Jeffrey Goldberg: Good evening, and welcome to Washington Week.

There have been very disturbing reports this week that the U.S.

has severely depleted its stock of crucial missiles in its war against Iran.

Patriot missile stockpiles are down by two-thirds, and the number of THAAD missiles is down by half.

And mind you, this has occurred in a war against a third-tier adversary.

Quite obviously, war planners in Moscow and Beijing and Pyongyang are watching what's happening with a kind of happy disbelief.

How did this happen?

We're not getting answers, straight or otherwise, from the Trump administration.

Mostly we're getting anger and threats directed at reporters who are telling the American public about these shortfalls, and some hints that the White House may be unhappy with Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, for misleading them about the state of the American military and its readiness.

Tonight, we'll discuss this mess and other messes with Carl Hulse, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, Jonathan Karl is the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News, Missy Ryan is a staff writer and Pentagon correspondent at The Atlantic, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The New York Times.

Thank you all for being here.

Zolan, let me just start with you.

You cover the White House on a daily basis.

Is President Trump aware that the war on Iran is not going well?

I mean, in a story, let me just mention this because it's very, very relevant, a story this week, you point out that none of the promises that he made to the Iranian people have come true, for starters.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs, White House Correspondent, The New York Times: There are plenty of signs that he should be aware that this is not going his way.

Right now, President Trump, increasingly the reporting shows that he sees this just as a headache, a political liability.

He's searching for ways to get out of a war that he started and that has gone on far longer than he initially at least said that it would go on for.

The goals, as you noted, just have shifted, right?

Really, when you hear the conversation now and you hear the president speak, he mostly talks about success in this war as reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

That -- let's go back to the start of this war.

Strait of Hormuz was open.

That wasn't part of the goals that he initially laid out when he initially made the case, belatedly, to go to war with Iran.

Rather, it was he said that the Iranian people should actually rise up and overthrow their government.

He at one point said, save the names of those in the Iranian regime that had actually been targeting protesters in January.

I just reported a story with colleagues, and we found that 20 -- Iran has actually executed 26 people in connection to those protests from January that this administration was spotlighting.

That's according to Amnesty International.

We talked to Iranians in Iran who were saying that they feel betrayed, particularly because they listened to those promises that President Trump laid out when he started this war, and have now found themselves watching as the Trump administration negotiates and talks about respecting, in some ways, this new regime and this new leadership, saying they are easier to work with than the past leadership, even though we know that the same structure, the same leadership structure is still in place even if many of the former officials in the Iranian regime have been killed.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Missy, I want to read you something that President Trump just said on Thursday about the munitions crisis.

He wrote, the U.S.

has massive amounts of munitions, he put munitions in scare quotes for some reason especially of certain types.

Additionally, large amounts are being manufactured and shipped to the U.S.

as needed.

Defense companies are building the largest number of plants and factories in our country's history.

The leakers, again in scare quotes, of these treasonous statements are being hunted down.

Long-term jail sentences will be sought.

Give us an overview of what's going on here in terms of manufacturing and depletion.

Missy Ryan, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Sure.

Well, the one thing that he, that rings true in his hi- his tweet is that there is an effort to replenish these stockpiles.

But what I'd like to talk about a little bit is the fact that this is a problem actually decades in the making, and it's going to take years to solve it.

These munitions just were not a priority in the post-Cold War era.

We were fighting counter-insurgent wars that had different requirements.

The munitions were known as a bill payer for the military, so that was if there was a shortage in another area, they would, you know, shorten the -- reduce the number of munitions that they were going to be buying.

The defense industry also went through a big consolidation starting in the 1990s, and that really led to an inability to produce anything quickly in our defense industry, not just munitions, but that's important here now.

And by the time we got to Ukraine, there were already significant shortages that -- so much so that the Army, for example, warned the Biden administration that it shouldn't provide some of these more exquisite munitions that it provided to Ukraine, warning that it was going to endanger their ability to conduct the O. plans, these operational plans that they thought that they wanted to be able to do in the case of an emergency.

The United States also expended a lot of munitions against the Houthis, some in Nigeria and Venezuela.

And by the time we get to the Iran war, you know, I think it really goes back to the rashness of the planning here and the fact that the Trump administration was not planning a five-month war, now going into its six months.

You know, it was supposed to be weeks.

And I think it goes to the flawed assumptions that it had about the pain threshold that Iran was willing to bear, overconfidence coming out of Venezuela, and the strikes on Iran the previous year, and here we are.

It's a serious problem.

As you say, one-third or more expended in Patriots, in THAADs, JASSMs, all of that.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Jon, I mean, to add onto this, one aspect of national defense credibility, obviously, is letting your enemies, adversaries know that you're a potent military machine, right?

But it seems like the president has squandered this deterrent capability, among other things by constantly threatening Iran and then never following up.

I mean, watch this with me just for a second.

This is what he said on Wednesday.

Donald Trump, U.S.

President: We've hit them very hard for the last few months.

But we were all set for the biggest attack since World War II, and they called me and they said, please don't do it.

Let's talk.

