Patriot missile supplies have run out this year, and Kyiv is now facing the consequences. Intercepts have fallen from more than 70% to none, leaving Russia to strike Ukraine’s infrastructure night after night with impunity, Jack Watling wrote in The Guardian. The shortage is not a surprise. It’s the bill coming due for years of NATO complacency and a war machine that plans around stockpiles, not people.
The Price of NATO’s Planning
Ukraine received Patriot air defence systems from its international partners in 2023, and the US-supplied missile interceptor proved to be an effective shield against Russian strikes. But Watling said countering ballistic missiles is not a simple or cheap activity. To intercept a tactical ballistic missile such as Russia’s Iskander, he wrote, a defensive system needs to be remarkably sophisticated because the target descends from the high atmosphere at more than five times the speed of sound and maneuvers through the air rather than following a predictable ballistic trajectory.
That means radars, data links and interceptors, all tied together by years of research and development. Across Nato, Watling said, most states have been happy for Washington to invest over decades to make the Patriot up to the job. The arrangement is familiar enough: the US builds the expensive machinery, allies depend on it, and when the missiles run short, the people under bombardment get told to wait.
The US and licensed manufacturers in Germany and Japan are able to produce about 840 Patriot interceptors a year. About 240 of those are older, larger PAC-2 interceptors, while 600 are PAC-3s, which are smaller and fly directly into the target. Watling said the latter approach is more effective but requires even more precise navigation, while the former can be used against other target types. Russia produces about 750 Iskander missiles a year and is looking to increase production. It also uses air-launched Kinzhal ballistic missiles and repurposed air-defence missiles, along with cruise missiles and drones.
Fortress Europe, Short on Shields
Watling wrote that to have a high probability of success, it is generally recommended to fire two to three interceptors against each ballistic missile. When the launchers’ limited coverage is factored in, and given that Ukraine is a vast country, Kyiv would ideally have three to four times the annual global production capacity of Patriot missiles to protect itself. Countries supporting Ukraine have therefore had to give their own stockpiles to Kyiv. That leaves their own arsenals thinner, and their own populations closer to the same insecurity they claim to manage from a safe distance.
Even before the US decision to attack Iran, western allies were nervous about depleting their own stocks by giving Patriot missiles to Ukraine, knowing it would take a long time for them to be resupplied. The US attack on Iran, which prompted Tehran to fire ballistic missiles across the Middle East, created an acute global shortage. Where Russia usually fires fewer than 10 ballistic missiles in a single attack, Iran has launched upwards of 170 a day during the current and last year’s war. Watling said a portion of Iran’s missiles were also advanced, and in one instance it took 17 Patriot interceptors to defeat a missile. He added that Iran has many more missiles in storage.
Ukraine, meanwhile, is being told to brace for the consequences. Watling wrote that it is not going to receive enough Patriots between now and the winter to save its critical national infrastructure, regardless of whether some countries make the political gesture of releasing a few more from their stockpiles. He said Kyiv must plan for a winter with severely disrupted power and disperse and fortify life-support systems such as water, sanitation, power and heating. That’s the language of managed collapse: not protection, but triage.
The Industrial Logic of War
Kyiv is trying to convince the US to activate Starlink satellite navigation modules over Russian territory to enable its drones to hunt for the Russian missile launchers. Watling said that, as the US recently found in Iran, pulling off this kind of mission over a large area is extremely difficult. Another line of effort in Kyiv is to attack the production of Russia’s ballistic missiles. He wrote that those factories are well defended and that to succeed, Ukraine’s partners will need to expand the funding and industrial capacity behind Ukraine’s nascent cruise-missile industry, or reopen questions of providing weapons systems such as Germany’s Taurus, which Berlin didn’t provide to Ukraine for fear of military escalation.
The whole setup runs on escalation, industrial capacity and political hesitation dressed up as prudence. NATO members have abjectly failed in defence planning, Watling said. The numbers in this equation have been known since before 2022, and yet the investments to expand Patriot production, or mature alternative systems such as the Franco-Italian SAMP-T, have not been made. He said that level of complacency is devastating for Ukraine today, but it also risks Europe being bereft of defences in the future.
Watling wrote that it remains remarkable that Europe, watching the consequences unfold on its very borders, has remained so idle. The line lands with the force of a verdict. The continent’s rulers can find endless money for militarised planning, but not the foresight to keep the shield stocked when the missiles come. Jack Watling is senior research fellow for applied military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute.