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The Most Dangerous Idiots in American History Just Started a War They Can't Finish: A full accounting of Iran's devastation, depleted stockpiles, and 1 million stranded Americans
Inside the weapons shortage, the burning embassies, and the defense contractors Trump is now begging to save him
“WINCHESTER”
By Dean Blundell | DeanBlundell.Substack.com | March 4, 2026
There’s a term that military people use when the guns go quiet — not because the enemy is dead, but because the ammunition is gone. They call it “Winchester.” It’s radio shorthand for a pilot or crew reporting they have no weapons remaining. It comes from the Winchester rifle. Empty magazine. Nothing left to fire.
The United States of America — the most heavily armed nation in the history of human civilization, with a defence budget larger than the next ten countries combined — is approaching Winchester on the weapons that actually matter in the Iran war it just started. Five days into Operation Epstein Fury, with six U.S. service members confirmed dead, tens of thousands of American soldiers and civilians sitting as unprotected targets across the Middle East, and Iran raining missiles and drones on nine countries simultaneously, the Trump administration is doing what it always does when caught flat-footed: lying about the damage, summoning billionaires for photo ops, and posting on Truth Social.
This is the story of a regime run by donors, sycophants, and ideologues — men and women who have never served a day in uniform, who ignored their own generals’ explicit warnings, who committed the sons and daughters of American families to a war they couldn’t sustain, for reasons that have nothing to do with American security, and everything to do with the financial interests of the people who paid for Donald Trump’s political resurrection.
Let’s go through it. All of it.
PART ONE: THE HOLE IN THE MAGAZINE
Four Years of Bombs in Four Months
Before we talk about the Iran war specifically, we have to talk about the weapons that were already gone before the first bomb dropped on Tehran.
Since the beginning of 2025, the United States has conducted over 626 airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen during Operation Rough Rider, in support of Israel during the 12-day June 2025 Iran-Israel war, and in various anti-proxy operations across the region. By any historical measure, that is a stunning expenditure of high-end precision munitions in a single calendar period — the equivalent of years’ worth of pre-planned operational budgets torched in a few months of reactive strikes.
Those strikes burned through inventory that was never replaced. And the most critical losses were in the weapons that matter most when Iran shoots back.
The THAAD Problem: The Math That Should Have Stopped This War
The Terminal High Altitude Area Defence system — THAAD — is the gold standard of American missile defence. Built by Lockheed Martin, each interceptor costs roughly $12.7 to $15 million. It’s designed to kill incoming ballistic missiles at altitude, before they reach their targets. It is, in every sense, the shield that stands between American troops and Iranian missiles.
The United States had approximately 534 THAAD interceptors delivered to its inventory as of December 2025. That sounds like a lot until you do the math.
During the 12-day Iran-Israel war in June 2025 — a conflict the U.S. joined in support of Israel — American forces fired more than 150 THAAD interceptors in a matter of days. That wiped out approximately 25 percent of the entire American THAAD stockpile. Every serious defence analyst in Washington read that number and went pale.
And here’s the production reality that the Trump regime apparently didn’t consider before launching Operation Epic Fury: in 2024, the United States procured exactly 11 new THAAD interceptors. It was expected to receive just 12 more in fiscal year 2025. You read that correctly. The country was firing 150 interceptors in a single engagement and replacing them at a rate of 11 per year.
As Secretary of State Marco Rubio himself acknowledged publicly: “They are producing, by some estimates, over 100 of these missiles a month. Compare that to the six or seven interceptors that can be built a month.” Iran builds. We fire. We can’t keep up.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies — not a progressive think tank, mind you, but a serious Washington defence establishment institution — estimated that in 2025 alone, the U.S. fired up to 20 percent of its Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) interceptors and between 20 to 50 percent of its THAAD supply. The report described THAAD expenditures as “concerning,” noting that the United States was firing missiles at a rate far beyond its ability to replenish them.
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The Full Inventory of What’s Running Dry
It’s not just THAAD. Here is the accounting of American precision munitions and interceptors under acute pressure in the current conflict:
THAAD Interceptors: Approximately 534 on hand as of December 2025. At least 150 were expended during the June 2025 war. Hundreds more are being consumed now. Production: roughly 96 per year — with a new agreement to eventually quadruple that to 400 annually, but that facility won’t be operational for years.
