Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

There have been very disturbing reports this week that the US has severely depleted its stock of crucial missiles in its war against Iran.

Patriot missile stockpiles are down by 2/3 and the number of THAD missiles is down by half.

And mind you, this has occurred in a war against a third tier adversary.

Quite obviously, war planners in Moscow and Beijing and Pyongyang are watching what's happening with a kind of happy disbelief.

How did this happen?

We're not getting answers, straight or otherwise, from the Trump administration.

Mostly, we're getting anger and threats directed at reporters who are telling the American public about these shortfalls and some hints that the White House may be unhappy with Pete Hegath, the Secretary of Defense, for misleading them about the state of the American military and its readiness.

Tonight, we'll discuss this mess and other messes with Carl Holtz, the chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times.

Jonathan Carl is the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News.

Missy Ryan is a staff writer and Pentagon correspondent at The Atlantic.

And Zolan Cano Young's is a White House correspondent for the New York Times.

Thank you all for being here.

Zolan, let me just start with you.

You cover the White House on a daily basis.

Is President Trump aware that the war on Iran is not going well?

I mean, in a in a story, let me just mention this because it's uh because it's very very relevant in a story this week.

You point out that none of the promises that he made to the Iranian people have come true.

For starters, there are plenty of signs that he should be aware that this is not going his way.

Um right now, President Trump increasingly the reporting shows that he sees this just as a headache, a political liability.

He's searching for a war that he started and that has gone on far longer than he initially at least said that it would go on for the goals as you just have shifted, right?

Uh really when you hear the conversation now and you hear the president speak, he mostly talks about uh success in this war as reopening the straight of Vermuse like that that let's go back to the start of this war.

Straight of Vermuse was open.

That wasn't part of the goals that he initially laid out when he initially made the case belatedly to go to war with Iran.

Rather, it was he said that the Iranian people should actually rise up and overthrow their government.

He at one point said save the names of those in the Iranian regime that had actually been targeting protesters in January.

Uh I just report a story with colleagues and we found that uh 20 the Iran has actually executed 26 people in connection to those protests from January that this administration was spotlighting.

That's according to Amnesty International.

We talked to Iranians in Iran who were saying that they feel betrayed particularly because they listened to those promises that President Trump laid out when he started this war and have now found themselves watching as the Trump administration negotiates and talks about respecting in some ways this new regime and this and this new leadership saying they are easier to work with than the past leadership even though we know that the same structure the same leadership structure is still in place even if many of the former officials in the Iranian regime have been killed.

Right, Missy?

I want to read you something that President Trump just said on uh Thursday uh about the munitions crisis.

He he wrote, "The US has massive amounts of munitions."

He put munitions in scare quotes for some reason uh especially of certain types.

Additionally, large amounts are being manufactured and shipped to the US as needed.

Defense companies are building the largest number of plants and factories in our country's history.

The leakers again in scare quotes of these treasonous statements are being hunted down.

Long-term jail sentences will be sought.

Give us an overview of what's going on here in terms of manufacturing and depletion.

Sure.

Well, the one thing that he that rings true in his uh his tweet is that there is an effort to replenish these stock piles.

But what I'd like to talk about a little bit is the fact that this is a problem actually decades in the making and it's going to take years to solve it.

These munitions just were not a priority in the postcold war era.

We were we were fighting counterinsurgent wars that had different requirements.

The munitions were known as a bill payer for the military.

So that was if there was a shortage in another area, they would, you know, shorten the reduce the number of munitions that they were going to be buying.

Um, the defense industry also went through big consolidations starting in the 1990s and that really led to an inability to produce anything quickly in our defense industry, not just munitions.

But that's important here now.

And by the time we got to Ukraine, there were already significant shortages that so much so that the army, for example, warned the Biden administration that it shouldn't provide some of these uh more exquisite munitions that it provided to Ukraine, warning that it was going to endanger their ability to conduct the the O plans, these operational plant that they thought that they wanted to be able to do in the case of an emergency.

The United States also expended a lot of munitions against the Houthis, um some in Nigeria, and Venezuela.

And by the time we get to the Iran war, you know, I think it really goes back to the uh the rashness of the planning here.

And the fact that the Trump administration was not planning a fivemon war, now going into it, six months, you know, it was supposed to be weeks.

And I think it goes to the flawed assumptions that it had about the pain threshold Iran was willing to bear, overconfidence coming out of Venezuela and the the strikes on Iran um the previous year and here we are.

It's a serious problem as you say one-third or more expended in patriots and feds jams all of that right John.

I mean to add on to this, I one one aspect of national defense credibility obviously is letting your enemies adversaries know that you are a potent military machine, right?

Um and but it seems like the president has squandered this deterrent capability among other things by by constantly threatening Iran and then never following up.

I mean, watch this with me just for a second.

This is what he said on Wednesday.

