Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) offered different assessments of the health of the United States’s current munitions stockpiles while on “Face the Nation” Sunday morning.Hegseth pushed back when Margaret Brennan suggested “there is a crisis with those stockpiles” due to the Iran war, saying “that is a manufactured story that the media wants to peddle, and ultimately our stockpiles are great and are only getting stronger.”Kelly, in a separate segment, said “of course we have a munitions issue,” adding “it’s widely understood that when you attack over 10,000 targets from the air with cruise missiles and ballistic missiles and bombs from airplanes, you are using a lot of munitions, and we do not have an endless supply of these things.”
The two appearances came hours before President Donald Trump announced a peace deal had been signed between the United States and Iran, reshaping the long-term debate about the issue.
The Brennan and Hegseth dispute stems from a verbal exchange that occurred between Kelly and the senior official during an April Senate Armed Services Committee hearing about the Department of Defense’s budget request.
Hegseth said it could take “months and years” to rebuild certain stockpiles, depending on the type of weapon, while responding to a question from Kelly about how long it would take to replenish the country’s defense systems.