Patriot PAC-3 Missiles: The backbone of point defence for U.S. bases across the Gulf. A 2025 Guardian investigation found the U.S. had only 25 percent of the Patriot interceptors needed for its own future military plans — after years of sending them to Ukraine and Israel. The UAE and Qatar, which host tens of thousands of American troops, have already reportedly requested emergency Patriot resupply. Their inventories are running low.
SM-3 and SM-6 Ship-Launched Interceptors: Used extensively to defend American naval vessels and bases from Iranian drone and missile attacks. CENTCOM officials describe inventories as dangerously depleted. Current and former defence officials warn of a potential “Winchester” scenario — complete depletion — for ship-borne interceptors if the current pace continues.
Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles: The workhorse of American offensive deep-strike capability. Defence analysts estimate U.S. warships could fire 150-250 Tomahawks in the opening phase of Epic Fury. Production was running at far less than 1,000 per year before a recent deal with RTX (formerly Raytheon) was signed to try to hit that threshold. But signing a deal and having missiles are two different things.
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Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) and Small Diameter Bombs: These are the medium-grade munitions Trump bragged about having in “virtually unlimited” supply. And he’s right that stocks of these cheaper, shorter-range weapons are substantial. The problem is they require air superiority and proximity to targets — and they do nothing to stop an Iranian ballistic missile heading toward a Navy base in Bahrain.
The brutal strategic arithmetic, as the Asia Times summarized it, is this: Iran launched 574 medium-range ballistic missiles over 12 days in June 2025, at an estimated cost of between $1.1 and $6.6 billion. The United States spent approximately $1.17 billion just in THAAD interceptors to stop them. Iran spends cheap. America spends astronomical. And Iran has thousands of missiles left.
PART TWO: THE SHIPS THAT RAN
The Navy Abandoned Port Before the War Started
Here is something that should be front-page news in every American newspaper and isn’t: before Operation Epic Fury began, the United States Navy quietly evacuated its own ships from port.
On February 26, 2026 — two days before Trump ordered the strikes — Fox News reported that the U.S. Fleet Headquarters in Bahrain had been reduced to fewer than 100 mission-critical personnel. Satellite photographs confirmed that every single U.S. ship previously docked in Bahrain had left port. They didn’t leave for combat. They left because the Navy knew it could not protect them.
This is the part that doesn’t fit the “strongest military on Earth” narrative: American warships fled their home port because the regime that ordered them to war knew there weren’t enough interceptor missiles to defend a stationary target. So the Navy made the ships moving targets instead — dispersing them across the Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea, where they’d be harder to hit but also further from the resupply infrastructure they desperately need.
The Bahrain naval base — home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, the command centre for all American naval operations in the Middle East — has now been attacked multiple times. Iranian missiles have repeatedly targeted the headquarters of the Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain’s Juffair area. Residential buildings near the base, housing the families of American service members and civilian contractors, have been struck. The Crowne Plaza Hotel in Manama was hit. Apartment complexes burned.
The Bahraini government’s own air defences reportedly shot down 45 missiles and drones in a single engagement. They were burning through their American-made Patriot interceptors to do it — the same interceptors that were already in short supply before this war began. Now they’re calling Washington asking for more, and Washington doesn’t have them to give.
PART THREE: THE BUTCHER’S BILL
The Trump administration has been deliberately vague about American losses. Let’s compile what is confirmed.
U.S. Military Dead
As of March 4, 2026 — Day Five of Operation Epic Fury — six American service members have been confirmed killed in action. The Pentagon has released four names:
Capt. Cody A. Khork, 35, of Winter Haven, Florida
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Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens, 42, of Bellevue, Nebraska
Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor, 39, of White Bear Lake, Minnesota
Sgt. Declan J. Coady, 20, of West Des Moines, Iowa
All four were from the 103rd Sustainment Command out of Des Moines, Iowa. They were killed on Sunday during a drone strike in Port Shuaiba, Kuwait. Two more bodies were recovered from a regional facility struck by Iranian missiles. Their names have not yet been released.
Additionally, the Washington Post confirmed that four troops were killed and five others seriously wounded in the opening days of combat. Three U.S. jets were shot down in Kuwait in what officials described as a friendly-fire incident — which, if true, raises its own catastrophic questions about the operational readiness and coordination of this campaign.
