CIPHER BRIEF REPORTING – On June 23, the U.S. Army used roughly 30 Patriot missiles to defend against an Iranian attack on Al-Udeid, the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East. Iran’s attack was a retaliation for the American strikes – carried out just hours earlier – against Iran’s nuclear program. According to U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, the engagement included the largest single-day usage of Patriot interceptors “in U.S. military history.” It also highlighted a major challenge for the Pentagon: keeping up with the demand for a hugely popular air defense system.
A week after the Iran strikes, the Trump administration announced a pause in deliveries of Patriots and other weapons to Ukraine, citing concerns that U.S. stocks were dwindling. Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell said the pause was part of a broader review, intended to “create a framework to analyze what munitions we’re sending where, to help the president and secretary of defense make decisions.”
The Army’s FY 2026 budget request includes plans to quadruple its Patriot arsenal — from roughly 3,300 interceptors to nearly 13,800 — and it was made before June’s heavy use of Patriots. In the wake of the successful deployment of Patriots against Iran, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll likened the Patriots to a “new tip of the spear.”
"You could never have enough PAC-3s," retired Army Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event last month, referring to the latest model of the Patriot. "It seems like the [combatant commands] line up outside the factory doors when PAC-3s are being produced."
Other key U.S. air-defense systems have been stressed as well. The Army fired more than 150 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile interceptors to defend Israel during its brief June war with Iran, according to The Wall Street Journal. That would amount to a quarter of all THAAD interceptors ordered or set to be ordered by the U.S. military to date.
While the Patriots are used primarily as missile defense for U.S. bases overseas – as in the June 23 launches, which protected the 10,000 Americans at the Al-Udeid base in Qatar – experts say the shortfall is also due to deliveries of Patriots to countries where there are no U.S. military bases.
“We've turned on the spigots [with the Patriots], particularly to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression, but also Israel,” David Ochmanek, a senior defense researcher at RAND and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, told The Cipher Brief. “And our industrial base was not geared up for this level of demand. So, we've been drawing down on our worldwide stocks in order to help these partners and allies defend themselves.”
“It is very effective, it's one of the most tested systems out there, and it's had a very long track record,” Michael Bohnert, a RAND analyst and former U.S. Navy engineer, told The Cipher Brief. “And from the perspective of capacity, it is the most proliferated system of its type amongst all U.S. allies and partners.”
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A hot item
While the Patriot has become one the world’s most popular and widely recognized air defense systems, it’s also something of a paradox – a made-in-the-U.S. system that plays almost no role in defending American territory.
The Patriot made its debut during the first Gulf War in 1991, when Iraq rained Scud missiles against Israel and U.S. forces in the region, and Patriot missiles knocked most of the Scuds out of the sky. Ever since, the Patriot’s successes have put it high on the wish lists of military commanders the world over, and the U.S. has deployed, shared or sold Patriot batteries and missiles to Ukraine; to Germany, Poland and other NATO countries; to Japan and South Korea; and to Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.
“Patriots are spread out in Asia, Mideast and Europe – we keep them everywhere,” Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, Senior Director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Cipher Brief. “Right now, the Middle East is where they're shooting things down aimed at our airfields. I think we understand that you need to have Patriots in place in Asia for a crisis with China. And for now, you need them in place in Europe for Russia.”
The Guardian reported last month that Patriot supplies had dipped to a quarter of the military’s needs. According to the report, the alert prompted Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg to halt a pending transfer of Patriot interceptors to Ukraine.
The Pentagon pushed back publicly against the report, but its response was limited to a defense of U.S. overall military readiness; there was no denial of the review, or of the 25 percent figure. Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, said the U.S. military had what it needed to “defend our homeland,” and that “we're always assessing our munitions and where we're sending them.”
Concerns about a shortfall have spiked as the U.S. deployed more Patriot interceptors to support its spring campaign against the Houthis, and then to beef up defenses at U.S. bases in the Middle East during the recent Israeli and U.S. strikes against Iran.
Gen. James Mingus, Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, speaking at the recent CSIS event, called the Patriots "a very stressed force element."
Montgomery said that the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine should have been a wakeup call for Pentagon officials about the need for more Patriots.
“We did not take this seriously right after February 2022 like we should have, or even the next year, and even the year after that,” Montgomery said. “Now we are. Now the Army's like, ‘Hey, we have to build a significant stockpile of Patriots. We need to increase our production rates.’ Three years after Ukraine started, we're beginning to do that.”
Bohnert told The Cipher Brief that decisions on deploying the Patriots involve “risk tolerance” – as in, how much risk can Pentagon planners stomach in certain corners of the globe?
“The question of how many do you need relates to how you view the world,” he said. “So if you want to take risks, and take the perspective that I will put all of my Patriots into one theater of the world in a conflict, you'll get one answer. If I want to maintain a capability everywhere, you'll get a different answer. It's very perspective-based and you could ask three people and get five different answers.”
Ukraine’s moment of need
For Ukraine, the value of the Patriots is hard to overstate. The first U.S.-made Patriot systems arrived in Ukraine in April 2023, and since then, the U.S. has provided three batteries and an unspecified number of interceptors, which have been put to regular use against Russian drones and missiles. Experts say the Patriot is the only system that can defend against Russian high-speed and ballistic missiles.
Asked to give examples of weapons systems that NATO and Ukraine would struggle to replace if the U.S. halted military aid, two Cipher Brief experts with deep experience in Europe singled out the Patriot.
“The Patriot, that will be difficult to replace,” Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former Commander of U.S. Army Forces in Europe, told The Cipher Brief. “U.S. intelligence obviously has been important. But for me, the air and missile defense is the thing that comes to mind first.”
Doug Lute, a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, said “high-end missile and air defense” would top the list of Ukraine’s needs, were American support to dry up. “Think of the Patriot missile system, which really doesn't have a European rival,” Lute said. “Systems like that, for which Europe has relied on the United States, would have to become increasingly European-owned and operated.”
The recent pause in U.S. shipments of Patriots came at a critical moment for Ukraine, as Russia was launching its heaviest aerial attacks of the war. Since then, the U.S. has turned to Europe, offering to backfill Patriot systems that Germany and a half dozen other NATO members would send to Ukraine. And the U.S. has ended its pause and offered to send additional Patriots, after President Trump determined – in his words – that Russian President Vladimir Putin “is not treating human beings right, he’s killing too many people, so we’re sending some defensive weapons.”
“They have to be able to defend themselves,” Trump said of the Ukrainians. “They’re getting hit very hard. We’re going to have to send more weapons. Defensive weapons, primarily, but they’re getting hit very, very hard.”
The China factor
As with many current Pentagon concerns, worry over the Patriot shortfall reflects anxiety over a potential conflict with China. U.S. involvement in a war over Taiwan – or any other conflict in the Pacific – would require defending U.S. forces against China’s arsenal of drones and missiles, at sites as spread apart as Japan, Korea, and the U.S. military base in Guam.
“We certainly do not have enough Patriot and other active missile defenses to comprehensively protect our land-based forces in a conflict with China,” Ochmanek said.
Newsweek and others reported that Patriots were moved earlier this year to the Middle East from Japan and South Korea, and that some of these were used to defend against last month’s strikes by Iran on the Al-Udeid Air Base. A China conflict would likely necessitate a flow of Patriot batteries and missiles back to Asia. The U.S. has some 55,000 troops stationed in Japan and another 28,500 in South Korea.
Ochmanek said that in any Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Beijing “would be very concerned to ensure that the United States was not able to bring to bear the full weight of its combat power to defend Taiwan,” and that could mean attacks against U.S. forces in Japan, Korea, Guam, and other parts of the Pacific.
“So, in anticipation of that kind of scenario,” Ochmanek said, “we have been deploying missile defenses to the Western Pacific and would deploy more in the weeks prior to a suspected invasion. They would be defending air bases, land force bases, ports that were used by military facilities, command and control sites that we believe would be attacked. Patriots would be a key component of that defense.”
Bohnert said the China war scenario represents another “risk tolerance” question for Pentagon planners. “If you believe there's going to be a conflict in the next couple of years with China,” he said, “you want a larger capacity right now.”
No easy fix
One thing is clear: restocking the Patriot arsenal won’t happen fast. The U.S. currently produces 600 Patriot missiles per year; Lockheed Martin has said it aims to raise annual output from about 600 to 650 missiles by 2027. For its part, NATO has announced plans to help European nations procure up to 1,000 missiles for their Patriot batteries. And Japan has a contract with Lockheed Martin to produce about 30 Patriot interceptors per year.
“I think even if we threw everything we had at it, we'll be lucky to produce more than 850 Patriots a year,” Montgomery said. “And that's with a lot of work. We are looking at joint ventures with Europeans to build them elsewhere. Japan has a joint venture with us to build some. But it's a very low level.”
Ultimately, Montgomery said that in the race to restock the Patriot arsenal, “the answer is it's going to be everywhere all at once.” As for those “risk tolerance” questions, he and others said that the priorities would likely shift to the Pacific.
“If I would have to predict long-term where we're going to concentrate, it would be in Asia,” he said. “And if we have knocked Iran back on their heels, we might pull back, eventually, the stuff in the Middle East. It's hard to do. Prioritizers would like to pick one theater and hang out in it, but that's not how the world works.”
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