WarTalk: Out of Ammo for Real + Are CCAs Dumb?

Six months into the war with Iran, the United States has fired 850 Tomahawks, emptied its LRASM and JASSM-ER inventories, expended essentially every ATACMS and PrSM in the arsenal, and burned through the SM-6 and PAC-3 interceptors it had been stockpiling for a fight with China. The administration's position is that the munitions are fine and the people saying otherwise are committing treason.

Bryan Clark is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and a former submarine officer who runs war games for the Navy and its allies. Justin McIntosh is a retired Army Special Forces soldier — twenty years in, sixteen of them as a Green Beret — who now writes Mind of Things on defense, technology, and foreign policy.

We discuss…

Why 850 Tomahawks in two months emptied the stockpile that was meant for China

The leak hunt at Camp David, and why it should be a very short list

How "lethality" became a testosterone prescription instead of an ammunition line item

Japan's new defense strategy, which finally names China out loud — and bets on one-way attack drones

Whether AUKUS Pillar 1 is quietly consuming the rest of the Australian military

Why manned-unmanned teaming keeps failing in the war games, and what the CCA program got wrong

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