During the major combat operations in the Iran war, the Navy’s destroyers and submarines fired so many Tomahawk cruise missiles that the United States had expended more than it produced in a last decade, according to an independent analysis in May by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. A new report released by CSIS Monday shows that Patriot interceptors and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile interceptors, both of which are in demand across the world, were expended at a rate that has left about half of the prewar U.S. inventory of each munition depleted.

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The Pentagon’s official and consistent stance has been to downplay the stockpile concerns raised by lawmakers, analysts and experts. “The munitions issue has been foolishly and unhelpfully overstated,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a House Appropriations subcommittee in May. “We have all the munitions needed to execute what we need to execute.” At a reporter roundtable on the sidelines of a Center for a New American Security event in June, Michael Cadenazzi, assistant secretary of war for industrial base policy, pushed back on the premise that current stockpiles could not sustain large-scale combat operations. “I think that’s fundamentally flawed,” he said. “I don’t think that’s based in fact.”

In an interview with WP Intelligence, Rep. Pat Ryan (D-New York), a West Point graduate and Iraq War veteran who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, alleged the administration is hiding the extent of the problem. Ryan co-chairs the bipartisan House Defense Modernization Caucus, and he has in several hearings pressed Pentagon officials and combatant commanders for a detailed accounting of what the war has consumed.

“There is still not a single classified or unclassified accounting that has been shared with the committee, despite multiple requests from members of both parties,” Ryan said. “And how do we fix this if we don’t understand what our current situation is?”

The May CSIS analysis is among the most rigorous public assessments available, based on unclassified Defense Department budget documents, news releases and other public reporting. CSIS estimated that Patriot interceptor stocks won’t be replenished until mid 2029, THAAD interceptors stocks will not reach pre-war levels until mid to late 2029, and Tomahawk missiles stocks won’t return to pre-war levels until late 2030 or early 2031. Similar production gaps face other missile replenishment efforts.

Since major combat operations with Iran have ended, the Trump administration has taken several steps on replenishment, even while denying the scope of the problem. On June 24, the Office of Management and Budget transmitted an $87.6 billion emergency supplemental requestto Congress, of which $21 billion is designated for munitions replenishment. That same day, the Pentagon awarded Lockheed Martin a seven-year, up-to-$35.3 billion contract to quadruple production for an anti-ballistic missile weapon known as THAAD interceptor from 96 to 400 units per year.

On June 24, the White House also convened a second meeting with defense company executives that, according to a source cited by Reuters, opened with a blunt message to the CEOs: “You’re not doing enough.” By the end, officials were calling for the companies to “get on a war footing.”

The question now is not whether a large-scale replenishment effort will occur. The harder questions are what will be built, who beyond the established primes will be positioned to build it, and whether an industrial base that took three decades to hollow out can reconstitute and reform itself at the same time.

“These munitions were designed in the 1970s and 1980s. They were built all about performance. They were not built to be mass produced. They’re very exquisite,” said Jerry McGinn, director of the CSIS Center for the Industrial Base. “So it’s really hard to scale them.”

Read the entire report at WP Intelligence here: https://wapo.st/4ygV7XR

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This is an excerpt from my latest Washington Post Intelligence report. Free link to the full report at the bottom.

The Trump administration is establishing an industrial policy unlike anything the United States has attempted outside of wartime or financial crisis.

Rather than relying on grants, loans or tax incentives, the administration is demanding ownership in companies. In deal after deal, negotiated at the highest levels of government — often by President Donald Trump himself, according to Trump — the administration is converting public funding into equity stakes in major U.S. companies, sometimes after making clear to company leadership that the alternative was potentially punitive.

For example, after the Trump administration struck a deal to take about a 10 percent of Intel in equity for the U.S. government, the president backed off his calls for CEO Lip-Bu Tan to resign, and said he had given Tan a reprieve for striking the deal. “He walked in wanting to keep his job, and he ended up giving us $10 billion for the United States,” Trump told reporters last August.

The administration has struck more than 20 equity deals giving the U.S. government stakes exceeding $50 billion in value, according to public reports and Washington Post Intelligence’s review of public filings and announcements. The Commerce Department holds stakes in at least nine companies across semiconductors and quantum computing, including Intel, PsiQuantum, IBM’s quantum subsidiary Anderon, GlobalFoundries and Diraq — as well as critical minerals firms USA Rare Earth and Vulcan Elements. The Defense Department holds stakes in MP Materials, Trilogy Metals, Vulcan Elements, and L3Harris. The Energy Department, meanwhile, holds a stake in Lithium Americas. The deals span semiconductors, rare earth minerals, nuclear energy, defense manufacturing and aerospace — and more are expected.

