Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine stated Wednesday that Iran is "firing fewer missiles than at war's start," attributing the decline directly to US strikes on launch infrastructure and missile stockpiles. The assessment came during the same Pentagon briefing where Defence Secretary Hegseth announced a second massive air assault was imminent.
The decline itself is observable. The UAE and Kuwait released cumulative intercept figures earlier this week — 165 ballistic missiles and 541 drones for the UAE alone, 97 ballistic missiles and 283 drones for Kuwait — volumes that implied early-conflict salvo rates exceeding most open-source projections of Iran's sustained capacity. By Wednesday, IRGC wave 17 comprised "more than 40 missiles." The drop from hundreds per wave to dozens is roughly 80 per cent or greater.
Caine's explanation — attrition through strikes — has supporting evidence. US forces have hit more than 1,000 targets including missile batteries and IRGC command centres since Saturday, with B-2 bombers deploying GBU-31 general-purpose munitions against hardened underground facilities. But it omits a competing explanation. Iran shifted from massed salvos to constant-rate strikes across dispersed targets earlier this week, a pattern the IRGC may have adopted deliberately to extend the operational life of remaining stocks. A force that knows its resupply lines are under bombardment has every reason to husband what it has left.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimated Iran's pre-war Ballistic missile inventory at between 3,000 and 4,000 missiles of various ranges. Seventeen numbered waves in five days, with early waves in the hundreds, suggests a substantial fraction has been expended regardless of cause. Whether US strikes have reached Iran's distributed production facilities — at Parchin, Isfahan, and elsewhere — determines whether the decline is a temporary dip or a trajectory toward exhaustion. Caine did not address production.
