about their usage in this war and why they've been used so heavily.
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Chris Park
That has been used heavily because the Iranians have a wide variety of ballistic missiles. Some of them are long range and require interception by Thaad. The United States has moved Thaad batteries into the region to defend Israel and our Gulf partners, and some of the Gulf partners, UAE and Saudi Arabia have their own Thaad batteries. So they've been using those also. So it's the high end, but Iran has some high end missiles that require an interception by Thaad and that the Patriot doesn't have quite the capability needed to intercept some of these incoming missiles.
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Venetia Rainey
And the stocks were quite low before and the ability to replace them also seems to take quite a long time. And as you mentioned, America only has eight of these batteries that can actually fire Thaad interceptor missiles. You said they had to pull one from South Korea. What are the problems coming down the line for trying to restore this particular
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Podcast Announcer / Acast Host
type of munition just in the South Korea point? Like you said, the United States has eight known THAAD batteries in its arsenal, two of which were outside the continental United States before this war. We suspect that some of the units that were inside The United States were moved into Cedar. But the one in South Korea, the Triple Hatted Command U.S. forces Korea Commander, as he testified in front of the Senate, I think last week or two weeks ago, the battery in South Korea remains there. The radar remains there. It's possible some of the components might have been moved to the Middle east, but the actual Thaad battery has remained and continues to be in South Korea. Just wanted to clarify that point.
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Venetia Rainey
Thank you. Yeah, that's very useful clarification. The other interceptor missile that we hear a lot about is Patriots. You estimate that around 50% of America's stockpile has been used up. These cost around $4 million each in their ground launch. They can target aircraft, missiles, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, a shorter range and a lower intercept altitude than those Thaads we were just discussing. And there's a specific problem here in that lots of countries are after these missiles, right? They're really highly sought after.
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Chris Park
Well, that's right. There are 18 other countries that use Patriot, and therefore there's a lot of competition for the output. Now, before the war, that was fine. The allocation was pretty straightforward. But now that the United States and allies are using, so many Gulf states, for example, have Patriots on their own, the usage and the allocation is becoming a major issue. One country where it's a big issue is Ukraine, because what had been happening was that the Europeans were buying Patriot missiles and then sending them to Ukraine. But now that the inventory has gone down, it's not clear that we're going to be able to sell any Patriots to the Europeans in the near term. To give you a sense about where we are on production, several years ago we were at about 150, or rather about 300 a year, divided by half and half between the US and other countries. We're up to about 600 and now split again 300 and 300. We're trying to get up to 2,000, but that'll take several years. The problem is we want to replenish our own stocks. The Ukrainians want some. The Gulf states want to replenish their inventories. And then there are other countries like Switzerland that want to buy the system just for their own usage. They've been told that they won't be able to do that for several years, and they're quite angry about that. They've been planning on it. So a lot of competition for the Patriot output.
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Venetia Rainey
And then just within that defensive class of missiles, you've also got the standard missiles, the SM3s and the SM6s, and you guys calculate that 20% of those have been used. Just explain what those are and how they've been used in this conflict.
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Chris Park
Yes, these are sea based missiles. The SM3s are anti missile missiles and the SM6 have some anti missile capabilities, but also anti air. They've been used, we think less intensively because the fleet has been outside of the Persian Gulf. So the opportunities to use them have not been as great. But these are also still scarce munitions where the United States is trying to build up inventories.
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Podcast Announcer / Acast Host
Yeah, I mean, just on the SM3s, like Professor KC mentioned, you know, those defend against ballistic missiles. And a lot of the reporting that has come out says, you know, it's been used really by ships firing them from the eastern Mediterranean against ballistic missiles heading to perhaps US bases in Turkey or perhaps Cyprus. But even though the volume of ballistic missile launches as compared to the cheap drones, which by the way we tend not to use some of these very expensive, exquisite systems against, have been lower, nevertheless there has been significant volume to expend some amount, you know, like you mentioned, we, you know, we estimate 20%, but some amount of these missiles against Iranian launches.
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Venetia Rainey
I wonder if you saw the NBC reporting last week that suggests an aging Iranian F5 fighter jet managed to get through American air defenses and bomb Camp Bering in Kuwait despite the presence of Patriot missile batteries, short range interceptors, advanced radar coverage and regional surveillance network. What did you make of that report?
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Chris Park
Well, that's a very interesting report because it should not have got through. The F5 is not a particularly sophisticated aircraft and there are extensive defenses, as you note, and radars. It's possible that this reflects the confusion at the early stages of the war. Remember, the Kuwaitis shot down three US Aircraft and it may be that the coordination for air defenses was not as tight as it might have been in those first early days. You're trying to mesh together the Gulf states in the United States and Israel and those. It's always difficult to do that even though much of the equipment is compatible. And this may reflect a gap that occurred.