Proponents argue government equity is a useful industrial policy tool. China dominates critical mineral supply chains and semiconductor manufacturing in ways that create genuine national security risk for the United States. The private sector alone will not fill the gaps. The Development Finance Corporation, the Small Business Administration, and the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital all have some form of congressionally authorized equity authority.

“If we do want these facilities here, without government support, I doubt we would get there,” said Sanjay Patnaik, director of the Center on Regulation and Markets at the Brookings Institution.

But elements of the administration’s approach to equity stakes present novel and serious risks. When the government becomes a major shareholder in companies it simultaneously regulates, funds and contracts with, structural conflicts of interest are unavoidable. Competitors face markets warped by political ties. Legal experts warn that companies subject themselves to the preferences of whoever controls the executive branch, which can change with an election. And many deals rest on statutory authority never designed to support them.

“It gives the United States government a lot of say and influence over how private corporations are run, kind of indefinitely,” said University of Colorado Law School Professor Ann Lipton. “That’s a problem, because it gives private corporations less incentive to compete on the merits of their products, it harms competitors who might have better products, and it distorts the marketplace in a way that is at odds with how we’ve designed a capitalist system.”

Now the scheme faces its first major legal challenge. On March 5, Intel shareholder Richard Paisner filed suit in Delaware Chancery Court against Intel CEO Tan, the Intel board of directors, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and the Commerce Department. The complaint alleges that Intel’s board breached its fiduciary duties by approving a deal transferring 9.9 percent of the company’s equity to the federal government in exchange for $8.9 billion in Chips Act funding Intel had already been promised — and that the transaction lacked lawful statutory basis. Portions of the complaint that had been redacted were unsealed June 17, providing a detailed picture of how the deal was allegedly made.

The newly unredacted complaint depicts a negotiation process that allegedly shows government pressure and was concluded in days. It alleges, according to Intel board documents produced to plaintiff’s attorneys under Delaware’s books-and-records statute and attached as exhibits to the complaint, that CHIPS Program Office General Counsel Dave Shapiro told Intel CFO and Executive Vice President David Zinsner last Aug.18 that Intel should not make the “mistake of thinking that this is a negotiation” — and that Trump was expecting an announcement by Friday. Shapiro allegedly warned that rejection would have “consequences” he could not predict, and urged Intel to “consider benefits of having a friend in this administration,” according to the documents attached as exhibits to the complaint. The board was allegedly first informed of the equity demand on Aug. 20, only two days before it approved the deal, without legal opinion on whether the transaction was lawful and no documented analysis of alternatives.

Intel declined to comment and didn’t make Tan or Zinsner available for comment. The Commerce Department did not respond to a request to make Shapiro available for comment.

Congressional scrutiny of other Trump equity deals is intensifying in parallel. House Science Committee Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren (D-California) has condemned the USA Rare Earth equity deal, alleging it is a “massive personal conflict” given its links to Lutnick’s family firm Cantor Fitzgerald — and Democrats have demanded answers about the Vulcan Elements deal, which allegedly benefited a company where Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., holds an investment stake.

A spokesman for USA Rare Earth defended the deal in a statement to WP Intelligence: “The recently announced definitive agreements with the U.S. Government followed extensive diligence conducted by technical professionals and advisers within the federal government.”

Vulcan did not respond when reached for comment.

Intel and the Commerce Department have both moved to dismiss the complaint, with Commerce arguing the Chips Act’s broad authority to enter agreements “on such terms as the secretary considers appropriate” covers the equity stake.

“The only special interest guiding the Trump administration’s decision-making is the best interest of the American people,” White House Spokesman Kush Desai told WP Intelligence. “Securing and reshoring America’s critical supply chains has been a top priority for President Trump, and the Trump administration continues to take historic action to safeguard America’s national and economic security.”

Meanwhile, the deals are likely to continue, often to the short-term benefit of the companies that struck them.

“There are lots of ways in which the government can shower favoritism on the companies it owns a stake in at the expense of another company that might have a better product but hasn’t cut the government in,” said Peter Harrell, former National Security Council official and visiting scholar at Georgetown’s Institute of International Economic Law.

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This is an excerpt from my latest Washington Post Intelligence report. Free link to the full report at the bottom.

Intro: The U.S.-China economic détente hangs by a thread

President Donald Trump’s May visit to Beijing was most notable for the fact that not much new was accomplished. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping did not settle ongoing disputes about trade, tariffs, technology or Taiwan. No major economic agreements or significant business deals were struck. But the two sides agreed to continue their trade war pause until Xi’s expected visit to the United States in September.

That lull now appears to be over. Washington fired the first salvo on June 8, when the Pentagon rereleased its updated list of Chinese companies it claims are tied to the People’s Liberation Army. This is known as the 1260H list, named after the provision in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act that established it. This year’s list included 65 new entities and delisted 10, bringing the total to a record-high 188 companies designated.

