Military & Defense Original Briefing

SRM Shortages Threaten US Air Defense Resilience

📅 June 19, 2026 ⏱ 9 min read 📰 Source: Breakingdefense 👁 3 views

Recent operations in the Iran conflict have starkly underscored both the operational effectiveness and critical vulnerabilities within US air and missile defense (AMD) systems. While intercepting numerous threats, these engagements have led to documented damage to high-value assets, such as TPY-2 radars, and alarmingly, a rapid depletion of essential munitions components like solid rocket motors (SRMs). This highlights a pressing readiness concern that could compromise sustained defensive capabilities.

This evolving threat landscape, characterized by complex missile and drone attacks, places immense pressure on an industrial base struggling to meet demand. It forces a strategic re-evaluation of defense manufacturing capacity and the long-term viability of deterrence postures against determined adversaries.

Key Intelligence Points

US air and missile defense systems demonstrate high effectiveness but incur damage and rapidly exhaust critical interceptor components.
Stockpiles of solid rocket motors, vital for many interceptors, are diminishing, raising significant concerns for sustained operational capacity.
A balanced "high-low mix" of defensive munitions is confirmed as essential, leveraging both advanced interceptors and more numerous, affordable solutions.
The inherent value of defending an asset consistently overrides the comparative cost of an interceptor versus an incoming threat.
Developing robust counter-UAS capabilities largely depends on improving capacity, training protocols, and clear rules of engagement, rather than new technological breakthroughs.

Intelligence Briefing

The dwindling supply of solid rocket motors directly compromises the operational readiness and sustainability of critical air defense systems. This vulnerability means that while current systems are highly effective, their finite component supply could degrade long-term deterrence and leave high-value military assets or personnel exposed to persistent threats. Policy makers must prioritize rapid investment in the defense industrial base to mitigate this strategic risk.

US air-and-missile-defense (AMD) systems have shown their worth in the Iran conflict, intercepting wave after wave of attacks from missiles and drones. But a number of costly TPY-2 radars have been damaged or destroyed, and stockpiles of munitions components such as solid rocket motors (SRMs) are dwindling, exacerbating concerns about the capability of AMD systems to maintain effectiveness.

Breaking Defense discussed the performance of AMD systems, munitions stockpile concerns and what needs to happen to ensure future deterrence capability with Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Breaking Defense: You’ve been publicly stating for some time that our stockpiles are not what they need to be, but has seeing how attacks have evolved from ballistic missiles to drones changed your thinking about what kinds of munitions we need?

Karako: I would not say it’s changed my mind as much as it’s simply confirmed the sort of things that we’ve been saying for years. It needs to be a high-low mix. There are those who will repeat the cliche that one shouldn’t use a $4 million missile to take out a $40,000 drone. Of course there’s a certain truth to that. It is not desirable to do so.

Having said that, no captain of a ship will pull out his slide rule and begin calculating whether the incoming threat costs more than the missile or the gun that they’re going to use to take it out. They’re going to defend the ship. Likewise, an air defender will defend the airbase and the lives on the base against an incoming threat with whatever means are at their disposal.

There is a distinction between cost and value, the value of the defended asset specifically, but it’s also just an operational reality. It’s to some extent about cost, but it’s really about affordability. The United States of America can afford more than North Korea can. The United States of America can afford more than Iran can. But it really comes down to the numbers that we’re able to buy and the industry is able to produce as well. I will caution that the lower-cost, lower-capability things are not going to be capable of doing what that $4 million PAC-3 is capable of doing.

When folks cast aspersions on the higher-end capability, they do so with a bit of abandon because there’s just no counter-UAS capability that can substitute. For the foreseeable future, the United States of America, the US government and the military, is going to demand capability as well as capacity. So it’s not an either/or, it’s a both/and.

The good news is that it’s not rocket surgery to bring these drones down. The hard part is detection and tracking and classification, and being in the right place at the right time and having sufficient capacity to shoot down that, basically, low and slow flying airplane coming at you. It’s a capacity problem, and it’s also a rules of engagement problem and a training problem.

One can’t attend an Army trade show without running into somebody’s counter-UAS effector. Everybody has a solution there, and that’s good. You can’t swing a tank turret at one of these conferences without running into somebody’s counterdrone system. That speaks to the relative ease of killing these things as opposed to being a technological challenge.

It comes down to capacity and training and rules of engagement. While many companies have different solutions in the near term, the emphasis is going to be on producing lots of them and frankly producing more of what the military is trained to use. There is a limitation on the introduction of many new things as opposed to lots of one thing that training and comfort with matter a lot.

