The U.S. defense official said the most concerning shortfall involves Patriot missile interceptors, which can shoot down Russia’s high-speed ballistic missiles. The NATO official confirmed the low inventories of Patriots among American and NATO forces in Europe. Both spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters. In the event of a Russian ballistic missile assault on, for example, a military headquarters or power plant, NATO could be in a similar position to Patriot-starved Ukraine and be forced “to take punch after punch in the mouth,” the U.S. defense official said. In Europe, the American military “definitely” does not have enough Patriots to stop any possible sustained ballistic missile attack and would have “very limited” capability to defend against a single ballistic missile strike or a stray Russian missile that goes off course, the U.S. official said.

It illustrates the cascading fallout from Trump’s decision to launch a war against Iran, a conflict that reaches the six-month mark on Friday. U.S. missile stocks in Europe have been moved to the Middle East, where U.S. and Gulf allies have fired off significant numbers of interceptors, including Patriots, to thwart Iran’s drones and missiles. Some of those attacks have killed and wounded American troops. Though a Russian ballistic missile attack against NATO countries is not imminently expected, CIA Director John Ratcliffe went to Moscow this week to warn Russia not to attack, The Wall Street Journal reported. Trump played down the significance of the rare and secretive trip, saying it was “sort of semi-routine.” European and NATO officials say Russia could be in a position to attack countries in the alliance by 2030. Patriot stockpiles are projected to rebound by then. In the meantime, Russia’s war in Ukraine could hinder its ability to carry out any missile attack on Europe as it would be a challenge for Moscow to fight an air war on two fronts.

US Patriot transfers to Ukraine played a role in the drawdown, but the Iran war wasn’t expected

The Patriot missile shortage is most acutely felt in Ukraine, where officials are begging for more air defense support and where previous U.S. transfers also have drawn down some supply. Kyiv says only U.S.-made Patriots can stop Russia’s advanced ballistic missiles, which increasingly are getting through Ukrainian defenses, including as part of a barrage overnight into Thursday. The U.S. supplied hundreds of Patriot missiles to Ukraine over the course of the 4 1/2-year-long conflict, but the Iran war was the tipping point for shrinking inventories, said Ed Arnold, senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a military think tank in London. The supply to Ukraine was planned for and reasonably measured, he said, whereas stocks in the Middle East have been unexpectedly and quickly drained, exposing supply chain constraints. The U.S. military in Europe also is grappling with critical shortages of the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, a medium-range ballistic missile designed to strike behind enemy lines, the two officials said. But the overall munitions picture in Europe is less dire than on air defenses alone because some European militaries have their own offensive missiles, such as the Taurus and Storm Shadow, which are both long-range air-launched bunker-busting missiles.

U.S. Army Col. Martin O’Donnell, a senior NATO military spokesperson, said it is “simply not the case” that the number of Patriot missiles in Europe is beyond critical. NATO, he said, is able to “block punches” and has enough air defense munitions available to defend itself as well as to donate to Ukraine.

so... where are all these donations to Ukraine then?

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement Thursday that claims of U.S. munition shortages “are false.” “We have everything required to strike at the time and place of the President’s choosing,” Parnell said. “Across multiple combatant commands, we have already executed successful operations while maintaining a deep, ready arsenal to defend our people and our interests.”

Europe has few alternatives while stocks are low

The dearth of Patriot interceptors in Europe would leave few alternatives for shooting down Russia’s more advanced ballistic missiles, which can be combined with swarms of inexpensive drones to overwhelm defenses, experts say. Ukraine and some allies already use systems that can destroy slower-moving drones without expensive missiles. But ballistic missiles are a challenge because they dive steeply toward targets at more than five times the speed of sound, leaving little time to stop them. The Patriot system tracks the missile, predicts its path and launches within minutes, all while carrying out complex calculations to ensure the interceptor finds its target. One Patriot battery can only cover a limited area: for example, a small military base but not a whole city. One alternative could be France and Italy’s SAMP/T NG air defense system. France has promised to speed up the delivery of the system — the upgraded version of the current SAMP/T — to Ukraine, which the manufacturer says is better able to counter ballistics. The new iteration, however, has not yet been battle tested and the current version of the SAMP/T has a smaller range than the Patriot. While U.S. and European militaries have warships that can serve as mobile air defense, they may be too far from a target to protect it and could risk getting sunk.

