TEHRAN — More than five months after the joint US-Israeli military campaign swept across Iran under the banner of "Operation Epic Fury," investigative reporting published by Reuters, CBS News, and CNN reveals that the architecture of Washington's strategic projection has hit an unprecedented wall.

What was initially marketed by the administration of President Donald Trump as a swift, decisive intervention designed to dismantle Iranian military capabilities in a matter of weeks has instead devolved into a profound industrial and strategic quagmire. According to comprehensive data and insider accounts detailed across Reuters, CBS News, and CNN, the US military has exhausted "virtually all" of its global stockpiles of premier long-range precision missiles. Rather than diplomacy or magnanimity halting the assault, reports from these three major outlets highlight that the exhaustion of America's elite munitions has become the ultimate stumbling block, exposing a failure to achieve core war objectives through military might.

According to internal Pentagon data and sources cited by the three above-mentioned media outlets, the high-intensity theater of war rapidly cannibalized America's most advanced strategic assets:

Surface-to-surface missiles: As first reported by Reuters and confirmed by CBS News and CNN, the US Army has burned through virtually its entire inventory of long-range precision weapons—specifically the Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and the cutting-edge, next-generation Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). Costing over $1 million each, these assets were deployed extensively to strike targets deep inside Iranian territory without risking piloted aircraft.

Cruise missiles: Naval capabilities have suffered a parallel collapse. Reuters and CNN report that the US has burned through nearly half of its global supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles, which serve as the Navy's primary vehicle for striking heavily defended inland targets from destroyers and cruisers.

Air defense architecture: Most alarming to military commanders—as detailed extensively in reports by CNN and CBS News using data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)—is the catastrophic depletion of America’s air defense systems. The US military has exhausted nearly 80% of its interceptors for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, alongside roughly half to 65% of its Patriot missile interceptors.

With manufacturing lines moving at a sluggish pace—recovering a mere trickle of new interceptors per month—replenishing these stockpiles to pre-war baselines could take anywhere from three to five years, according to analysts cited by CNN and Reuters.

The rapid depletion of these critical munitions highlights a stark reality documented by the media reports: the US has fundamentally failed to achieve its strategic objectives through force. The original premise of the February 28 offensive—predicted by Trump to be a short, clean operation—assumed that overwhelming aerial dominance would instantly break the adversary. Instead, months of relentless bombardments have left the US military dangerously hollowed out, raising acute concerns among defense analysts and military brass that Washington is critically vulnerable and ill-equipped to deter other global competitors like Russia and China.

While the White House has publicly attempted to spin the pause in hostilities as an opening for diplomatic engagement—with President Trump claiming he wants to give Tehran a final chance before potential escalation—CNN and CBS News confirm that the standstill is a forced tactical retreat. Repeated plans for massive offensive waves over recent weekends were aborted not out of sudden diplomatic grace, but because senior military advisers issued stark warnings about the dangerously low state of the arsenal. Furthermore, CNN notes that intense pressure from Persian Gulf allies, terrified of devastating retaliatory strikes on their own energy infrastructure, forced Washington to pull back its hand.

The continuation of this conflict threatens to plunge the United States deeper into an intractable quagmire with Iran. By over-relying on a short-sighted strategy of high-end missile expenditure, the administration has locked itself into a war of attrition that outpaces the nation's defense industrial capacity.

Iranian resilience and defense

In stark contrast to the fragile, over-extended global supply chains underpinning the American war machine, the Islamic Republic of Iran has demonstrated remarkable operational durability. Operating primarily on indigenous, home-made military infrastructure and localized defense manufacturing, Iran has absorbed months of intense bombardment while maintaining its core defensive posture.

Throughout the conflict, Iran's strategic actions have been fundamentally defensive, designed to repel unprovoked foreign aggression and protect national sovereignty. While Western media and administration officials frequently decry regional friction, independent analysts cited across the reporting outlets note that Iran's domestic defense ecosystem has enabled it to withstand the initial onslaught. Lacking the billion-dollar logistical tail of the Pentagon, Tehran's localized military economy has proven capable of continuing the war and sustaining its defense against external coercion, proving that resilience often trumps high-tech overreach in a prolonged war of attrition.

As the US administration weighs its next steps amidst fractured supply lines and anxious allies, the missile shortages documented by Reuters, CBS News, and CNN stand as an enduring monument to the limits of imperial overreach—signaling that military dominance cannot forever defy the laws of industrial exhaustion.