A Tucson, Ariz., factory run by defense giant RTX is working around the clock to increase production of Tomahawk and other missiles in short supply for U.S. operations against Iran.
Lockheed Martin is adding hundreds of workers in Arkansas to triple its output of much-needed Patriot interceptors. Subcontractors including Boeing, L3Harris and Northrop Grumman have broken ground on new assembly lines to meet soaring demand for electronics, rocket motors and other components needed for the weapons.
Defense contractors are spending billions to build factories and increase production to stock America's nearly bare cupboard of highly engineered missiles.
But those efforts haven't translated into real gains yet, leaving the U.S. and allies with depleted stocks of important weapons while it fights Iran. Most of the new missiles will arrive too late for any conflict in the next couple of years.
"Ministers of defense have fat wallets-they walk into the shops and there are empty shelves," said retired Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, the top military officer at NATO until last year. "They are frustrated."
A host of factors are driving the frustration-and raising national security concerns. After Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, government officials and weapons suppliers pledged to create a surge in production, but supply didn't keep up with demand.
Since then, Washington officials have been reluctant to place the big orders needed to justify investments in new production lines until recently. President Trump and European defense ministers have said that companies need to pick up the production pace.
Capital expenditures as a percentage of revenue barely budged between last year and 2021 at Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and other large U.S. defense companies. Their 2026 spending forecasts are higher-but order backlogs are growing at a much faster rate.
Between 1999 and 2025, missiles and munitions accounted for an annual average of 7.5% of the Pentagon's procurement and research budget, according to Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank. That compares with 23% for aircraft and 10% for shipbuilding.
That share for munitions is set to roughly double to an average of 14% between 2028 and 2031, Harrison calculated.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the department's pending budget request to Congress is designed to aggressively increase munitions stockpiles.
"Since Deputy Secretary [Steve] Feinberg arrived at the Department of War, strengthening our munitions capabilities and revolutionizing the antiquated acquisition process has been his top priority," Parnell said. The Pentagon declined to comment on the AEI findings.
Quiet factory
In the wake of the Ukraine war, the Army Science Board-an advisory panel-conducted a study on the defense industry's ability to increase munitions production. The board found an industrial base that had been hollowed out.
"It's a miracle that we have anything that blows up," said Mackenzie Eaglen, a member of the panel coordinating the study.
Despite being around since the 1980s, the Tomahawk remains the long-range cruise missile of choice for the U.S. and many of its allies.
But Pentagon missile orders for the Tucson factory dipped so low in recent years that further cuts risked shutting down the Tomahawk line. Contracts to retrofit old missiles with new navigation systems helped keep the factory busy.
The Navy in August issued a $23 billion order spanning seven years for new Tomahawk missiles. Even that request, after more than a year of negotiations, needs full congressional appropriations to turn into a final contract.
An RTX spokesman said the contractor will continue investing to reach its long-term target of producing more than 1,000 Tomahawks annually. It is on track to make more than 400 this year, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The U.S. fired more than 1,000 Tomahawk missiles in two months in its war with Iran, The Wall Street Journal has reported. American armed forces have used about one-third of their pre-Iran war Tomahawk inventory and roughly half of their high-end Patriot interceptors, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank.
New boom time
Thanks to long-term government contracts, it is now boom time across the roughly 1 square mile of factories, warehouses and offices that occupy a part of Tucson's main airport.
RTX said it has pumped about $900 million into the Tucson plant and two other factories over the past three years. And this year, the Pentagon has awarded billions of dollars worth of new contracts for the Tucson factory's components and missiles that have all been in action in Ukraine and Iran.
Surrounded by desert and a mountain range, no other RTX location is hiring more, with around 670 positions in Tucson advertised on its website. The listed roles include electrical engineers, explosive experts, chemists and software specialists.
Critical positions have been hard to fill in Tucson, the company has said. RTX has also struggled with getting raw materials, saying in June that supply-chain disruptions have affected access to the rare earth elements, microelectronics and other critical components to missile production.
Contractors are often limited by their own weapons designs. Sophisticated munitions like the Tomahawk hold thousands of parts, and move through factories that look more like small workshops than automated production lines.
New equipment aimed at jump-starting production is set to come on line. One robotic machine, the largest of its kind RTX says it has built, puts missile pieces through a battery of tests against heat, cold and other extreme conditions.
The machine, which sits behind a chain-link enclosure around the length of a basketball court, should test missile parts 30% faster than manual methods, RTX said.
The gap between munitions production and their battlefield use isn't lost on U.S. officials as the conflict in Iran continues.
"Across our weapons industrial base, this is absolutely a challenge," Rear Admiral Ben Reynolds, the deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for budget, said in April.
"We need and expect Raytheon to invest very, very heavily now to be able to ramp up production," he said, referring to the RTX division that makes the Tomahawk.
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