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Notes -
I would imagine not letting the enemies know exactly how much ammo they have to tank before you run out is probably something the MIC would think up. Procurement is famously opaque. I'm not confident on this point but it seems like such an obvious thing to keep strategically ambiguous that it's difficult for me to imagine we aren't obscuring the stockpiles in some way.
The opacity is more in how they end up spending enormous numbers of money on a tiny number of missiles (plus black budget spending on secret weapons and research). But all publicly revealed weapons are listed:
https://www.asafm.army.mil/Portals/72/Documents/BudgetMaterial/2025/Base%20Budget/Procurement/Missile-Procurement-Army.pdf
So if you go to page 41 of the link, it says how many patriot PAC-3s they buy (230 a year at $4 million per missile). Not that many once you account for tests and training and exports.
Now they don't say exactly how many they've got left but it's not that hard to estimate (by intelligence agency standards), given that there's video evidence of them being shot away. There's a defined upper limit on how many they could have, unless they lie on these reports. They've also been starting to issue orders for PAC-2s again to supplement the PAC-3s. So there are clear signs of pressure, plus this is something that wargames have warned of for many years.
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