The Global North is running out of missiles. Six months into the Iran war, and with Russia's winter bombardment of Ukraine just getting under way, the interceptors built to shoot down ballistic and cruise missiles are being fired faster than the West can build them — and Ukraine, whose skies have gone undefended against entire barrages this month, is furthest into the dark.

Washington's own stockpile is depleted and its arms industry is scrambling to catch up; Kyiv is chasing spare interceptors from allies who increasingly need their own; and a $300mn arms deal with Turkey, while welcome, does nothing to plug the gap in Ukraine's air defences.

Chaos in Washington

The scale of the depletion became public knowledge after President Donald Trump reportedly exploded at Secretary of War Pete Hegseth during a cabinet meeting at Camp David in late July, venting that he had believed the munitions shortage “had been fixed”; Hegseth, caught off guard, pointed the finger at his deputy Stephen Feinberg for failing to keep the president fully briefed, according to the Washington Post. The Pentagon has denied the confrontation took place.

Whatever was said in the room, the numbers are not in dispute. A Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) estimate puts global Patriot interceptor inventories at under 827 as of late July, down from roughly 2,200 before the Iran war began, while THAAD stocks have fallen from 452 to fewer than 278. The Pentagon says it has expended more than 850 Tomahawks, 1,000 Patriot/THAAD interceptors and 1,300 tactical ballistic missiles since the war started, and separately told Congress it fired between 1,060 and 1,600 interceptor missiles in March and April alone — against which only 172 replacement missiles had been delivered by March.

CSIS estimates it will take at least three years to rebuild US stockpiles to pre-war levels at current production rates.

Feinberg has since given US defence contractors just 21 days to submit plans to “dramatically accelerate” production, telling firms that “years-long development cycles are not acceptable.”

The Pentagon has already signed a $58.6bn contract with Lockheed Martin to expand PAC-3 MSE production and separate deals with Lockheed and Northrop Grumman to increase PAC-3 and THAAD output, but the bulk of that expansion depends on a $1.15 trillion defence spending bill still stalled in Congress — and, per industry estimates cited in the Washington Post, on manufacturing capacity that companies have told the White House they cannot meaningfully expand before 2028.

Even a fully funded surge would not close the gap. Ukraine's own officials say Russia is now out-producing the West's ability to intercept what it fires: one estimate puts Russian output of 9M723 Iskander ballistic missiles at 55-60 a month, plus a further roughly 50 a month of the S-300/S-400-launched RM-48U — a combined rate that, on Kyiv's figures, is not far off Russia firing more missiles at Ukraine in a week than global manufacturers deliver Patriot interceptors in a month. The US itself is estimated to produce in the region of 650 PAC-3 interceptors a year.

Ukraine scrambles for interceptors

Ukraine's own position has grown increasingly desperate as its interceptor missiles run dry. Speaking in Belgrade on August 8, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Kyiv had reached an agreement with Washington for monthly deliveries of Patriot interceptors from US stockpiles, though he declined to give a number “for security reasons” and admitted the volumes for 2026 will be “lower than in 2025.”

On a rough estimate, the true figure is unlikely to be much above five missiles a month — roughly the pace at which new production is adding to US stocks – meaning the deal likely does no more than keep Washington's own inventory flat rather than genuinely topping up Ukraine's.

The push to let Ukraine build its own Patriot interceptors has swung back and forth all summer. At the Ankara Nato summit on July 8, Trump told Zelenskiy he would grant Kyiv a licence to manufacture PAC-3s domestically — “Make them yourself,” he said — only to walk the idea back less than a week later, telling reporters Washington had to be “very careful about letting somebody build them.” By this weekend Zelenskiy said the licence was back on and domestic production could start this autumn, though he also acknowledged it would take Ukraine “from 12 months to several years” to actually begin manufacturing interceptors even with the licence in hand. The problem is not the intellectual property rights, but the ability to get his hands on the specialised components — solid rocket motors, active radar seekers — that are difficult to produce even for established US contractors. Components are as in short supply as assembled missiles.

Zelenskiy separately asked Trump in Ankara for an emergency transfer of 300 PAC-3 interceptors before winter — roughly a third of the entire US inventory — and was refused. With Washington unable or unwilling to provide enough, Zelenskiy has ordered Ukrainian diplomats around the world to personally track down spare interceptors in allied countries' own stockpiles.

