AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

The Washington Post revealed several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth against extending the war in Iran because the six-month-old war has degraded the military’s ability to confront threats elsewhere. The warnings appeared in a classified assessment recently shared with Hegseth. The Washington Post reports the warnings were detailed by the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force and the four-star commanders overseeing U.S. operations throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. This comes after multiple reports have revealed the U.S. is facing a munitions shortage. According to Reuters, the U.S. Army has used up much of its global stockpile of surface-to-surface long-range missiles.

We’re joined now by William Hartung, principal adviser at the Project on Government Oversight, his new piece for The Nation headlined “The Real Reason There’s a Munitions Shortage.” His latest book is titled The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home.

So, what is the real reason for this shortage? And do you believe there is one, Bill?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Too many wars. I mean, if you’re going to arm a genocide, wage an illegal war on Iran, the prior arming of Ukraine, you’re going to run out of munitions. And, of course, these interceptors are dealing with drones that cost tens of thousands; they cost millions. So, the Pentagon is completely dysfunctional when it comes to fighting this kind of war.

They have depleted some of these things to some degree, perhaps a third to a half. But the reason they’re saying this is because they won’t be ready for a war with China. If we have a war with China, we’re in deep, deep trouble. We really have a diplomacy gap more than a munitions gap.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, we were just reporting on the U.S. attacking Iran again for the first time in a month.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yeah, well, I think Hegseth and Trump, they have a foreign policy more based on fantasy and the president’s ego than any kind of analysis. I mean, he thought he was going to swoop in there, put in a, you know, leader that was conducive to U.S. interests, and he’s got a six-month war on his hands. So, whether they’ll listen to the military leaders is hard to know, but the fact that they spoke up is kind of unique in Trump world.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the U.S. using, to say the least, expensive missiles to attack Iran’s, to say the least, inexpensive drones?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, yeah, you know, an Iranian drone might cost $30,000 or $40,000. A cruise missile is $2 million. Some of the Patriot interceptor batteries are over $10 million — $10 billion, rather. The THAAD missile defense system, a full battery could be $18 billion. So, the so-called cost-exchange ratio is not in the U.S. favor. And, of course, these things take time to build. So, it’s great as a money-making machine for the weapons industry, but it’s not any way to wage a conflict — of course, a conflict that shouldn’t have been started in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: Your book is called The Trillion Dollar War Machine. The U.S. has never spent more on the military than it is now, and it has a critical shortage of weapons?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes, it’s partly because they like to build the big-ticket things: the F-35, the bombers, the aircraft carriers.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the F-35, which you’ve, to say the least, criticized?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, it’s probably the most dysfunctional weapons program in living memory. It was supposed to do many things, does none of them well. It’s in the hangar half of the time. It was supposed to be a revolution in military procurement. It’s kind of proven why you have to take those claims with a grain of salt, like the new tech claims about how the miracles they’re going to do are probably just that: a marketing technique.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about how the weapons are being used? Last week’s Democracy Now! headline: “This comes as the Associated Press reports the Pentagon faces a 'beyond critical' shortage of Patriot missile interceptors in Europe, after exhausting most of its supply defending U.S. bases and Israel from Iranian drones and missiles.” Talk about the role of the interceptors, specifically what role they play in the U.S. defense of Israel.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, yes, you know, these drones can be quite capable, and, as you said, they’re relatively cheap by military terms. So, to defend Israel, to defend U.S. bases, to defend U.S. communication nodes, they need to use these expensive missiles. And you can’t build them quickly, so they’ve taken them from Europe. They’ll probably use fewer in the Gulf, although they have to defend parts of the Gulf. So, it’s really — I think they thought they could bully their way to victory, and they really didn’t build — our military is less about defense than about enriching contractors. So, that dysfunction is coming —

AMY GOODMAN: And what about that, the level of profit of the military contractors at this point?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, you know, more than half the Pentagon budget goes to contractors. And usually in wartime, they get more, because they’re supposed to go quicker and so forth. But, for example, out of Ukraine, they gave General Dynamics money to build an ammunition plant that literally didn’t produce anything in two years, as Politico — ProPublica reported. So, this idea, push it out the door more quickly, is working against a dysfunctional arms industry.

AMY GOODMAN: Final comments on what people should understand at this point and what you feel should be the direction this country is going? And given the amount of dark money in politics right now, in campaign contributions, do you also hold the Democrats responsible?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yeah, it’s a bipartisan problem. Trump, of course, is shouting it from the rooftops. But I’m not worried about a munitions gap. I’m worried about a democracy gap, a public health gap, environmental protection gap, equality gap. Those are the things that are going to harm people, certainly more than Iran or even more than China. So, we need to demand that rather than doubling down on a bigger arms industry, we start meeting people’s needs.

AMY GOODMAN: William Hartung, principal adviser at the Project on Government Oversight. We’ll link to your new piece, “The Real Reason There’s a Munitions Shortage.” His latest book, co-authored with Ben Freeman, is titled The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home.