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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