Patriot stocks have plunged during the Iran war

Ukraine has received Patriots from American and European stockpiles since Russia’s 2022 invasion, with the U.S. providing about 600 of the interceptors during the Biden administration, said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel who is now senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. But the greatest expenditure has been during the Iran conflict, which has used up 65% of U.S. Patriots, amounting to roughly 1,500 of the nation’s 2,330 interceptors, CSIS says. About 600 missiles, including those destined for Europe, should be made this year, with a production goal of 2,000 Patriot missiles a year set for 2030, Cancian said. NATO says Europe’s first Patriot missile production facility is expected to open in Germany in September, with deliveries possibly beginning early next year. The first deliveries should go to countries that have already placed orders, including Germany, the Netherlands, Romania and Spain, the U.S. defense official said. But for now, that means some countries, such as Germany, have bought expensive Patriot systems but are in the “ridiculous” position of not having any ammunition to fire from them, said Arnold of the London think tank. Germany’s defense ministry said it does not comment on stockpiles.

Russia also has limitations

Moscow likely cannot carry out a sustained air assault on a NATO target while it launches almost nightly attacks on Ukraine, Arnold said. Ukraine’s recent strikes into Russia also have exposed weaknesses in Russia’s air defenses, which could prompt Putin to think twice about provoking a retaliatory attack. “The uncomfortable truth is possibly the best air defense that we have is Russian constraints,” Arnold said.

Half-meter resolution Planet imagery captured in recent weeks shows the North Korean approach to the bridge fully built, including a customs building and a controlled entry point several hundred meters from the riverbank. Work on the Russian side, by contrast, is still continuing, with construction on border facilities and even the road itself still visibly ongoing. While the footprint for a large customs building and the gravel for a future highway have been laid, at present, the border is still far from opening to commercial traffic on the Russian side. The crossing sits at Tumangang, a longstanding rail hub on the North Korean-Russian border that handled Soviet-era bulk trade before falling largely dormant after 1991. Activity there has picked up sharply since 2022, coinciding with Pyongyang’s decision to supply Moscow with artillery shells and troops for its war in Ukraine, and Russia’s decision to turn a blind eye to the application of UN sanctions against the Kim regime that Moscow had originally helped to put in place. The border between North Korea and Russia is just 17 kilometers, or 11 miles, long, but increasingly geopolitically significant.

“It’s clear that Kim Jong Un has decided, ‘Our way forward is with Russia,’ and this is emergent proof of it,” said John Ford, a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, who has tracked North Korean infrastructure and arms production for years. Ford noted that Pyongyang had sought a symbolic road bridge at the crossing for decades, only for Moscow to rebuff the idea until the diplomatic fallout from its full-scale invasion of Ukraine reshaped the relationship. According to Ford, in addition to the symbolic value, the bridge may aim to address a persistent bottleneck at Tumangang’s existing rail link, where North Korea’s lack of standardized ISO shipping containers has forced cargo to be transloaded by hand between rail cars − a slow process that has instead pushed much of the ammunition trade through the port of Rason, then by sea to Russia’s Dunai terminal. A functioning road crossing could let trucks bypass that chokepoint, though Ford cautioned it remains unclear whether it would primarily move Russian goods into North Korea, or North Korean goods, including munitions, out.

“The most surprising thing is that it seems functional,” Ford said, pointing to the impractical location of the construction site. It sits far away from any major urban center in Russia’s far east, and even for North Korea, Tumangang is in a remote corner of the country. Existing transport options, primarily by ship from the nearby port of Rason, seem like the obvious choice. He also noted that Russian truckers are unlikely to drive deep into North Korea given the unpredictable and potentially hostile environment, making a river-adjacent transfer point more plausible to him than a true cross-border logistics route. What is for certain, though, is that Russia and the country officially called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have moved much closer together on the world stage since Putin’s 2022 decision to invade Ukraine. The two countries signed a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” in 2024, which includes a mutual defense clause committing both countries to defend the other in times of war, and many stipulations for cooperation ranging from nuclear to spaceflight. Ford also pointed to symbolic markers of the deepening alignment, including the restoration of Lenin and Marx portraits at North Korea’s Military Officers Political Academy and Kim’s 2023 visit to Vladivostok, as evidence Pyongyang is betting on a durable partnership with Moscow that could outlast the war in Ukraine. Whether the bridge meaningfully expands cross-border throughput, Ford said, will only become clear once construction wraps and analysts can watch for signs of actual truck traffic.

