Posted on 08/20/2026 4:50:24 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
On July 23, Volodymyr Zelensky told Ukrainians that Raytheon wanted to help produce Patriot interceptors on Ukrainian-linked lines. Five days later, Lockheed Martin signed a second license, this one for the PAC-3 MSE — the hit-to-kill missile that has spent three years picking Russian ballistic warheads out of the sky over Kyiv.
For a moment it looked like a watershed: the United States handing a country still absorbing nightly missile and drone barrages the blueprint to build its own air defense. Then, within days, the story came apart in public. US Ambassador Matthew Whitaker said Washington would not allow Ukraine to build PAC-3s at all. Donald Trump called the technology transfer “a hard thing to give away.” NATO’s own envoy said no agreement would close before winter. Something had clearly been decided. Nobody could agree on what.
The Patriot system is the closest thing the West has to a proven shield against ballistic missiles, and it is scarce everywhere it is needed. Roughly twenty countries now compete for a production line that turns out about 650 PAC-3 MSE interceptors a year worldwide — Lockheed Martin’s entire global output, shared among Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, Gulf states and the US Army’s own depleted stocks.
Russia, meanwhile, has been firing 55 to 60 Iskander ballistic missiles a month at Ukraine alone, before counting the nightly Shahed drone waves that push crews to expend scarce interceptors on cheaper threats out of necessity. The Pentagon has spent much of the past two years quietly rationing Patriot allocations across allies, reportedly diverting orders meant for Taiwan and Ukraine to replenish American stockpiles. Against that backdrop, “Ukraine will build its own Patriots” is not primarily a sovereignty story. It is a story about whether the system that makes Patriots for everyone else can keep up at all.
(Excerpt) Read more at moderndiplomacy.eu ...
Some CLOWN here claimed (to me) that there is no shortage of Patriots. Thanks for posting this, I knew he was full of it.
Doesn’t seem to prove that at all. Good headline no proof.
USA used to build pretty good stuff, mostly, and we could do it FAST.
Bridges- big ones - under a year.
Battleships — by the hundreds.
Tanks — by the thousands
Fighter jets and bombers ... everything we needed and then some.
Now? WTH has happened to us?
We (the USA) is not on a full all out war production footing. Open your eyes and may be read a book or two....
Entitlement and lack of ambition. We've become a nation of too many people seeking bread and circuses.
“Doesn’t seem to prove that at all. Good headline no proof.”
Since you guys want us to believe there’s no problem with a trickle of Patriots being needed against MANY THOUSANDS of attacking missiles...so you guys will simply keep claiming “no proof”, while looking like math idiots.
May I suggest handing the problem to Elon Musk.
Then you bring out the big toys and the thousands of missiles will cease.
Please tell me the numbers math genius.
“Please tell me the numbers math genius.”
The numbers in the article. Please provide PROOF that they are lying, as you’re claiming here (for some reason).
The sarcasm isn’t necessarily. Forget about war footing for a moment, BFW. These days, the United States can’t seem to build anything important in a reasonable time.
The Hoover Dam was built in around five years, 1931 to 1936.
The California high-speed rail project was started in 2015.
We all know the rest of that story.
Russia has their war with Ukraine while the US wars with Iran, each having supplied the other’s enemy with military and monetary support in the past. Not only do we need our Patriots for our own purposes, but I wonder if part of this refusal to supply Patriots to Ukraine is a realpolitik mutual accommodation, so Russia stops supplying intelligence and other military support to Iran. Trump has had a measure of success in applying economic pressure with our enemy, China, to back off a bit in its military support of Iran, although they are still importing Iranian oil if they can slip through the blockade.
We never built battleships by the hundreds.
You’re not the only one also told this.
Sources left right and center report it...
The best solution for defending against missiles is to shoot the archers. Ukraine’s capabilities here are limited, but getting better rapidly.
Next best is to diffuse the targets so much that the attacker cannot possibly produce enough missiles to be effective. This results in, for example, a rather inefficient energy grid, but, not so much that the Euro’s cannot provide enough support.
“Mosaic” strategy such as is employed by the Iranian regime is also quite useful.
Also viable is going underground with some diffusion. Going underground forces the attacker’s missiles to be very large and expensive. (This assumes the attacker does not have air superiority, and the defender has some depth of defensive area.)
I suspect FHC is using this new language in which any warship over 100 ft. long is a “battleship”. Properly put, the word should be “warship”.
The United States and its allies have provided Ukraine with approximately 600 Patriot interceptor missiles over the course of the full-scale conflict
Reports from early April 2026 indicated that Iran fired approximately 650 missiles at Israel during the intense initial weeks of the conflict, alongside subsequent launches targeting regional U.S. and allied assets in the following months.
During the June 2025 Twelve-Day War with Israel, Iran fired approximately 550 to 574 ballistic missiles (with overall conflict tallies citing around 574 to 627 total missiles launched depending on the defense assessment), alongside over 1,000 suicide drones.
Coordinated U.S. and Israeli air defenses intercepted roughly 273 of the incoming missiles.
Currently, there are eight Patriot battalions with 33 batteries stationed in the United States. There are seven battalions with 27 batteries stationed overseas.
We make about 5 Patriot missiles a month.
No sane military is going to make public their arsenal logistics, the very fact they proclaim to know any kind of numbers shows they are lying. Such information is very classified.
As an ex Navy guy old nuke submariner I can say with certainty very few people ever knew any ship’s actual load out.
Such articles are pure fiction. It is insane any country would let their actual armament numbers become publicly available. If this were true an easy proof would be hearing how someone soon was found to have released state secrets, then I might take this serious.
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