Between 100 and 150 THAAD interceptors have been expended in eight days of fighting — over a quarter of the entire global arsenal. A former US official stated the United States had "shot several years' worth of production in the last few days." One Gulf ally was running low on interceptors by Day 4.
Lockheed Martin's facility in Troy, Alabama — the sole THAAD interceptor production line — builds roughly 48 per year. Replacing what has already been fired would take two to three years at current rates. Each interceptor costs approximately $12 million. The seven operational THAAD batteries deployed worldwide each carry 48 interceptors; every round fired in The Gulf is one unavailable on the Korean Peninsula or in the Pacific.
The Pentagon was already considering repositioning Patriot and THAAD batteries from South Korea to the Middle East — a transfer that would reduce coverage against North Korean intermediate-range ballistic missiles at a moment when Pyongyang can observe Washington depleting its interceptor reserves in real time. South Korea's THAAD battery, deployed at Seongju in 2017 over Chinese objections that nearly froze Seoul-Beijing trade, was intended as permanent Peninsula defence infrastructure. Pulling it would reopen that diplomatic wound with no guarantee of return.
The bottleneck is structural. Mark Cancian at CSIS identified this exact vulnerability in 2023 wargaming of a Taiwan Strait contingency: a defence industrial base designed for peacetime procurement cannot sustain wartime consumption. No surge production line exists for THAAD. The gap this conflict has opened will constrain US missile defence commitments for years after the last shot in this war is fired.