The new additions in the June 8 list expanded into new sectors of the Chinese economy: consumer electric vehicles and batteries (BYD, NIO, EVE Energy), consumer tech (Alibaba, Baidu), humanoid robotics (Unitree), LiDAR (Hesai, RoboSense), biotech (WuXi AppTec, BGI Group), solar (JA Solar, Trina Solar), and consumer networking hardware (TP-Link). The Pentagon is designating any company that participates in China’s “civil-military fusion ecosystem” — a definition broad enough to encompass most of China’s private sector.

On Sunday, Beijing responded. China’s Ministry of Commerce placed 10 U.S. companies on its export control list, barring Chinese firms from supplying them with dual-use goods — and the Finance Ministry separately excluded 46 mostly defense-linked U.S. companies from Chinese government procurement. The export control list is where Beijing aimed for strategic effect: among those named are MP Materials Corp. and USA Rare Earth, the two companies at the center of Washington’s push to build a domestic rare earth supply chain independent of China.

Some experts point out that a 1260H designation is not a sanctions measure. The newly listed companies remain free to sell in the United States and raise capital on U.S. exchanges — for now. “It’s the list of Chinese companies out there that matters the least,” Martin Chorzempa, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told WP Intelligence.

But the list’s bite comes from its downstream effects. Starting June 30, DoD cannot contract directly with listed entities. A lobbying ban takes effect simultaneously: DoD cannot contract with any U.S. firm that employs a lobbyist representing a listed Chinese entity. Starting June 2027, it also cannot contract with any company whose goods or services for a contract include those from a listed company. The COINS Act in the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act requires, within two years, a presidential review of whether 1260H-listed companies qualify for Treasury’s “Non-SDN Chinese Military-Industrial Complex” (NS-CMIC) List, which would bar U.S. persons from trading their securities.

As Neena Shenai of the law firm WilmerHale told WP Intelligence, the 1260H list is “the U.S. government raising a red flag about certain companies and their relationship to the Chinese military industrial complex.”

In February, the Pentagon published a near-identical version of the list but retracted it within the hour — with no public explanation. The retraction occurred because the Pentagon had dropped two Chinese memory chip manufacturers — YMTC and CXMT — that the Biden administration had already designated, according to officials close to the process who were not authorized to speak publicly about internal deliberations. China hawks inside and outside the administration criticized the omission, but the list stayed in limbo until after the Trump-Xi summit, which the White House did not want to disrupt, these officials said. Now, those two Chinese firms are on the list again.

“You can’t have a functional data center without these memory chips. The Chinese competitors to U.S. and allied firms are CXMT and YMTC,” said Michael Sobolik, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “So, the conditions are in place where if CXMT and YMTC are not blacklisted, we could miss the opportunity.”

The Defense Department, which did not respond to requests for comment, has not said whether it will respond to Beijing’s retaliation against U.S. firms. But the administration’s next move could come from a different agency. On Wednesday, Reuters reported that the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security has not updated its list of blacklisted Chinese entities since October — the longest gap in more than a decade. The interagency committee that governs the list has approved more than 100 Chinese companies for designation that Commerce has not published. Among them: DeepSeek, CXMT and many more. Reuters reported citing sources that Undersecretary of Commerce Jeffrey Kessler has, since late 2025, sought to avoid listing Chinese parties to prevent escalating bilateral tensions. The Commerce Department did not respond to a request for comment.

U.S. businesses depend on critical minerals from China to such an extent that escalation could have cascading effects on U.S. defense and manufacturing sectors, which are already short on supplies. That will be top of mind in the White House as it considers next moves, Chorzempa told WP Intelligence.

“China clearly believes it has escalation dominance,” Chozempra said. “The sense that you could just do things like this and China would just take it — that ship has sailed.”

A White House spokesperson told us that the Defense Department’s 1260H procurement restrictions “help ensure secure and reliable supply chains for U.S. military forces,” and added, “Beijing’s response only validates the assessment that Chinese suppliers are unreliable.”

Read the entire report using this gift link here: https://wapo.st/4eWLpSx

I’m Josh Rogin. I’ve spent the past two decades covering U.S. foreign policy, national security, and international affairs. My reporting and analysis have appeared in The Washington Post, Bloomberg View, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, Congressional Quarterly, Federal Computer Week Magazine and Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper. I’ve appeared as an analyst on CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News, and PBS. I’m the author of Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi and the Battle for the 21st Century, published in 2021.

My main job is as Lead Global Security Analyst for Washington Post Intelligence, where I cover the intersection of global security, technology and business. The Cable is where I share everything else — the reporting, analysis and opinion that doesn’t fit inside the day job.

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