Here’s How Long It Will Take to Replace Weapons Trump Used on Iran

President Donald Trump can try to pour billions of additional dollars into the U.S. military, but restoring the country’s weapons systems will still take years.

A new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies published Wednesday found that munitions depleted during Trump’s military onslaught against Iran have created a multiyear “window of vulnerability” for the United States in potential future conflicts. 

The study estimated it will take until at least 2030 to replace the more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles the U.S. fired deep into enemy territory. While Raytheon aims to produce more than 1,000 missiles a year, the current production rate is less than 200. It will also take until at least 2029 to restore the interceptors used in U.S. air defense systems, as well as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, and Patriot missiles, according to the study.  

Earlier this month, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost roughly $24 billion to replace the munitions expended on Trump’s military campaign alone. Trump has moved to deliver a record-breaking $1.5 trillion to the U.S. military for the fiscal year 2027, by sapping taxpayer dollars from other federal agencies. But the report says, “The problem today isn’t money; it’s time.

“It takes time to expand production capacity and to build these complex systems,” the report said. “Thus, 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. The DOD will need to make plans for dealing with this gap.”

The report warned about potential future conflicts in the Western Pacific, but said that the outlook was “not all bleak.” The U.S. military’s major show of force in Iran and in operations against Venezuela and the Houthis could act as deterrence against China, which has “no recent combat experience.”

The Trump administration is planning to drastically reduce military provisions to NATO allies.

An envoy of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Alexander Velez-Green, shared details of the forthcoming recissions with senior officials of NATO member states during a meeting in Brussels last week, reported German news outlet Der Spiegel.

The proposed plan is much more drastic than European diplomats had predicted: It involves decreasing the number of U.S. fighter jets, warships, drones, and aerial refueling tankers available to the alliance, according to the briefing. The number of available fighter jets, for instance, could be diminished by a third, and the number of strategic bombers halved.

All submarines will be pulled out, and the number of available destroyers will also be cut.

Washington also intends to substantially scale back its previous commitments to NATO’s “Force Model,” which was agreed upon in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The model stipulates which units the Supreme Allied Commander Europe is allowed to directly access from NATO member states in defensive strategies. 

European countries are expected to fill in the resulting gaps themselves, Der Spiegel reported.

Donald Trump has been threatening such an action for weeks, specifically since the European continent refused to support his invasion of Iran and the subsequent blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.

Last month, Trump claimed he was open to the idea of pulling troops from Italy, Spain, and Germany, accusing NATO members of being “cowards” and “terrible” for refusing to assist in his Middle East war.

At the time, the sudden Oval Office announcement stunned the Pentagon as much as it did America’s allies.

The Defense Department “was not expecting it and has not been planning any kind of drawdown,” a congressional aide familiar with the situation told Politico. “But we have to take him seriously because he was serious about it during his first administration.” 

In July 2020, Trump proposed pulling 12,000 troops out of Germany in order to punish Berlin for its low defense spending. That order was never implemented.

But the president has been on the offensive against NATO since the early days of his first term in office. He regularly baselessly insists that other members have failed to pay their dues and argues that the U.S. has been shortchanged by other NATO countries, even though that’s not how the alliance operates.

It is unclear who in the Western world benefits from the dissolution of NATO. John Bolton,  Trump’s first-term national security adviser and a policy hawk who also served under Ronald Reagan’s administration, has said that the consequences of exiting the alliance could be dire. A U.S. withdrawal from the pact could effectively be the death of NATO, leaving behind a fractured and significantly weakened European alliance, while devastating America’s international credibility as an ally.

President Trump is publicly fuming after former President Joe Biden sued the Justice Department in an attempt to block the release of audio and transcripts from his interviews with his memoir ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer in 2016 and 2017. The president called his predecessor a “Crooked Politician!!!” Wednesday on Truth Social.

The interviews in question were used in the 2023 special counsel investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents. That investigation concluded there was no criminal wrongdoing, but that Biden was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden’s attorneys argue that the interviews were private conversations that should not be released retroactively by the Trump DOJ.

“Every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home,” Biden’s attorneys wrote. “And when the U.S. Department of Justice obtains that private information through a criminal investigation, the Department bears a particular responsibility to protect it from disclosure.”

They also noted that the DOJ spent two years properly protecting these transcripts in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act, until they switched up in February, telling Biden they’d be releasing them “without any formal explanation.”

Texas attorney general and MAGA rabblerouser Ken Paxton won the Republican Senate primary on Tuesday over incumbent John Cornyn. Paxton now advances to the November general election, where he will face Democrat James Talarico.

While the idea of Senator Paxton is terrifying to Democrats, establishment Republicans were perhaps even more upset. Conservative groups who backed the slightly less extreme Cornyn were forced to scrub their social media of statements attacking Paxton, presumably while a kind of metaphysical angst washed over them.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee deleted at least eight critiques of Paxton, including a July 2025 statement released after Paxton’s wife, Angela Paxton, filed for divorce on “biblical grounds.”

“What Ken Paxton has put his family through is truly repulsive and disgusting. No one should have to endure what Angela Paxton has, and we pray for her as she chooses to stand up for herself and her family during this difficult time,” read the statement.

Another deleted post bore the headline “Ken Paxton’s Lies and Incompetence Keep Piling Up.” This statement cited an Associated Press article that found that Paxton and his then wife were listing three different homes as “primary residences” so they could take advantage of lower interest rates.

Paxton’s primary win was aided by a late endorsement by President Donald Trump. Some expected that Trump might back the more electable Cornyn, but fealty matters more than anything with our president, and Paxton has given the president lavish, consistent support over the years.

Paxton was “very loyal to your favorite President, ME,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday. “Ken’s opponent was VERY disloyal to me.”

Paxton is also an outsider with a long history of scandal. He was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives on corruption charges in 2023. That, plus the adultery, may be why Trump saw himself in him and blessed him with an endorsement.

The official financial fund set up for Donald Trump’s Board of Peace has received exactly zero dollars—but that doesn’t necessarily mean that cash isn’t flowing into the president’s slush fund run by war criminals.

Four months after Trump launched his preposterous pet project for Gaza, the group’s official fund set up by the World Bank and approved by the United Nations has yet to see a drop of the billions promised to the board, four people familiar with the matter told the Financial Times Wednesday.

“Zero dollars have been deposited,” one person told the FT.

Rather than rely on the official fund, Trump’s Board of Peace has decided to receive donations through its JPMorgan account, which has no transparency or reporting requirements.

A Board of Peace official told the FT that contributors were offered a number of options for paying, and had at this point “opted to use other options.” The board would report its financials to its executive board—which includes classic Trump cronies such as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff—“at a time deemed appropriate,” the official said.

Ten countries pledged billions of dollars to carry out Kushner’s master plan to turn Gaza into a strip of luxury hotels, but so far, barely any of that money has materialized.

Morocco has contributed $20 million to fund the office of Nickolay Mladenov, the Bulgarian diplomat serving as the “high representative” for Gaza, plus salaries for the slate of technocrats who will oversee the enclave. The United Arab Emirates also provided $100 million to train new police in Gaza, but the program has yet to begin and the funds are frozen, two people told the FT.

Trump has previously pledged $10 billion in taxpayer money to his slush fund. The State Department has offered $50 million to keep the board running, which has yet to be allocated. The State Department has also promised to reallocate $1.2 billion in aid spending to the Board of Peace’s myriad projects, but apparently that money isn’t headed for the board at all.

“None of that money [has gone to the board]. None of that money is being managed by the Board of Peace. And State tells us there’s no intent to have any of that money managed by the Board of Peace,” one congressional aide told the FT.