Josh Keating

But, you know, we can assume that they're feeling the strain.

This is kind of the million-dollar question, or maybe I should say the $4 billion question.

You know, so early in this conflict, it looked like there was a real risk of that.

I mean, there was a report in Qatar, for instance, a U.S.

ally that hosts a major military base was only a few days away from running out of interceptors entirely.

The shortage is a little less acute now, and that's mainly because just the number of Iranian launches has dropped.

They're firing...

According to the Pentagon's number, 90% fewer missiles, something around 80% fewer drones.

That means the supplies can probably hold up a lot longer just because they're using fewer of them.

And sort of the question becomes, is Iran firing fewer missiles because...

It's running out of them, but it also is quite possible the Iranians are holding something in reserve, that they know this could be a long conflict and they are kind of, you know, drizzling them out, so to speak, just using a few at a time just so they can continue to fight this war as long as possible and continue fighting.

to impose costs, you know, the calculation being that Trump's pain tolerance is just a lot lower than theirs and that sooner or later the president will, you know, get sick of this war and move on to other things.

You know, they certainly want to give that impression.

If you look at another actor in this conflict, Hezbollah, which is the Lebanese militia, one of Israel's staunchest enemies, they fired like a handful of rockets into Israel, like maybe half a dozen.

And I think a lot of analysts, reporters looked at that and were like, oh, you know, Hezbollah's spent.

Like they've been fighting Israel for two years.

They just don't have it.

And then a few days ago, they launched 200 into Israel, and that indicates they were holding back.

So the Iranians may be doing the same.

So my guess is it's a combination of the two, that there is a deliberate strategy where they're sort of parceling these out and they don't want to run out.