Jonathan Karl, Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News: I mean, I've counted seven times he's done this, seven times since the start of the war where he has threatened to escalate majorly and then backed off, claiming progress on peace talks.

Look, on the munitions question here, you know, I can understand his being upset about leaks of classified information.

This was hardly a classified information.

CSIS did a comprehensive study on this earlier this year and found at that point -- I believe the study came out in May -- found out at that point that it would take three years to replenish the defensive missiles that were used in this war.

So, we're talking about Patriots and THAADs, defensive missiles.

And these are missiles -- keep in mind, you know, a Patriot missile costs roughly $4 million and a long production cycle to create.

And you fire not just one, you fire two, sometimes more against a single missile coming in.

And we're at a very dangerously low level of Patriot missiles.

Right.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, talk about this deterrence problem and how it's being interpreted around the world.

Jonathan Karl: I mean, you know, when you have the President of the United States repeatedly threaten and then back off, threaten and back off, not once, not twice, not three times, seven times, he'll probably do it again, it creates an obvious credibility problem.

You don't believe the threat that a U.S.

president makes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

One of his predecessors famously said, great nations don't bluff.

Jonathan Karl: Yes.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And it's -- this has been a bluff game.

Carl, what are people saying on the Hill about the state of the war?

I mean, we talk about the Democrats.

But talk about Republicans.

Carl Hulse, Chief Washington Correspondent, The New York Times: It's caught up in all the other messes that are going on, and they don't -- J.D.

Vance came up to talk to Republicans this week, closed door, reassure them that the war is going great.

Well, they don't really believe that, and it's particularly not going great for them.

You mentioned political liability.

They see this as a real liability going into November and, you know, hitting with gas prices, that sort of thing.

But it's also a budgetary issue.

There's a real fight on Capitol Hill about how much to fund the war.

Some of this among Republicans themselves like how to fund it.

Do you do it through this process that skirts the Democrats, or do you do it in the typical appropriations process?

So, even though it would take years and years to replenish these stocks, even getting the money to do it is proving to be very, very tricky.

As for Trump, right, it wasn't the saying TACO, right, that Trump always chickens out.

Jonathan Karl: But think about this.

I mean, we have this year a trillion dollar defense budget.

Carl Hulse: Of which they want to make a trillion and a half.

Jonathan Karl: A trillion -- and they want to go to a trillion and a -- I mean, this is staggering.

13 -- more than 13 percent of every dollar that the federal government spends going to defense.

It's hard to say that we're not spending enough on these munitions.

Carl Hulse: And it's also easy for the Democrats to say, listen, we've got a lot of problems in this country.

People are paying a lot for their food and you're going to spend this much on defense?

It's an easy hit.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: There's also a concern about among elected officials and national security experts on military readiness when you talk about other conflicts in the world.

Munitions are low here.

How does that impact your readiness for China, for Taiwan, South China Sea.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes, and much less what the Taiwanese are thinking, the South Koreans are thinking, the Lithuanians are thinking, so on, going this year.

Missy Ryan: Now, going back to the money, I think this is why you're seeing such pushback from -- even from some Republicans about it's not just the amount.

There is support for increasing defense funding.

I think there's a debate about how much it should be.

But it's about the process.

They've given very few details.

Even to the appropriators out on the Republican side are mad about it.

And it's basically Pete Hegseth saying, trust me.

Give me this unprecedented amount of money.

And now this is coming home to roost as he went up on the Hill last week to have this closed-door session with Republican lawmakers to say, we need to do this now.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Speaking of Pete Hegseth, how is his reputation holding up on the Hill among Republicans?

Carl Hulse: You know, I think they're biding with it.

They're okay.

I think they see him as, you know, the person who's in charge right now, also kind of a scapegoat for things that go bad.

They don't have to blame Trump directly.

You know, that hearing that he had, the public hearing, got pretty -- it seemed like he had been told, don't get in too big of a fight with these folks.

But by the end, he was really fighting with them.

Jeffrey Goldberg: He has a hot temper.

Carl Hulse: Yes.

And he controlled it for a while, but it did go off.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: Yes.

Congress also hasn't exactly like established a trend of pushing back on some of Trump's picks for these past like nearly two years in office.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

I simply just don't understand.

It's just like that old joke about you had one job, you know?

And this is a situation where the U.S., as the dominant military power in the world, cannot afford to ever be known as a place that runs out of ammunition.

It's sort of like if you ran a McDonald's and you ran out of McNuggets, you know, the corporate headquarters would be like, you're not doing a good job of running your McDonald's.

I mean, this is the very serious version of that.

I just don't understand why there's no accountability.

Carl Hulse: Pentagon, it turns out, is a very serious, big business, and that you need to have some experience to be running it.

And some of these guys didn't know -- Missy Ryan: And that's what even the Republicans who do support Hegseth overall will complain about is his management skills and his lack of management experience.

You know, Steve Feinberg is the deputy secretary of defense.

I think there's a lot of support for him and more trust in him.

But at the end of the day, Pete Hegseth is the guy at the rudder.