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Podcast Announcer / Acast Host
Overall, if you look at the campaign broadly, the overall interception rates appear to be fairly high in that it was in the 80 to 90% range. You know, based on the reporting by some of our Gulf coalition allies. And you know, no defense is perfect. You know, some of these missiles will get through and you know, in the case of Iranian F5, say some of the planes might get through, but the overall interception rates and the extent of damage appears to be, or the interception rate appears to be high. The overall damage level appears to be, you know, has, you know, not significant impact on continuing operations. Although, you know, like we discussed before, separate question about how long it'll take to repair some of these damages and repair losses of equipment.
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Venetia Rainey
Yeah, maybe we should quickly talk about this. NBC reporting talks about significant damage done to American bases and estimates the cost of repairs to infrastructure may reach well over 5 billion. We don't have the full picture, do we? I mean, we haven't, we don't get official numbers about how many munitions have been used and we don't have official information about the damage done to these bases. So how confident are you. You just said you think the intercepts has been working very well. How confident are you about that assessment?
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Chris Park
Well, we looked at two pieces and include them in our analysis. One is the equipment that was destroyed by Iranian attacks and the other is the base damage. And sometimes they go together, of course, the attacks on, in Kuwait, for example, communications equipment, same thing in Bahrain. That's ground based. There's a lot of overhead on damage to the bases. And we can see that the Iranian attacks are precise. That is, they hit particular buildings. They were apparently aiming for those buildings. There are no random craters that would indicate attacks that went awry or that were not precision. But it's also hard to know what's inside those buildings. But it's the equipment that's probably the more expensive to replace. There's some radars, Thaad radar, very expensive to replace. There's also these communications equipment that have been struck, the golf balls that we see in the videos, that's also quite expensive. And then there were some aircraft that have been hit on the ground. But as Chris said, an important perspective is that although there has been damage to these bases, they're all continuing to operate. None of the damage has been of such a degree that the United States can't use the bases anymore. And you also have to put it into perspective. That is, during the conflict, the Iranians were maybe striking maybe 10 targets a day. This is at the same time that the US and Israel were hitting 600 to 700 targets a day. So it's not a question of tit for tat. The United States and Israel were striking many, many more targets. The thing is, you don't see that because of the censorship with Iranian communications.
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Podcast Announcer / Acast Host
I mean, the Thaad radar which we discussed and Professor Kingston just mentioned, replacing that, I think will be one of the most acute shortfalls that come out of this war. We didn't have that many to begin with and it'll take many years for that and also a lot of money to replace that particular system that we've lost in this war.
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Venetia Rainey
I want to move on to some of these offensive missiles that you both also looked at. So the precision strike missiles, you estimate at least 45% have been used up, possibly as high as 75%. If one of you wouldn't mind just talking us through what they are and how they've been used in the conflict.
- [35:03]
Chris Park
These precision strike missiles are ground launched. They are launched from the HIMARS and MLRS launchers that have been around in the US army inventory for many years. They are a follow on to the system called atacms, which has again been around for many years and many people have heard about that. PRISM is longer range. US was able to build this longer range missile when the Intermediate Missile Treaty expired. The shorter range atacms go about 180 miles, 300 kilometers. The prism goes over 500 kilometers, 300 miles. So the reason it's in short supply is that it has not been in production very long. So we've used a large part of that inventory. It's been very useful because it's ground based and can fire into these parts of Iran. And is credited with taking out an Iranian submarine, which is ironic that the only submarine US has destroyed since World War II was done by the Army. The United States does have maybe 800 ATACMs. These are shorter range but strike the same sorts of targets. So there are munitions here when the Prisms are used up.
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Venetia Rainey
But the shorter range you estimate that the US has used up about 30% of its Tomahawk missiles, more than 1,000 used in Iran. That may account for nearly all of the available Tomahawks in the region. These are long range missiles fired from the sea at ground to.
- [36:47]
Chris Park
Well, the Tomahawks have received a lot of attention in recent years because they have been used so extensively. Because they're fired from the sea, you have these mobile bases so that they can move to whatever theater is needed. They were used against the Houthis, for example. They were used against insurgents in Nigeria. So they are quite versatile. We've used quite a number here early on and then apparently some continuing their long range, which is their great strength. The platform can stay outside of the adversary's defensive position and fire in with relatively little risk to the platform. Then later on we transition to short range air delivered munitions. It's interesting too that these are fired from the sea. Some are from surface ships, but some came from submarines. We have submarines that are specially designed to launch Tomahawks cruise missiles. And we almost certainly use them here. We did use them back last June, so they've been quite used extensively here and elsewhere.