U.S. Assets and Bases Struck
Iran has now attacked U.S. military positions across nine countries. Here is the confirmed accounting:
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Bahrain — The U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet headquarters in Juffair has been targeted multiple times. Multiple residential buildings near the base have been struck. The Bahraini government confirmed its international airport was hit by a drone, causing material damage. A fire broke out at a residential tower housing American families.
Kuwait — Ali al-Salem Air Base, which hosts American and Italian troops, was struck by ballistic missiles. Kuwait International Airport was targeted by a drone, injuring workers and causing structural damage to the passenger terminal. Four U.S. Army Reserve soldiers were killed at Port Shuaiba.
Qatar — Al Udeid Air Base — home to thousands of American troops and their family members, the largest U.S. air base in the Middle East — has been targeted in multiple waves of missile attacks. Qatar’s air defences have worked to intercept incoming fire, but the sheer volume of Iranian launches is draining Qatari Patriot stockpiles at an alarming rate.
UAE — Al Dhafra Air Base was targeted. Explosions were reported in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. A drone struck near the U.S. Consulate, starting a fire. A U.S.-flagged oil tanker was struck in the Port of Bahrain by Iranian projectiles, forcing evacuation of the crew. The UAE intercepted nine Iranian ballistic missiles, six cruise missiles, and dozens of drones in a single engagement.
Saudi Arabia — The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh was struck by two Iranian drones, causing a fire that forced the embassy’s closure. Drones also hit the Saudi capital, Riyadh. Iran targeted Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province and a major refinery, disrupting energy production and spiking global oil prices.
Iraq — Explosions were reported near the U.S. Consulate and international airport in Erbil, in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region where U.S. troops remain stationed. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed responsibility for a hotel strike targeting American troops.
Jordan — Jordan’s armed forces reported intercepting 49 drones and ballistic missiles. Two ballistic missiles required direct interception.
Cyprus — A UK military base at Akrotiri — which the U.S. uses for operations — was struck by an Iranian drone. British forces were deployed in a defensive capacity in response.
Israel — Iran launched a sustained ballistic missile campaign against Israel throughout the conflict. A missile strike in Beit Shemesh killed nine Israeli civilians. Iranian shrapnel fell in Tel Aviv. Air raid sirens sounded across the country for days.
Americans Stranded, Embassies Closed
The State Department issued emergency departure orders urging Americans to leave 16 countries: Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, UAE, and Yemen. That is essentially the entire Middle East.
The U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, admitted publicly that options for Americans to evacuate from Israel were “VERY LIMITED” — mainly bus routes to Egypt. The U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem said it was not in a position to help Americans leave. Rubio confirmed the State Department was trying to evacuate roughly 1,600 Americans who had requested help, with planes repeatedly turned back when airspace closed mid-flight.
As of this writing, tens of thousands of American civilians — contractors, aid workers, businesspeople, dual citizens, students — remain in a war zone, in countries whose own air defences are being depleted, with their own government unable to protect them or get them out.
However, Trump did manage to get a MAGA White House aide and a MAGA influencer out of the region on a private jet.
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PART FOUR: PANIC AT THE PENTAGON
The Emergency They Pretended Wasn’t Coming
Here is what makes this unconscionable rather than merely disastrous: they were warned. Explicitly, formally, and in writing.
Five days before Operation Epic Fury began, General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the top uniformed officer in the United States military — sat down with Donald Trump and his senior aides at the White House and told them directly: a major operation against Iran would face serious challenges from a significantly depleted munitions stockpile. He warned that shortages of critical munitions — specifically interceptors — could hamper efforts to counter Iranian retaliation and posed, in his words, a “significant risk” to American lives.
Trump ordered the strikes anyway.
Now, five days in, with bases burning across the Gulf and allies begging for interceptors Washington doesn’t have, the administration is in full scramble mode.
The Emergency Defence Industry Summit
The White House has summoned the chief executives of America’s largest defence contractors — including Lockheed Martin and RTX (formerly Raytheon) — to an emergency summit. The explicit goal is to accelerate production of high-end munitions as the Pentagon prepares a $50 billion supplemental budget request to replenish what’s been burned through.
Think about what that number means. Fifty. Billion. Dollars. In emergency supplemental spending. To restock weapons, the administration fired in a war it started without a credible plan to sustain it.