We've hit them very hard for the last few months, but we were we were all set for the biggest attack since World War II.

And they called me and they said, "Please don't do it.

Let's talk."

I mean, I've counted seven times he's done this.

Seven times since the start of the war where he has threatened to escalate majorly and then backed off claiming progress on on on peace talks.

Uh, look on on the munitions question here, you know, I can understand his being upset about leaks of classified information.

This was hardly a classified information.

Uh, CSIS did a comprehensive study on this earlier this year and found at that point, I believe the study came out in in May, found out at that point that it would take 3 years to replenish uh the defensive missiles uh that were used uh in this war.

Of course, we're talking about Patriots and threats, defensive missiles.

Uh, and these are missiles.

Keep in mind, you know, a Patriot missile costs roughly $4 million uh and and a long production cycle to to to create.

And you fire not just one, you fire two, sometimes more uh against a single missile coming in.

And we're at a at a very dangerously low uh level of Patriot missiles.

Right.

So, so talk about this deterrence problem and how it's being interpreted around the world.

I mean, you know, when you have the president of the United States repeatedly threaten and then back off, threaten and back off, not once, not twice, not three times, seven times, he'll probably do it again.

Uh, it it it creates an obvious credibility problem.

You don't believe the threat that a that a US president makes.

Right.

One of his predecessors famously said, "Great nations don't bluff."

Yeah.

And it's this has been a bluff game.

Carl, what what are people saying on the Hill about the the state of the war?

I mean, we talk about the Democrats, but talk about Republicans in all the other messes that are going on on the Hill.

JD Vance came up to talk to Republicans this week, closed door, reassure them that the war is going great.

Well, they don't really believe that, and it's particularly not going great for them.

You mentioned political liability.

They see this as a real liability uh going into November and you know hitting with gas prices, that sort of thing.

But it's also a budgetary issue.

There's a real fight on Capitol Hill about how much to fund the war.

Some of this among Republicans themselves like how to fund it.

Do you do it through this uh process that skirts the Democrats or do you do it uh in the typical appropriations process?

So even though it would take years and years to replenish these stocks, even getting the money to do it is proving to be very very tricky.

And as for Trump, wasn't the same taco, right?

That Yeah.

Yeah.

Trump always.

But but think about this.

I mean, we we have a this year a trillion dollar defense budget, which they want to make a trillion and they want to go to a trillion.

I mean, this is staggering.

13 more than 13% of every dollar that the federal government spends going to defense.

It's hard to say that we're not spending enough, right?

And it's also easy for the Democrats to say, "Listen, we've got a lot of problems in this country.

People are paying a lot for their food and you're going to spend this much on defense."

It's an easy hit.

There's also a concern about uh among elected officials and national security experts on military readiness.

When you talk about other conflicts in the world, munitions are low here.

How does that impact your readiness for China?

Yeah.

Yeah.

and much less what what the Taiwanese are thinking, the South Koreans are thinking, the Lithuanians are thinking, so on going on.

No, going back to the to the money, I think this is why you're seeing such push back from even from some Republicans about uh it's not just the amount.

There is support for increasing defense fund funding.

I think there's a debate about how much it should be, but it's about the process.

They've given very few details even to the appropriators on the Republican side are mad about it.

And it's basically Pete Hex says saying, "Trust me.

Yeah, give me this unprecedented amount of money."

And now this is coming home to roost as he went up on the hill last week to have this closed door session with Republican lawmakers to say, "We need to do this."

Now, speaking of Pete Hex, how is his reputation holding up on the Hill among Republicans?

Uh, you know, I think they're biting with it.

They're okay.

I think they see him as, you know, the person who's in charge right now.

also kind of a scapegoat for things that go bad.

They don't have to blame Trump directly.

Uh, you know, that hearing that he had, the public hearing got pretty, it seemed like he had been told, don't get in too big of a fight with these folks, but by the end he was really fighting with them.

He has a he has a hot temper.

He controlled it for a while, but it did go off.

Congress also hasn't exactly like established a a trend of pushing back on some of Trump's picks for this past like nearly two years in office.

I I just I simply just don't understand.

It's like that that old joke about you had one job, you know, and this is a situation where the US as the dominant military power in the world cannot afford to ever be known as a place that runs out of ammunition.

It It's sort of like if you ran a McDonald's and you ran out of McNuggets, you know, the corporate headquarters be like, "You're not doing a good job of running your Mc McDonald's."

I mean, this is the this is the very serious version of that.

I I just don't understand why there's no accountability.

Pentagon, it turns out, is a very serious big business.

Uh, and that you need to have some experience to be running it.

And, uh, some of these guys and that's what even the Republicans who do support Hegath overall will complain about is his management skills and his lack of management experience.

You know, Steve Fineberg is the deputy secretary of defense.

I think there's a lot of support for him and more trust in him, but at the end of the day, Pete Hex says it's the guy at the rudder.