Missile crisis: The hard truths about America's military arsenal

On the floor at Lockheed Martin's production facility in Camden, Arkansas, Tim Cahill, head of the company's missile division, showed "Sunday Morning" the latest model of the Patriot air defense missile, a state-of-the-art weapon designed to shoot down the deadliest of threats: an incoming ballistic missile. It destroys an incoming missile by impact – a classic "bullet hitting a bullet" scenario.

Each of these "bullets" costs about $4 million, and Lockheed Martin is currently turning out 750 of them a year – not nearly enough to replenish the estimated 1,500 fired in the war against Iran.

Mark Cancian, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has compiled estimates of the Patriot and six other critical weapons (including the Tomahawk; the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile, or THAAD; and the long-range Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM) used against Iran. He says the cost of munitions already fired off against Iran is in the vicinity of $25 billion.

"If they fire a ballistic missile, we have to use one of our high-end systems to defend," Cancian said.

Now in its seventh month, the unpopular war with Iran has exposed for all to see an unsettling fact: A chronic shortage of high-tech weapons, which was largely ignored by both Democratic and Republican administrations, until the U.S. increased military aid to Ukraine after the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022 .

"The war in Ukraine was the wake-up call," Cancian said, "because it became clear that we did not have adequate inventories or the surge capability to supply a protracted conflict."

Then, this February, the U.S. attacked Iran. By April 8, according to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, the United States Joint Force had struck more than 13,000 targets .

Asked if the U.S. has enough weapons to see the war through, Cancian replied, "For a war against Iran, the answer is yes. The problem is a war against China. We might be able to provide enough munitions for a month, but getting on to month two or month three or four, that's a great challenge."

The Pentagon says, "Claims of U.S. munition shortages are false," and only embolden enemies to attack American troops.

But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been exhorting industry to increase weapons production to what he calls a "wartime footing," which Lockheed Martin's Tim Cahill describes as "controlled chaos." "It's just, move fast, figure it out, find what our obstacles are, break them down ," he said.

Cahill says Lockheed Martin intends to increase Patriot production from 750 a year to 2,000, by laying on more shifts and increasing automation on the assembly line. "Hours are going to become minutes as we fully automate this factory to drive those rates up," he said.

It takes some six weeks to assemble a Patriot, but about two years to manufacture the 4,000 parts that go into it. Lockheed Martin depends on a vast supply chain – on the order of 500 to 1,000 suppliers – creating potential bottlenecks. "Our joke is, 'How many parts does it take to build a missile?' And the answer is, 'All of them,'" Cahill said.