The munitions shortage caused by the Iran War is real and growing. While the precise magnitude of the shortfall is uncertain, the question now is how quickly the window of vulnerability can be closed. With no apparent path for passing a supplemental or regular appropriations bill by Oct. 1, the Pentagon will likely spend at least the first quarter of fiscal 2027 under a continuing resolution. The debate over what happens next will naturally focus on how much funding Congress ultimately provides, but for the munitions the military urgently needs, money is only one scarce resource. The other is time, and the two are fundamentally different. After the election, Congress can fund what it did not in FY 2026, but it cannot buy back the time lost.

The Pentagon’s own budget documents reveal the unforgiving timelines. The published procurement lead time—the time it takes from when an order is placed to when the first delivery arrives—is 31 months for the much-needed PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE) interceptor, 34 months for the most recent lot of THAAD interceptors, and 40 months for Tomahawk Block Va. If appropriations are enacted in December and new orders placed immediately, the MSE missiles would begin to arrive no earlier than roughly July 2029, THAAD interceptors in October 2029, and Tomahawks in April 2030. 

Those dates presume that contracts are ready to be signed and everything downstream proceeds as planned. But if FY 2027 appropriations follow recent trends and slip to March or later, all else being equal, every date shifts three months or more to the right. A dollar appropriated in December and one appropriated in March may look identical in the final fiscal-year total, but to a production line waiting to expand, they are not the same at all.

That is why the details of a continuing resolution matter more this year than the topline suggests. CRs do not shut down existing production lines, but they typically restrict new starts and increases in production rates. The White House specifically asked Congress to exempt several munitions from some of these restrictions, including PAC-3 MSE and Tomahawk. Neither the House nor the Senate version includes that anomaly language. As written, the CR would prevent DoD from executing some of the planned FY 2027 quantity increases until Congress provides additional funding authority—potentially months of delay.

A second issue is that the administration made the timing problem harder by putting much of its munitions surge in a separate legislative vehicle. Of the original $350 billion FY 2027 reconciliation request, about $57 billion is allocated for procurement and research and development of munitions and interceptors. But the House-passed budget resolution provides only $60 billion in reconciliation for defense, far short of the request, and the Senate has yet to move it. If reconciliation stalls or is insufficient to carry munitions funding, the only remaining options are to squeeze it into an already full base budget or an FY 2027 supplemental—both of which are fraught with political challenges.

A third issue is the mismatch between the political calendar and the production calendar. This is not a buildup for the current administration or Congress. These weapons will not arrive until after President Trump leaves office—and too late for even the next Congress to see the first deliveries. Orders placed in FY 2027 for these munitions will not lead to deliveries until 2029 at the earliest. The 119th Congress is being asked to act today for the benefit of the next administration and the 121st Congress. That separation makes delay easy to discount politically, but it does not make delay less consequential strategically.

The military and industry can work to shorten these lead times. The military can buy new types of munitions designed for manufacturability at scale and speed. Both DoD and industry can invest in expanded production capacity, diversified supply chains, and pre-purchasing of long-lead-time parts. Much of this is already planned, although DoD has not been especially transparent about how the $92 billion of industrial-base funding it requested would support specific weapons programs. The framework agreements reached with industry set the stage for this surge, but each of these actions requires funding and takes time to yield results—and the procurement clock does not start until Congress acts.

The most certain way to speed things up is to stop delaying, and that responsibility rests with Congress. Every month that passes without funding and authority to ramp production of key munitions extends the window of vulnerability. Congress could get the process moving now in three ways: 1) add language to the final CR allowing critical munitions orders to proceed; 2) identify which reconciliation-funded munitions to move into regular appropriations or a supplemental; and 3) require DoD to publish a crosswalk connecting industrial-base investments to specific programs. Congress should debate how much money these programs deserve and which ones come first. But delay is the one choice it cannot reverse. The next Congress can make up for many of the things this Congress fails to deliver, but it cannot make up for time lost.

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