The deals being discussed include ramping Tomahawk production to more than 1,000 per year; boosting SM-6 production to more than 500 annually; and quadrupling THAAD interceptor production from the current rate of 96 per year to 400 per year. In January, Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon signed a framework agreement to that effect, and the company broke ground on a new “Munitions Acceleration Center” in Camden, Arkansas.
But as Tom Karako, a senior fellow at CSIS, noted with necessary bluntness: “The current prospect for ramping munitions is a bit less sanguine than meets the eye.” A framework agreement is not a contract. A contract is not a missile. And a missile ordered today won’t exist for months, if not years.
Considering Wartime Powers
Behind closed doors, the administration is discussing invoking the Defence Production Act — a Korean War-era statute that gives the President authority to force American manufacturers to prioritize wartime production. It would compel defence contractors to drop other work and produce what the military needs most, on the timeline the military needs it.
It would also give Trump a trigger to cancel the 2026 midterm elections.
A senior White House official confirmed to NBC News that Trump himself has not yet formally discussed invoking the Act, but that he “wants defence contractors to manufacture munitions as quickly as possible.” One U.S. official framed the challenge with startling candour: “The emotions America needs to turn our factories into war factories, we’re just not there. This takes time. We’re going to have to figure out how to ramp up production in a way that we haven’t.”
Translation: we started a war without an industrial base capable of sustaining it, and we’re trying to fix that now, while the war is happening, but we may need to cancel the midterms to ramp up production and to protect Americans from the consequences of the war we started for this very reason.
Cool, cool.
The Allies Are Desperate Too
It’s not just America running low. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel — all of which rely on U.S.-made interceptor systems for their own defence — are burning through stockpiles at catastrophic rates. Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, noted that the backlog of allies needing Patriot resupply “is going to be extraordinary, and they’ll need it quickly.” Saudi Arabia alone has a backlog of 360 THAAD interceptors waiting to be manufactured and delivered.
Israel faces its own interceptor shortages. The Arrow missile defence system, which Israel uses against ballistic threats, has been heavily taxed. The UK has deployed its RAF in a defensive capacity to help intercept missiles near British bases in Cyprus and Qatar, and Prime Minister Starmer confirmed that UK personnel and Ukrainian specialists are being brought in to help Gulf states intercept Iranian drone attacks.
Everyone is sharing from an empty bowl while Trump tells us it’s full.
PART FIVE: WHY WE’RE REALLY HERE
The Trump Family’s Business Partners Wanted This War
Let’s be honest about something the mainstream American press continues to treat as impolite to say directly: this war was not launched for American security. There is no credible evidence Iran was months away from a nuclear weapon capable of hitting the continental United States. Iran’s ballistic missiles cannot reach America. The country is, as Rachel Maddow put it plainly last Saturday, “a whole continent away.”
The Washington Post confirmed that Trump launched Operation Epstein Fury after weeks of intense lobbying from an unusual pair of allies: Israel and Saudi Arabia. Those are the two countries whose regional rival is Iran. Those are the two countries whose rulers have the most to gain from Iran being bombed into submission. And those are the two countries that have spent years methodically purchasing influence inside the Trump political ecosystem.
The receipts are not subtle. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund gave Jared Kushner — Trump’s son-in-law, who was also leading U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations on behalf of the administration — $2 billion for his investment firm at the end of Trump’s first term. The understanding was, supposedly, that Kushner would never work in government again. He was back at the table within weeks of Trump’s second inauguration.
Qatar, the country where the largest American air base in the Middle East is located and where Iranian missiles are now landing, recently gave Trump a $400 million aircraft — a literal gilded flying palace for personal use during and after his presidency. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund was also approached by Trump’s associate Steve Witkoff’s son, seeking investment capital, shortly before the war began.
The UAE structured a $2 billion crypto transaction that effectively enriched the Trump family’s brand-new digital currency venture. This is the same UAE whose airports and consulates are now on fire.
As Maddow summarized it, the Gulf Arab states — Iran’s principal regional rivals — “have been assiduously buying up members of the Trump family and the Trump administration with just astonishing amounts of cash in recent years, and particularly in recent months. And now for that low, low price, they appear to have rented the services of the United States military to start a war that they want, but that the American people do not.”