Let’s talk about SRMs specifically, which were the subject of a recent report by CSIS. Is it harder to replace SRMs than it is to replace other components of AMD interceptors?

The answer is yes and no, and it just depends on the round. For some things it’s more the dependent variable and in other instances it’s not. It may be the seeker, it may be the avionics, it may be the electronics in some other manner. It just depends, but these relationships are also coupled. Expectations about SRM delivery may shape expectations about seeker delivery and vice versa. The short answer here is that everybody is kind of ramping up and everybody needs to ramp up together.

How has the inconsistency of the demand signals over the last couple decades led to challenges for the industrial base to quickly ramp up SRM production?

The defense industrial base for SRMs is the defense industrial base that we paid for. We also have the defense industrial base that the government has created and curated and shaped and incentivized and disincentivized in 17 different ways. We have the industrial base that was asked for and that was manufactured by the monopsony customer over several decades. When the customer decides on a dime that they want something completely different and now they’re wagging their finger at the defense industrial base that it created, it is not surprising that it creates some difficulty.

You mentioned that everybody needs to ramp manufacturing up together, but don’t SRMs have some additional manufacturing complexities due to considerations such as safety regulations?

Well, they do. From the study interviews and site visits that we did that I don’t think safety regulations are the thing to short. SRMs are dangerous. People do die from time to time and it’s okay to spread buildings around and to have berms between buildings. Safety matters because people matter. We can’t build these things without people. So it’s not the need for regulation or the need for safety by any means.

Having said that, there were some things that emerged during this process such as, for instance, the existence of redundant and contradictory regulations. In addition to the Pentagon’s fairly exhaustive and prudent regulations, there’s also the jurisdictional phenomenon that a lot of this is regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. That’s interesting and this creates dilemmas where you’ve got various objects that are regulated by two different agencies, very different agencies, with different rules, which is not necessarily productive. Perhaps that’s something that a future NDAA or other legislative mechanism takes up. Aren’t the DoD’s regulations good enough? Do we really need a second regulatory organization for solid rocket motor things?

The question of redundancy is an interesting object of legislative scrutiny that efficiency and also just good government might be worth revisiting.

In the recent report CSIS released on SRMs for AMD, one interesting note is that the demise of the space shuttle program has created some unused manufacturing capacity for SRMs. Can you expand on that?

The shutdown on the shuttle is a part of why the demand went down. But many of the facilities exist for more capacity than they are producing today.

At a number of sites we visited, we would hear from industry and see facilities that are not functioning at their max capacity. The reason for that is not that they can’t. At one facility people pointed to a building with mixing bowls that are only used two days a week. Why are they only used two days a week? Because the government demand only necessitates they’re being used two days a week. Could they be used five days a week? Yes, they could, but the government contracts are not there to use them five days a week. Could they be? If they were, the answer is yes. It really comes down to “physician, heal thyself.” The customer with this collective existence needs to have and to communicate a clear demand signal.

Now that there has been some time to look back at everything that has happened during the Iran conflict, how would you evaluate the current effectiveness of US air and missile defense?

The effectiveness has been quite good, especially in terms of the ballistic missile defense engagements. It’s bee

Editorial Analysis

The strain on solid rocket motor stockpiles signals a profound challenge to the defense industrial base's ability to pivot from a peacetime procurement model to a wartime surge capacity. The "cost-per-kill" debate, often invoked when high-value interceptors counter low-cost drones, is fundamentally misdirected; the imperative to defend lives and strategic assets dictates engagement regardless of relative expenditure. This operational reality demands a multi-tiered defense approach, encompassing both sophisticated interceptors for high-end threats and scalable, cost-effective solutions for massed drone attacks, critically ensuring that neither capability is compromised by production shortfalls.

This current predicament is not merely an isolated consequence of the Iran conflict; it reflects systemic underinvestment in the foundational elements of defense manufacturing over decades. The emphasis on producing a limited number of highly advanced systems has inadvertently created a brittle supply chain, ill-prepared for high-intensity, sustained operations. Addressing this requires a strategic shift towards bolstering industrial capacity for essential components, fostering greater production flexibility, and prioritizing the manufacturing of proven, widely-used munitions to ensure continuous readiness and adaptability in an increasingly contested global security environment.

rocket motorsindustrial basemissile defenseamdcounter-uasdefense procurementsupply chain

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Primary Source

Breakingdefense · All editorial analysis is original to Sentinel News

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