Excerpts:

The Pentagon May Not Be Telling Trump the Full Picture About the War

Vice President Vance is worried that the U.S. is running low on weapons.

By Missy Ryan, Vivian Salama, Michael Scherer, and Nancy A. Youssef

In closed-door meetings, J. D. Vance has repeatedly questioned the Defense Department’s depiction of the war in Iran and whether the Pentagon has understated what appears to be the drastic depletion of U.S. missile stockpiles.

Two senior administration officials told us that the vice president has queried the accuracy of the information the Pentagon has provided about the war. He has also expressed his concerns about the availability of certain missile systems in discussions with President Trump, several people familiar with the situation told us. The consequences of a dramatic drawdown in munitions reserves are potentially dire: U.S. forces would need to draw from these same stockpiles to defend Taiwan against China, South Korea against North Korea, and Europe against Russia.

Both Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, and General Dan Caine, who chairs the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have publicly said that U.S. weapons stockpiles are robust, and portrayed the damage to Iranian forces after eight weeks of fighting as drastic. Vance’s advisers, who spoke with us on the condition of anonymity, told us that the vice president has presented his concerns as his own rather than accusing Hegseth or Caine of misleading the president.

Vance is trying, the advisers suggested, to avoid making this personal, or to create divisions in Trump’s war Cabinet. Some of Vance’s confidants, however, believe that Hegseth’s portrayal has been so positive as to be misleading. In a statement, Vance said that the Pentagon chief “is doing a great job,” and cited Hegseth’s work with Trump to ensure a “warrior ethos” in the military’s top ranks. A White House official told us that Vance “asks a lot of probing questions about our strategic planning, as do all of the members of the president’s national-security team.

Pentagon leaders’ positive portrayals present an incomplete picture at best, people familiar with intelligence assessments told us. According to those internal estimates, Iran retains two-thirds of its air force, the bulk of its missile-launching capability, and most of its small, fast boats, which can lay mines and harass traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. At least in terms of resuming stalled maritime commerce, “those are the real threat,” one person told us.

The vice president was skeptical about the merits of attacking Iran before the war started; Trump has acknowledged that Vance was “maybe less enthusiastic” about a conflict that has proved deeply unpopular among American voters. But the vice president has multiple factors to balance: his desire to work smoothly with other senior officials, his track record of opposing “forever wars,” and his prospects should he mount a presidential run in 2028.

One senior administration official told us that the president is satisfied with the information he has received from the Pentagon. This person cast the different views within the president’s national-security team—which includes Hegseth, Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles—as part of a healthy tension that serves the president.

Far from Hegseth’s predictions of a quick, decisive win, the Iran war has now drifted into a costly, indeterminate muddle. Last Tuesday, as the minute hand ticked toward the end of the initial cease-fire, Vance’s plane idled on the runway, ready to fly him to peace talks in Pakistan. But when Iran appeared unprepared to dispatch its own negotiators, Trump backed down, extending the truce indefinitely. Meanwhile, the two countries’ standoff in the Strait of Hormuz escalated last week when the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seized commercial vessels for the first time—a sign that its forces remain potent and that the war could again defy the upbeat assessments from the Pentagon’s leaders.