The response has been overwhelmingly negative: Greece, Spain and, most recently, Finland have all declined, each citing the need to preserve their own air defence readiness. Finnish Defence Minister Antti Häkkänen said Helsinki had “done everything we could to the maximum extent possible, but as a frontline country we cannot compromise our continuous air defence readiness,” adding that the pace of US production had become “the primary issue for European security policy,” a process he said was “rife with bureaucracy and inertia.”

The Turkish lifeline

Turkey surprised everyone by coming to Ukraine rescue this weekend with an unexpected missile deal. Ukraine has purchased 70 M39 ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles, 12 M270 multiple-launch rocket systems and tens of thousands of cluster munitions from Turkey's own stockpiles, in what the US State Department called the largest single arms transfer to Ukraine Turkey has ever made, worth close to $300mn.

The package — submitted to the US Congressional Record on August 6 and due to clear the mandatory 15-day congressional review period later this month — will be delivered via Turkish, Bulgarian and American logistics firms; Ankara's motive, per the transfer documents, is to offload older equipment and fund modernisation of its own arsenal.

The ATACMS are offensive weapons, not interceptors, and Kyiv intends to use them against Russian missile launchers and logistics nodes inside Russia that fire the missiles Ukraine cannot shoot down — extending the tit-for-tat missile campaign already under way against Russian refineries and shadow-fleet tankers. But the M39 variant is a 1990s-era design with a relatively low-accuracy inertial guidance system rather than GPS correction, relying instead on a large cluster warhead to compensate; hitting mobile launchers precisely will be extremely difficult without better real-time targeting data over Russian territory — the same gap Ukraine has run into in its dispute with Elon Musk over Starlink coverage. For now, the Turkish missiles add offensive reach without doing anything to close the much larger hole in Ukraine's air defences.

Europe's own magazines are bare

Kyiv's diplomats have found little to work with. A rough country-by-country picture of Patriot interceptor stocks compiled by IntelliNews from procurement disclosures and reported transfers shows most European operators either already stripped bare by earlier donations to Ukraine or years away from meaningful new deliveries.

Country

Estimated interceptors on hand

Notes

Spain

30-40

War reserve was 50 in April 2024; 12 already sent to Ukraine. New GEM-T/PAC-2 order not due until 2027.

Greece

200-300 (est.)

Largest potential pool, but mostly ageing PAC-2s 23 years old; already sent dozens to Qatar since March 2026; has refused Kyiv's request for 200.

Germany

Low hundreds (unconfirmed)

Europe's largest likely inventory, but heavily drawn down by battery and missile donations to Ukraine.

Poland

200 or fewer

208 PAC-3 MSE ordered, expansion to 644 more not fully delivered; on track to become one of Europe's largest Patriot operators.

Romania

Below 224

Ordered 168 PAC-3 MSE plus 56 GEM-T; donated one full Patriot system (missile count undisclosed) to Ukraine.

Netherlands

Dozens

Has donated launchers and missiles to Ukraine; share of the European 1,000-missile order will eventually replenish stocks.

Sweden

100-200 (est.)

Procurement suggests a meaningful stock, but delivered/operational numbers undisclosed.

Switzerland

Not yet operational

Patriot and PAC-3 MSE ordered but delivery still under way — a future stockpile, not a current one.

Source: IntelliNews complied from reports

Even the better-stocked operators are wary of parting with what they have. As Häkkänen put it, any Nato member outside the biggest holders is unlikely to have more than “5 missiles, 10 missiles” in reserve — a picture the table above broadly bears out: Europe's combined usable Patriot inventory, once Germany and Poland's undisclosed real totals are set aside, likely runs to a few hundred missiles at most, against a Russian ballistic-missile campaign firing well over 100 a month into Ukraine alone and a total of 900 in all of 2025 – a total that could double this year after Russia expanded its missile production capacity in the last twelve months.

Between a US arms industry that says it cannot expand production before 2028, European allies unwilling to give up their own last reserves, and a Russian missile-production line still outpacing every interceptor being built to stop it, Ukraine's air defences look set to stay thin through the winter — Turkish ATACMS notwithstanding, since they add to Kyiv's offensive reach without adding a single interceptor to its skies.