Garrison Davis

Tomorrow, there's supposed to be a speech by the president on Iran, so we'll know more then.

But relevant reporting indicates the Trump administration is at least seriously weighing the feasibility of sending Marines in to take and hold Iranian territory, namely Karg Island and potentially other islands in the Strait of Hormuz, most of which are inhabited and all of which are heavily defended.

If they go through with this, we might be about to watch in real time one of the most consequential disasters in military history, a modern-day Gallipoli in which hundreds or thousands of American soldiers and billions in materiel get chewed up in an unsustainable and unwinnable war of attrition.

There's no real way for the average American to know what kind of stockpile our military maintains of the most advanced munitions.

We're talking precision-guided missiles like the Tomahawk cruise missile, but also the interceptor missiles used by our various missile batteries.

Estimates suggest the U.S.

has already expended about a thousand Tomahawks in a month of combat operations, which would be around a third, maybe a little less, of the total stockpile.

That doesn't sound so bad until you realize that our present stockpile of tomahawks was built up over more than a decade.

We're only capable of making about 150 a year at present levels, which means our military already burned through around seven years' worth of these things.

Maybe more, because in 2025, the U.S.

defense budget included something like 56 tomahawks, even though our largely ineffectual war against the Houthis had already depleted the stockpile.

This is a story that you'll hear over and over again in this episode.

The U.S.

military is actually quite bad at knowing and asking for what it will need, and even worse at predicting accurately what it's going to need in the immediate future.

Each Tomahawk costs around $3.6 million to produce, and these are the only long-range offensive weapons mounted by our naval destroyers.

Per a source interviewed by Military Watch magazine, quote, without intervention, the Pentagon may be left out of ammunition.

Now, tomahawks aren't the only things the U.S.

military is low on.

Per that same article, inventories of anti-ballistic missiles and GBU-57 bunker buster bombs are estimated to have been almost totally spent while being significantly more costly to replace.

We just don't have granular data on the size of U.S.