- Middle East
- International Affairs
- US Foreign Policy
- US Defense
- Determining America's Role in the World
Military logistics in warfare rest on two pillars: an industrial one and a supply one. Winning a battle requires more than the ability to manufacture, service, and maintain platforms and equipment at speed and scale. It also demands the ability to deliver those capabilities reliably and securely to forward-deployed forces in distant theaters. The geographical and industrial reality of these elements projects an increasingly prolonged and costly nature of warfare with increasingly uncertain outcomes.
One crucial lesson of the Iran war is that gaining the early operational upper hand and eventually achieving decisive battlefield victory demands both a tolerance for high-tempo attrition and the capacity to absorb severe strain on capabilities. This is a capacity the U.S. does not currently possess, and it is confronting that reality in Iran in real time.
The so-far relatively short Iran war, measured against the scale of other American Middle Eastern endeavors, has already left a serious dent in US strategic munitions stockpiles and equipment reserves. According to research by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in a single regional war against a second-tier military power, the US expended more than a quarter of its prewar JASSM stock, a third of its Tomahawks, and by some estimates the majority of its THAAD interceptors, at unit costs ranging from $2.6 million to $28.7 million per missile. Replenishing some of these systems stretches to 64 months for the most depleted inventories. This pace of munitions depletion and the resulting shortages of precision weapons threaten to overwhelm aging maintenance and logistics chains, leaving the US exposed in other critical theaters. What makes this worse is that pre-Iran war munitions inventories were already insufficient for a conflict with a near-peer power like China.
The fundamental and recurring lesson the US has the opportunity to relearn is that this is not primarily a money problem but an industrial-logistical one. The Iran war has exposed dangers on the industrial side while demonstrating reasonable operational competence on the logistics side. But that distinction matters enormously: Operation Epic Fury never evolved, and was never intended to evolve, into a large-scale conventional combat operation—something that would be unavoidable with a potential conflict in the Western Pacific. Accounting for aircraft refueling and maintenance at well-established nearby regional bases, supplying destroyers and carrier strike groups engaged in blockade operations is a categorically different problem from projecting and sustaining power into the Indo-Pacific theater, where bases are less concentrated, distances are an order of magnitude greater, and the adversary's combat readiness and lethality are incomparably more formidable.
In short, the near-term implication of the Iran war is the recognition that demand for capabilities already exceeds available supply: this should drive urgent corrective measures from US military planners. But given the possibility of combat operations in the Western Pacific, long-term strategic measures are equally necessary: the logistics tail is as decisive as the capabilities it keeps in the fight. The simultaneous fielding of resilient manufacturing capacity and secure logistics operations in contested environments will determine whether the US can sustain successful operations in both the Greater Middle East and the Indo-Pacific. In that sense, Iran is not a distraction for the administration but a driver for renewed focus on the sea power that underpins American grand strategy in a most consequential theater. The Iran conflict exposes America's growing inability to sustain a protracted, high-intensity warfare against a serious adversary.
Beyond the gradual erosion of the US’s concentrated defense industrial base that emerged from the post-Cold War consolidations, potential warfare in the Western Pacific carries far more uncertain consequences given China's military preparedness and geostrategic position. China would fight within its own territory and immediate region. For the US, Indo-Pacific operations would be fundamentally expeditionary, requiring the forward deployment of capabilities and their sustainment through mostly sea- and airlift means across a theater covering more than 100 million square kilometers and roughly 65 percent of the world's oceans. That scale imposes prolonged transit times and significant logistical burdens on American force projection, which unlike in Iran is further complicated by advanced—albeit untested—Chinese anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities.
The PLA recognizes US military superiority, particularly in subsea warfare, but it also sees the geostrategic asymmetries it can exploit during a conflict, especially within the first island chain. PLA doctrine, shaped by the assumption that the US would intervene following any move on Taiwan, is oriented around exploiting precisely these imbalances to threaten US force sustainment and logistics operations. The goal would be to win not by matching the US in open combat but by keeping it out of the fight altogether: destroying sustainment capabilities, breaking operational tempo, striking forward bases, and creating a political and military environment in which continued intervention becomes prohibitively costly.
This leaves US war planners with a fundamental question: Can the country sustain a costly, prolonged, and high-intensity conflict given the critical logistical shortfalls it already faces? The Iran war suggests the answer is problematic, unless renewed and serious attention is placed on what might be called the duality of sustainment readiness: logistics is as decisive as the warfighting assets and critical supplies it sustains.
