How Much Has the War in Iran Depleted the U.S. Missile Supply?

NEWYORKER-April14th2026

In a capital where politicians and policymakers often argue one side and then the other, Elbridge Colby has stood out over the past decade for his consistent and often single-minded position that the United States should shift its military and geopolitical world view toward countering the rise of China. Known to friends and colleagues as Bridge, Colby is something of national-defense royalty: his grandfather was William Colby, a legendary C.I.A. director who had served as the agency’s station chief in Saigon in the early years of the Vietnam War. During the first Trump Administration, Colby, then a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, helped devise the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which directed the department to reorient its focus from the Middle East to China (a perennial-but-never-realized staple of U.S. policy since the Obama Administration proclaimed a “pivot to Asia” in 2011). After Joe Biden was elected, Colby continued to argue that the world was returning to an era of Great Power competition, publishing a book, “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict,” writing op-eds, and leading a think tank, the Marathon Initiative, which he had co-founded with the promise to “develop the diplomatic, military, and economic strategies the nation will need to navigate a protracted competition with great power rivals.”

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022, Colby opposed the Biden Administration’s surge of arms, military assets, and munitions to aid the country in its fight. In Colby’s view, Europe needed to take the lead on its own defense, and the U.S. needed to conserve its weapons for China and the Pacific. As he wrote in an op-ed in November, 2022, “This military scarcity confronting the United States is felt not so much in overall number of soldiers or total expenditures, but rather in the critical platforms, weapons, and enablers that are the key sources of advantage in modern warfare—heavy bombers, attack submarines, sea and airlift, logistics, and precision munitions.”

Two weeks after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, Colby retweeted a warning based on comments by Samuel Paparo, a top U.S. admiral, that “conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are eating away at U.S. stockpiles of air defenses.” In December, Colby shared a tweet by Mike Waltz—who was soon to be Trump’s national-security adviser—in which Waltz proclaimed, “President Trump received an overwhelming mandate to avoid the U.S. being dragged into another Middle East war on his watch.” Later that month, Trump nominated Colby as his Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy—one of the Pentagon’s most powerful roles. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called him “the intellectual front man for a wing of the political right that argues the U.S. should retreat from commitments in Europe and the Middle East.”