- [37:59]
Venetia Rainey
And then finally you mentioned the jassm, the Joint Air to Surface standoff missiles. You estimate that about 20% have been used. By moving on to the implications, a lot of your analysis looks at how this might damage a potential future war in the Indo Pacific with China. But there are more immediate consequences, as you mentioned, Mark, Ukraine. But I'd like to focus on Asia. Japan has reportedly been told that its deliveries of 400 Tomahawks may be delayed because of the Iran war. And we've done some reporting speaking to analysts in Asia saying that, you know, this usage rate of munitions and the dwindling US Stockpiles will be met with unease in capitals such as Taipei, Tokyo, Manila, Seoul. Can you speak a bit more about what kind of knock on impact this usage of munitions will have in Asia?
- [38:42]
Chris Park
Well, one of the effects, as you note, is the sale of 400 tomahawks to Japan. Japan is becoming more forward leaning in its attitude towards China. It's been building up its military forces and including its offensive forces, whereas before it had been focused mostly on defense. This is a key element of that. And if the United States is unable to provide that, the Japanese are sort of hanging out there. They've prepared ships to use this weapon. They've laid the foreign policy groundwork. So they really need to bring this capability on board. And then many of the allies and partners in the Western Pacific, of course, are nervous about what this usage means. There is a window of vulnerability here until the United States can replenish its stockpiles. That will take some number of years. The White House says, well, we're fully able to contend with a Chinese challenge. Well, of course they have to say that the fact that we've had this usage does not mean that the United States would lose a conflict with China, but it does put a dent in some important capabilities. And that window will be open for a period of time.
- [40:03]
Podcast Announcer / Acast Host
I mean, it goes even beyond the 400 Tomahawks. Right. Because we've talked a lot about Thaad earlier in our discussion and the news potentially that the United States has moved out some potentially radar components, maybe interceptors of Thaad sparked a pretty concerning discussion amongst our South Korean allies about what the US Commitment looks like, what the capabilities are if the proverbial balloon goes up on the Korean peninsula. So it's for all the systems we've laid out and then there's some of the others we did not mention in our report. The concern across the western Pacific, I think like Professor Casein said, you know, short to medium term risk as our current buildup of production capacity and procurement quantities come into inventories.
- [40:57]
Venetia Rainey
And I mean the boring question, but I mean the US Is that the Trump administration is still waiting for Congress to approve additional funding to replenish these stocks, Right? And even then it can't get going immediately. We're talking about huge amounts of money and very long supply chain times. And that's another spanner in the works for all of this, isn't it?
- [41:17]
Chris Park
Well, it is.
- [41:18]
Venetia Rainey
Now.
- [41:18]
Chris Park
Congress has provided money for the last couple of years to expand U.S. munitions inventories and expand production rate. This goes back to the Biden administration and a recognition in the U.S. national security community that we needed more munitions across the board. CSIS had written several reports, but we could see that with Ukraine, where the United States had run low on munitions and some weapons. So there was impetus for several years to build munitions inventories. We put money into that. The United States in the base budget. Then in this recent reconciliation bill, 153 billion that went to DoD. A lot of that went to building munitions stockpiles. So the United States has been working on this for a while. The problem is time, because all of this takes time. Takes time to expand production. It takes time to produce systems, at least two years plus another year to deliver the lot. But those timelines have been extending as the demand for systems has outgrown the capacity. So right now the problem isn't money. The United States has put money against it. There's a lot more money that the Trump administration proposes to put against this. The problem is time.
- [42:49]
Venetia Rainey
Mark Cancian and Chris park from csis, thank you very much for joining us on around the Latest.
- [42:53]
Chris Park
Thanks for having us on the program.
- [42:59]
Venetia Rainey
That's all for today's episode of around the Latest. What be back again tomorrow. Until then, goodbye. Iran the Latest is an original podcast from the Telegraph created by David Knowles and hosted by me, Venetia Rainey and Roland Oliphant. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Iran the Latest on your preferred podcast app and if you have a moment, leave review as it helps others find the show. For more from our foreign correspondence on the ground, sign up for our new daily newsletter Cables via our website or listen to our sister podcast Ukraine the Latest. We're still on the same email address battlelinestelegraph.co.uk or contact us on X. You can find our handles in the show notes. The producer is Elliot Lampit. The executive producers are Venetia Rainey and Louisa Wells.
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