NATO races to solve missile shortage as wars drain Western stockpiles
by Guillaume Ptak · The Washington TimesKIELCE, Poland — Rocket-launch and advanced radar systems on display at Europe’s largest defense fairs are multiplying quickly, but finding enough actual missiles to put in the systems is proving increasingly difficult.
Four years of high-intensity war in Ukraine followed by months of heavy American interceptor use in the Middle East have exposed an uncomfortable weakness in NATO’s air defenses: Western militaries are firing sophisticated missiles far faster than the defense industry can replace them.
Germany is the latest NATO ally to press Washington for permission to manufacture PAC-3 MSE interceptors, the most advanced missile used by the Patriot air-defense system. Berlin is seeking to bring more of the Patriot supply chain onto European soil as demand outstrips existing production.
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The scramble comes as NATO tries to replenish missiles already consumed in combat while simultaneously attempting to build a much larger air-defense force for a potential war with Russia amid heightened tensions between Moscow and the alliance.
Secretary General Mark Rutte has said NATO needs a 400% increase in air and missile-defense capability to meet its military requirements.
Ukraine alone says it is arranging purchases of roughly 1,000 Patriot interceptors with help from its European partners. However, Ukrainian officials have acknowledged that most will be delivered only over several years.
Missile manufacturers are scrambling to meet the needs.
“Global demand for Lockheed Martin’s offensive and defensive systems is unprecedented,” a spokesperson for the company, which manufactures the PAC-3 MSE interceptor missiles, told The Washington Times.
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From boutique production to mass warfare
For decades, many of the West’s most advanced missiles were built at rates suited for relatively limited conflicts.
The war in Ukraine and Iran wars have laid bare the flaw in that approach.
A new assessment by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) found that NATO’s European members signed more than $51 billion in contracts for ground-based air-defense systems between 2022 and 2025, excluding separate orders for missiles.
This represented a 629% increase over the previous four years.
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Missile production is now climbing sharply: Lockheed Martin delivered a record 620 PAC-3 MSE interceptors last year and plans to raise annual production capacity to roughly 2,000 by the end of the decade.
Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), the U.S. military’s other principal system for intercepting ballistic missiles at high altitude, is undergoing a similar expansion. Lockheed and the Pentagon aim to raise annual THAAD interceptor capacity from fewer than 100 missiles to 400.
“We’ve moved from discussion to execution,” the Lockheed spokesperson said. “Through PAC-3, THAAD and PrSM agreements, we are accelerating production, improving demand visibility and expanding infrastructure.”
Unease over U.S. munitions stockpiles boiled in Washington during the summer. A Center for Strategic & International Studies analysis in July stated that Patriot and THAAD interceptor stockpiles had dropped by two-thirds and by half, respectively, since the start of the Iran war in February.
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With that as a backdrop, Lockheed says it plans to invest between $8 billion and $9 billion through 2030 to modernize more than 20 U.S. facilities and rapidly increase munitions output.
The company says deliveries of six critical munitions had already increased by more than 220% since 2016, with further major increases planned to support PAC-3 and THAAD production.
European manufacturers are also ramping up. IISS estimates that Diehl Defence, a major German manufacturer, has increased production of its IRIS-T air-defense missile roughly tenfold from 2021 levels. Poland’s state-owned manufacturer MESKO has increased annual production for its Piorun — “Thunderbolt in Polish” — man-portable air-defense (MANPAD) system from about 300 missiles to 1,300 and plans to double that again by 2029.
The multinational European weapons maker MBDA, meanwhile, has cut the production time for its Aster interceptor from 42 months in 2022 to 30 months in 2025.
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While impressive, those recent increases also expose how small many prewar production lines were.
“Big wars are fought with numbers, not wonder weapons,” missile specialist Markus Schiller of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said in a recent interview with Reuters.
It’s a view shared by Iryna Terekh, CEO and chief technology officer at Fire Point, a Ukrainian manufacturer of long-range drones and missiles that has rapidly scaled production since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Fire Point was among the most prominent Ukrainian companies exhibiting at the recent MSPO International Defense Industry Exhibition in Kielce, Poland.
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In an interview with The Times earlier this year, Ms. Terekh described the Patriot and THAAD systems as the pinnacle of missile engineering. “It’s like a cherry on top of engineering art,” she said. “But we need a whole lot of cherries.”
The rocket motor problem
Building more missile assembly lines only solves part of the problem.
Modern interceptors depend on highly specialized rocket motors, propellants, energetic materials, seekers and electronics. Many of those components come from supply chains that shrank after the Cold War, when Western militaries ordered comparatively small quantities of missiles.
The IISS assessment cited rocket motors as a particular constraint on missile production in both Europe and the United States.
Norway has warned that even a planned 150% increase in rocket-motor production at Nammo, one of the Europe’s major manufacturers, is likely to prove insufficient as demand continues to rise.
IISS specifically identified shortages of energetic materials and long certification processes for alternative suppliers as burdens on production.
Companies are now pouring money into those less visible parts of the missile industry.
Nammo is adding rocket-motor production in Norway and the United States. Germany-based Bayern-Chemie is building a new facility to supply the German production line for Patriot GEM-T missiles. Poland’s MESKO is expected to manufacture motors and warheads for CAMM-ER air-defense missiles.
Lockheed has also begun bringing more unconventional suppliers into the PAC-3 supply chain: General Motors Defense delivered its first components for the interceptor this month, only weeks after the two companies reached an agreement.
Defense industry insiders say the goal is to turn what was once a relatively narrow missile industry into a much broader transatlantic production network.
A cheaper way to shoot
NATO is also trying to rework the economics of air defense by reducing the number of expensive missiles it needs to fire.
Russian attacks on Ukraine now routinely combine ballistic and cruise missiles with hundreds of much cheaper attack drones. Firing state-of-the-art interceptors at every target would quickly empty even much larger Western stockpiles.
Ukraine has consequently developed layers of cheaper defenses, including interceptor drones, electronic warfare and mobile counter-UAS teams, allowing Patriot and other scarce missiles to be used only for the most dangerous threats.
It’s a lesson the IISS assessment said is increasingly influencing European air-defense planning, with militaries seeking cheaper missiles and other effectors to preserve expensive interceptors for ballistic and cruise missiles.
Lockheed is applying a similar logic within the Patriot family. The company says its new PAC-3 Affordable Capability Effector, or ACE, is intended to defeat a range of air and missile threats at less than half the unit cost of PAC-3 MSE.
The PAC-3 ACE would complement rather than replace the more capable MSE interceptor.
But cheaper missiles won’t eliminate NATO’s need for far larger stocks of high-end weapons.
The alliance would enter any prolonged conflict against Russia facing the same problem Ukraine confronts nightly: An adversary using drones and missiles in combinations designed to exhaust defenses and force difficult choices over what to protect.