Decided to Stop or Forced to Stop?

The US pounded Iran and was on the verge of total destruction of Iran’s political and military power and then, inexplicably, stopped attacking in favor of pursuit of a peace agreement.
 
As we’ve often noted, you don’t negotiate with an enemy, you utterly destroy them and then impose whatever surrender terms you want. 
 
Since WWII, the US has failed to pursue ultimate victory in every conflict it’s been involved in and the results have always come back to bite us.
 
Keeping that in mind, let’s change gears.
 
ComNavOps has frequently offered estimates of weapon inventory levels by examining budget documents for the preceding years.  In very brief terms, our weapons have historically had inventories in the low to mid thousands with production rates in the low hundreds.  However, that balance has been upset by the recent heavy expenditures of weapons off Yemen, around Israel, and against Iran.  In other words, our inventories are being depleted far faster than production can replenish.
 
Now, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has done exactly what ComNavOps has done and has issued a report estimating weapon inventories prior to the Iran conflict, specific weapon expenditures during the conflict, and speculation about the amount of time required to rebuild the inventories.
 
As one example, here are the figures for Tomahawk missiles.  As reported by TWZ website, CSIS estimated a pre-war Tomahawk inventory of 3100 missiles and an expenditure of 1000+ missile, thus far.[1]
 
Think about that expenditure rate and note that was against a helpless, fourth rate enemy who was being pounded by other countries and other weapons.  Now, consider how that would change against China.  We’d be expending Tomahawks at a rate of a thousand per week!  But, I digress …
 
What about Tomahawk inventory replenishment ?  It’s not encouraging.
 

Tomahawk procurement “averaged 86 missiles in the past 10 fiscal years (FY 15–FY 26), with most orders coming from the Navy,”  CSIS noted. [1]
 
 … the recent annual production rate is less than 200 … [1]

It’s worse than that, though.  A significant chunk of production is slated for sales to foreign countries, as noted below.
 

Another factor to consider are foreign military sales, with nearly 800 due to Japan, Australia and the Netherlands.[1]

So, we have a very small production capacity which is further “eroded” by deliveries to other countries.  It’s going to take many years to recover our Tomahawk inventory levels.  How much worse will this be during a war with China?  But, again, I digress …
 
The same trends hold true, to varying degrees, for all other weapons in the US military.
 
With low inventories and dismal replenishment rates in mind and returning to the first sentence in this post, we can now legitimately ask whether the seemingly inexplicable pause on the verge of total victory was due to some [misguided] desire for a premature peace or due to having reached a state of weapons depletion that became unacceptable given the constant threat of war with China and the need to maintain a “sufficient “ stockpile of weapons.  In other words, did we choose to stop or were we forced to stop by low weapon inventories?  Did we hit the minimum “safe” inventory levels and had to stop?
 
There’s no way to know the answer but logic suggests that we stopped because we reached a point where we felt we couldn’t expend any more weapons without depleting our inventories to unacceptable levels.  If this is the case, then all the talk of the US being ready and willing to resume attacks is just public relations propaganda for the masses and Iran is in no real danger of further heavy, sustained attacks and that would certainly change the negotiation strategies on both sides.
 
What do you think?  Decided to stop or forced to stop?
 
 
Note:  This is not a post about the “rightness” of the Iran strikes, just the military aspects of those strikes.  Political comments will not be allowed.
 
 
 
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[1]The War Zone website, “Severity Of America’s Depleted Advanced Weapons Stockpiles Detailed In New Report”, Howard Altman, 28-May-2026,
https://www.twz.com/news-features/severity-of-americas-depleted-advanced-weapons-stockpiles-detailed-in-new-report