The post-Cold War Bottom-Up Review, initiated by Secretary of Defense Aspin, oriented the defense establishment toward high-end capabilities suited to short, predominantly regional campaigns where precision, stealth, and technological advantage allow for decisive victory. That strategic environment has changed fundamentally with China's rise to near-peer competitor status, and US strategy has not fully adapted.
On the industrial side, the defense base must grow its manufacturing output, but the emphasis should shift from fewer, more expensive systems toward a modernized version of Admiral Zumwalt's high-low capability mix, adapted to 21st century strategic realities and operational needs. Manufacturing smaller and more affordable vessels with simpler systems speeds up planning and production. That said, revamping the defense industrial base will take years, and production growth alone cannot be the only line of effort.
In the interim, the US needs to aggressively expand its hull count by any means available, including purchases on the secondhand market and through allied cooperation with established shipbuilding nations such as Finland and Italy, both of which produce capable, affordable frigates that could be acquired or co-produced at speed. This is not a stopgap measure to be dismissed as strategically inelegant. Mass matters. A larger fleet of moderately capable hulls affords the US something it currently lacks: enough ships to escort logistics convoys through contested waters, which is the proven historical method for securing free passage of capabilities and equipment under threat. However, this requires a significant number of hulls, and the US does not have them. Which brings the argument to the second pillar of contested logistics: manufacturing is one problem, getting there is another.
As lessons stretching back to the Peloponnesian and Second Punic wars make clear, logistics is not only a supply-side problem. It is not simply about regenerating combat power fast enough to sustain the fight but also developing a strategy that ensures capabilities reach the theater in time, and securely. The moment sea lane control is lost, the bottleneck moves up from production to delivery. China, aware of US underinvestment in sealift cargo platforms, treats logistics as the lever it can use to deny outside intervention and foreclose American power projection into what it considers its own sphere of influence.
The Iran war has, however, offered some instructive lessons that should be translated into doctrine for INDOPACOM. The Navy's use of consolidated cargo operations (CONSOLs)—first demonstrated during the RIMPAC 2022 maritime exercise—allowed specially outfitted Military Sealift Command tankers to provide fuel to oilers at sea, eliminating the need to return to port facilities that are, as Iran demonstrated, exposed and vulnerable. When Iranian drones and missiles degraded critical port infrastructure, CONSOLs enabled warship refueling away from the danger zones. At the scale and tempo of potential Indo-Pacific operations, this model needs to be expanded substantially and urgently.
Addressing the deeper shortfall in maritime logistical capacity also requires reviving a solution that was abandoned in the 1980s during a period of uncontested naval hegemony: the Effective US Control (EUSC) Fleet model, which gives the DoD access, through requisitioning or chartering, to a large stock of American-owned, foreign-flagged diverse fleet of commercial hulls during wartime. The EUSC Fleet addresses both sides of the logistics problem simultaneously, providing a resilient and scalable mechanism for projecting capabilities into and through contested environments.
By leveraging the EUSC Fleet, composed of hulls flying flags of convenience (e.g., Liberia, Panama, Marshall Islands), the US can build on a strategic sealift resource that is more resilient and adaptable than a government-sustained fleet given the inherent efficiency of private shipowners.
In concert with the EUSC model, the Maritime Administration's Ready Reserve Force represents the institutional backbone of US surge sealift that already exists and deserves greater investment than it has historically received. MARAD's 44 RRF vessels, activatable within five days and responsible for nearly 50 percent of government-owned surge sealift capacity, are the ships capable of moving equipment and other supplies into combat theaters before commercial hulls can be chartered and contracted. This allows the US to signal credible rapid deployment capacity which is a critical commodity in contested logistics operations.
The current administration's $6.2 billion commitment to RRF management contracts is a recognition of that role. However, the fleet's average age and limited size—considering its 1994 peak at 102 ships—mean that sustaining surge capacity across a theater as vast as the Indo-Pacific will require recapitalization at a pace that has yet to be achieved.
The conventional school of contested logistics holds that threats to joint logistics originate in the homeland, making the resilience of the industrial base the bedrock of sustainment. The emerging school must recognize and act on the fact that with near-peer competitors in the picture and costly, prolonged great-power conflict growing more plausible, 21st century sea power is not only about fielding high-end capabilities but also about being able to sustain the intra-theater “battle of exhaustion” over time and distance. By bringing commercial incentives into line with defense needs, the US can keep its maritime base as resilient and adaptable as the forces it supports.
Authors:
Seth Cropsey is president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy Undersecretary of the Navy. His most recent book, Breaking the New Axis, co-authored with Yorktown Institute Senior Fellow, Harry Halem, was published by the US Naval Institute Press in April 2026.
Barna Peterfi is a Senior Research Fellow at Yorktown Institute.
