Iran has made our most urgent national-security priority painfully clear

During the 1979-1981 hostage crisis, a defiant Iran starkly demonstrated the limits of American power. Forty-five years later, it is doing the same thing, although in vastly different circumstances. Back then, a time when the post-Vietnam military was at a low ebb, we didn’t strike Iran and a long-shot rescue operation ended in abject failure. Now, with the US military at its most proficient and professional in history, we have inflicted punishing blows against the regime but still haven’t been able to impose our will, in part because we are running low on the munitions necessary to prosecute the war. Not only is this embarrassing; it is dangerous. If Operation Midnight Hammer — last year’s lightning strike against Iranian nuclear facilities — demonstrated the prowess of the US military and sent a useful deterrent message to our enemies, the Iran War is now doing the opposite.We’re running low on missiles and interceptors in a months-long conflict with a beleaguered second-rate power. What would happen in drawn-out conflict with a major adversary?President Donald Trump has posted a thunderous denunciation of leaks to the media about our low weapons stocks, and they are indeed irresponsible.But this problem is a matter of public record and has been tracked by outside organizations. At the end of July, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that out of an arsenal of 2,330 Patriot interceptors prior to the Iran war, we had roughly 800 remaining.We were down to roughly 250 THAAD interceptors from 450 at the start of the war. On top of this, news organizations are reporting that we are almost out of ATACMS — a ground-launched precision-strike missile — and Precision Strike Missiles, the newer, longer-range successor to ATACMS.This isn’t comforting at a time when a war with China could be in the offing.Even before Operation Epic Fury, a war game involving a conflict in the Taiwan Strait conducted by CSIS had the United Sta...