Joint Chiefs chairman cautions lack of munitions and allied support may mean greater danger for troops

US Joint Chiefs chairman General Dan Caine attends a meeting at the White House in December. Photo / Matt McClain, The Washington Post

As the Trump Administration weighs an attack on Iran, the Pentagon’s top general has cautioned United States President Donald Trump and other officials that shortfalls in critical munitions and a lack of support from allies will add significant risk to the operation and to US personnel, according to people familiar with internal discussions.

General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed his concerns at a White House meeting last week with Trump and his top aides, these people said.

He cautioned that any major operation against Iran will face challenges because the US munitions stockpile has been significantly depleted by Washington’s ongoing defence of Israel and support for Ukraine.

Caine’s remarks at the White House meeting have not been previously reported.

Separately, in Pentagon meetings this month, Caine also has raised concerns about the scale of any Iran campaign, its inherent complexity and the possibility of US casualties, one person said.

The general has said that any operation would be made all the more difficult by a lack of allied support, this person said, speaking like others on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

In a statement, Caine’s office said that in his role as the President’s top military adviser, the chairman “provides a range of military options, as well as secondary considerations and associated impacts and risks, to the civilian leaders who make America’s security decisions”.

Caine, the statement adds, “provides these options confidentially”.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said Trump listens to a “host of opinions on any given issue and decides based on what is best for US national security”.

She described Caine as a “talented and highly valued member of President Trump’s national security team”.

Trump, after this article’s publication, posted on social media that it is “100% incorrect” that Caine is “against us going to War with Iran”.

Trump said that the general would not like to see a military confrontation with Iran but that if it did happen, “it is his opinion that it will be something easily won”.

The people who spoke to the Post about Caine’s thinking directly contradicted Trump’s optimistic characterisation.

The White House meeting last Wednesday NZT included Vice-President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House adviser Stephen Miller, one person told the Washington Post.

Caine’s views, reported earlier by Axios, are seen as highly credible by the Administration because of the successful execution of two other major operations he has overseen: the assault on Iran’s nuclear sites last year and the January raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Caine, said one person familiar with his conversations, will support whatever decision the President makes, as he did with previous operations, and does not want to be seen as taking any option off the table.

The US is preparing for potential air strikes on Iran, with military assets in place. Photo / Getty Images

Possible US objectives

The scale of an Iran campaign could vary significantly depending on Trump’s objectives.

Taking out Iran’s missile programme would require hitting hundreds of targets across a country more than three times the size of Iraq.

Those targets could include missile launch sites, many of them mobile; supply depots; air defence systems; and the transportation networks used to move those weapons, a former defence official told the Post.

If the objective is to overthrow Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as Trump has mused publicly, the target set would expand dramatically to thousands of sites, including command-and-control nodes, security services, and key buildings tied to Khamenei.

Such a campaign could extend for weeks or months, require much more munitions and expose US forces to more intense retaliation, the former defence official said.

The Administration has assembled a massive strike force in the Middle East, and Trump has acknowledged that he is also weighing a limited strike aimed at pressuring Tehran into a deal to restrict its nuclear programme on terms favourable to Washington.

Iran has expressed a willingness to make a deal, but disagreements remain over Iran maintaining a uranium enrichment capability, among other issues. Talks between US and Iranian negotiators are scheduled to resume this week in Geneva.

Debate over course of action

Some US officials oppose a limited strike because it could trigger an unpredictable cycle of tit-for-tat violence, including Iranian attacks on US military and diplomatic personnel in the region, said a person familiar with the deliberations.

Advocates for a limited strike point to Iran’s modest response to previous US and Israeli strikes, including telegraphed counterstrikes aimed at limiting the risk of US casualties.

Opponents say Trump’s open deliberating about regime change and the growing influence of hardliners in Iran’s military establishment may invite a more lethal response.

US allies in the region, some of whom met Trump last week to convene his Board of Peace, also worry that a limited strike would push Iran away from the negotiating table.

An attack on Iran could further strain US relations with its regional allies. A senior Gulf official told the Post that Arab countries have informed Washington that they would not allow their bases to be used for a strike against Iran.

Iran’s threat to retaliate against any country that supports the US operation has also raised questions about Washington’s ability to secure flyover rights.

One former Pentagon official said the lack of allied support significantly complicates the mission.

“How are we going to be able to do this, especially if the Arabs don’t give us overflight? How are you going to hit hundreds, if not thousands, of targets across the country?” the former official said.

US weapons supplies

Two munitions critical to the defence of US military personnel against Iranian-launched ballistic missiles - Terminal High Altitude Area Defence, or THAAD interceptors, and Patriot missile systems - have been extensively used in recent military operations in the Middle East.

Patriot missiles also remain one of the most in-demand items by Ukraine as it defends against Russian missile attacks.

But the US produces only several hundred of both defences each year - far less than would be needed, said Ryan Brobst, deputy director of the Centre on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies.

The Navy, too, has a limited supply of its standard missiles, a must-have if the US is going to limit risk to the thousands of US military forces that have surged to the region.

Ship-launched SM-2, SM-3 and SM-6 munitions have been rapidly consumed as the Navy has protected vessels in the Red Sea against Iranian-proxy forces in Yemen and defended Israel against ballistic missiles.

Because of their complexity and production constraints, it can take two years or more to produce each replacement missile, said Mackenzie Eaglen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “There’s no quick fix to this problem,” Eaglen said.

The US military’s supply of those missiles is globally managed and allocated, meaning one pot is shared by commands worldwide depending on need. No one has everything they need, a US official told the Post.

Munitions stockpile levels dropped so low last year that the Defence Department abruptly requested almost US$30 billion from Congress to purchase a range of high-end missiles and interceptors. The request was only partially fulfilled in the Pentagon budget passed last month, according to lawmakers.

Dangerous numbers game

Katherine Thompson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who recently left the Pentagon, said that the US “is not currently prepared to resource simultaneous conflicts” and that any extended conflict with Iran “would likely come with significant trade-offs for higher-priority interests”.

The US has surged forces to the region in part to mitigate risk to US personnel there and Israeli targets, but a dangerous numbers game persists.

As long as Iran retains a missile arsenal, American and Israeli forces would have to absorb incoming fire or destroy Iran’s launch sites at scale, a former defence official said.

“That is the dynamic,” this person said.

As the Trump Administration deliberates, it has assembled the largest military build-up in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Today, the US ordered the departure of non-emergency US government personnel and family members from the US Embassy in Lebanon amid fears that Iran’s proxy Hezbollah could be drawn into the conflict.

Trump’s special envoy to the region, Steve Witkoff, told Fox News over the weekend that the President is “curious” why Iran hasn’t “capitulated” to US demands, given the looming threat of a military attack.

“Why, under this pressure, with the amount of sea power and naval power over there, why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do?’ And, yet, it’s sort of hard to get them to that place,” he said.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi responded on social media, saying: “Curious to know why we do not capitulate? Because we are Iranian.”

- Dan Lamothe, Noah Robertson, Alex Horton and Aaron Schaffer in Washington and Suzan Haidamous in Beirut contributed to this report.

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