This is not conspiracy theorizing. This is documented financial history, mapped against a decision to go to war. And it matters, because the people who made that decision have never served in uniform, never studied asymmetric warfare, and apparently never asked the most basic strategic question: what happens if Iran doesn’t fold in 72 hours?
The Rationale That Kept Changing
The Washington Post ran a damning piece on March 3 under the headline “White House Offers Shifting Rationales for War With Iran.” In the five days since the bombs started dropping, the administration has offered the following explanations for why this war was necessary:
Iran was close to a nuclear weapon. (No independent assessment confirmed this, and Trump provided no evidence.) Iran was planning to attack American forces first. (The stated logic for killing Khamenei as a preemptive measure.) The goal is regime change. (Said explicitly by Trump in his opening video, then walked back by Pete Hegseth the same day.) The goal is to destroy Iran’s missile program. (The stated military objective.) The goal is to protect Iranian protesters. (The earlier humanitarian framing that evaporated once the bombs started.) The goal is “peace throughout the Middle East and, indeed, the world.” (Truth Social, February 28, 2026.)
Even some of Trump’s most loyal supporters have broken over this. Tucker Carlson said plainly on his podcast: “This is Israel’s war. This is not the United States’ war.” Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called it Americans “dead and murdered for foreign countries,” a betrayal of “America First.” Conservative commentator Matt Walsh posted a scathing dissection of the contradictory messaging, calling the White House’s narrative “confused” at best.
When you can’t keep your own story straight, and your own base is breaking from you, and your top general warned you not to do it, and you did it anyway — that’s not a strategy. That’s a mess caused by nuclear incompetence and a completely compromised POTUS.
PART SIX: THE RECKONING
What Comes Next, and Who Pays the Price
Iran is not defeated. Iran is not surrendering. Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei is dead — killed in the opening strike — but as Brookings and every serious Iran analyst has noted, the Islamic Republic was designed to survive decapitation. The IRGC, the Revolutionary Guards, the hardline security apparatus: they remain intact, they remain motivated, and they remain in possession of thousands of ballistic missiles, hundreds of drones, and an existential incentive to make the United States bleed.
The Heritage Foundation’s January 2026 report — released before any of this began — warned that in a high-intensity conflict, U.S. stockpiles of THAAD, SM-3, SM-6, and PAC-3 interceptors “would likely be exhausted within days of sustained combat.” It estimated the entire U.S. vertical launch system inventory at roughly 17,000 rounds — insufficient for even one full fleet reload — with pier-side rearming creating gaps of multiple weeks. It projected “systemic operational failure” within 30 to 60 days.
We are on Day Five.
Seth Jones of CSIS — who literally wrote the 2023 report warning about this exact vulnerability — told NPR this week that “neither Israel nor the United States have sufficient munitions, either offensive or defensive, for a war that really lasts weeks into months.” His estimate for how long before key systems face critical shortfalls: about a week.
And in the Pacific, China is watching. Every Tomahawk fired at Tehran is one fewer deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. A January 2026 Heritage Foundation analysis concluded that “the initial stock of U.S. munitions would run out within 25 days of a high-intensity conflict with China.” We are burning those days in the Persian Gulf right now.
Meanwhile, 40,000 to 50,000 American service members are stationed across the Middle East in a theatre where their own government can’t guarantee their air defences won’t go “Winchester.” Tens of thousands of American civilians in the region have been told to leave on their own because the government’s evacuation capacity is overwhelmed, and the airspace keeps closing. Bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq have been struck. The Strait of Hormuz — through which 20 percent of the world’s oil supply transits — is closed, and oil prices are already surging toward $80 a barrel.
Trump assured Americans on Truth Social that the munitions situation is “virtually unlimited.” His own Secretary of State said the opposite to Congress. His own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs warned him to his face not to do this. His own generals are watching the intercept count tick upward, and the magazine depth tick downward, five days into a war that was supposed to take “four to five weeks.”
“Nobody should get the wrong impression,” Undersecretary of Defence Elbridge Colby told lawmakers Tuesday. “We’re ahead of the problem.”
The problem is on fire in nine countries. It killed four Army Reserve soldiers from Iowa. It’s closing embassies and turning off airport runways across the Gulf. It’s draining the defensive arsenal that was supposed to protect Taiwan and deter Russia.
This is what happens when the people who start wars have never had to finish one.
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