President Donald Trump is speaking up in defense of his embattled Pentagon boss, former Fox News presenter Pete Hegseth, after a series of bombshell reports indicating that the Department of Defense has blown through nearly all the precision-guided rockets in its inventory and could take years to replenish those stocks.

Writing on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump accused news organizations of “spreading false and completely unfounded rumors” about his relationship with the former weekend morning show host and said he’s “very happy” with Hegseth’s job performance.

“Everything has been extraordinary, including our attack on Venezuela, where the result was accomplished in less than one day, allowing us to bring one of the worst criminals anywhere in the World, Nicolas Maduro, to Justice! Likewise, Iran, where the country has been decimated for the purpose of NOT ALLOWING IT TO EVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON, is going very well,” he said.

The president went on to claim that Hegseth, a former Major in the Army National Guard who has presided over the firings of more than two dozen senior admirals and generals and personally edited promotion lists to deny advancement to female and racial minority officers is “highly respected within the Military, and has made tremendous improvements, including getting rid of DEI, and increasing recruitment to historic levels.”

He closed out his missive with an attack on The Washington Post, which earlier this week reported on a confrontation between him and Hegseth at last Friday’s cabinet meeting over precision munition shortages he’d believed to have “been fixed,” calling the reporting “treasonous.”

Publicly, Trump claims the U.S. has “massive amounts” of the expensive weapons and has said that “large amounts are being manufactured and shipped to the U.S. as needed” while lashing out a “leakers” for providing information about the depleted stockpiles to the press.

But the reality of America’s post-Cold War defense industrial base is that the few major defense contractors that remained after a wave of consolidation following the fall of the Soviet Union don’t have the capacity to produce missiles such as the Patriot air defense missile, the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, or the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile used to intercept ballistic missiles at a scale that would replace the thousands that have been expended since Trump started an unprovoked war against Iran this past February.

Concerns about the pace at which American forces have expended the costly munitions have persisted among defense officials for months, even as Hegseth has publicly insisted that all is well.

At least one senior administration official who has spoken to The Independent has expressed concerns that the former Fox talking head has been presenting overly rosy forecasts of imminent success in the war.

According to the Post, the defense chief’s response when confronted by the president was to blame his deputy, Stephen Feinberg.

Trump’s expression of support for Hegseth comes hours after he lashed out at the negative reporting on the weapons supply concerns in a separate Truth Social post, claiming that contractors “are building the largest number of plants and factories in our country’s history” and calling for “long-term jail sentences” for “leakers.”

But multiple administration spokespersons have claimed instead that the unflattering stories are fabricated rather than inaccurate.

One of them, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the confrontation between Trump and Hegseth “literally never happened” and added that Trump “has the utmost confidence in Secretary Hegseth.”