WASHINGTON, Aug. 18 -- When the United States Navy awarded Raytheon Technologies a $22.9 billion contract on Sunday to massively expand Tomahawk cruise missile production, it was also acknowledging something that senior Pentagon officials have been reluctant to say plainly: the United States military spent years building stockpiles designed for peacetime, then found itself fighting several wars at once.

The gap was the central tension driving the deal. At the start of 2026, Raytheon was producing roughly 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles a year. In the same period, American forces had launched hundreds into Iranian-backed targets in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria, and transferred additional stocks to Ukraine. The numbers never added up. On a seven-yea...