The helicopter type has experienced five major crashes since October, and a deadly mishap earlier this month in Texas killed two soldiers, sparked a wildfire and led the Army to temporarily bar Apache pilots from conducting routine training flights. With that crash, fiscal year 2026 is on pace to be the second worst for Apache flight accidents since a new model of the AH-64 was rolled out in 2011. The Army announced that the pause in training flights, which exempted units deployed to the Middle East, ended Wednesday. This year’s rate of major Apache crashes — known as Class A mishaps in Army parlance, meant to represent any accident that kills or permanently disables a person or results in the loss of an aircraft or $2.5 million in damage — surpasses typical years and rivals that of the service’s most severe rate in the 2024 fiscal year, according to CNN’s review of data. The accident rate is based on the number of incidents compared to the total hours the aircraft spent flying, calculated using data that has been publicly released and flight hour estimates for the current year provided to CNN by the Army. In Fiscal year 2024 there were nine major Apache crashes amid a spike in accidents across all Army helicopter models. Army leaders ordered a special safety training initiative that year and attributed the accidents to human errors stemming from decreased experience among its pilots and an increase in training intensity and complexity after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine inspired a new focus on preparing for major conflicts.

But the causes of this year’s spike are murkier. The July issue of an official Army flight safety newsletter said that just over half of this year’s Apache accidents, including more minor incidents, are primarily attributable to human error. It’s unclear how many of the most-severe crashes are due to equipment failures, but the magazine said that “a catastrophic transmission failure was noted in one Class A mishap.” CNN estimated this year’s major Apache crash rate to be approximately 6.24 per every 100,000 flying hours. Thus far in fiscal year 2026, five Class A flight mishaps involving the attack helicopter have occurred. The Apache, through August 15, had flown approximately 80,171 hours. That number combines 42,971 hours through March 31 that were listed in the internal Army safety newsletter and an estimate provided to CNN by an Army safety spokesperson that pilots had logged approximately 37,200 additional flight hours through August 15. Fiscal year 2024, by comparison, had a rate of 7.02 major crashes per 100,000 hours for the aircraft.

The E-model Apache, introduced in 2011, has faced significant problems this year with its transmission that could knock out the aircraft’s tail rotor, electrical power and hydraulics, according to a pair of internal safety messages obtained by CNN. The loss of those systems can put a helicopter into a sudden spin and potentially knock out its flight controls. As of mid-July, the cause of the problems remained “under investigation,” according to a safety message released at the time. Army spokesperson Maj. Montrell Russell declined to answer questions regarding the transmission investigation or disclose any “preliminary findings” regarding the causes of this month’s deadly Texas crash at Fort Hood. “We express our deep sadness over the loss of the two Soldiers near Fort Hood,” Russell said in a statement to CNN. He said that “special controls and release protections” prevent the service from providing detailed “technical aviation information,” to include how many of this year’s crashes are related to the helicopters’ transmission. The initial April safety message, first reported by trade publication Defense One, identified 70 potentially faulty transmissions and ordered all units to stop flying affected Apaches pending repair. A follow-up message sent in mid-July said the root cause remains “under investigation” and added 10 more suspect transmissions to the no-fly list. The two safety messages combined to impact roughly a tenth of the Army’s attack helicopter fleet. In early June, an Army official told CNN that all affected Apaches remained grounded, and the Army did not answer CNN’s questions about how many, if any, have returned to flight since then.

Meanwhile, the Apache’s transmission issues continue to be mentioned in Army flight documents. CNN obtained an August 14 internal Army order that formally cited the two transmission safety messages in its references for the service’s training flight pause after the Texas crash. Russell cautioned that “including these messages in safety reviews does not imply causation for any individual mishap.” The Apache’s manufacturer, Boeing, has deployed teams to Army maintenance depots to assist with inspecting and fixing the transmissions, according to the Army order. The Army and Boeing did not answer questions on how they identified the potentially faulty parts. A Boeing spokesperson confirmed to CNN that the company is “supporting the U.S. Army’s investigation to ensure the operational readiness and safety of any affected aircraft,” but referred additional questions to the Army.

And the fact that these companies are landing contracts, may be indicative of faster production and delivery in a matter of several months, opposed to years, Montgomery said. But producing low-cost munitions isn’t necessarily a solution to the U.S. military’s current stockpile problem. “It's about transitioning your arsenal long term to a high-low mix. But some of these things can come soon,” Montgomery said. “So it doesn't impact the next stage of the war. But it could impact a 2027 end game. And it certainly will impact being ready in 2028, 2029 for Russia or China to do something.”

Strategic shifts

While industry is answering the call to build more affordable munitions, defense experts question whether the military is willing to use them. In March, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine declared that the U.S. military was pivoting from “from stand-off munitions to stand-in munitions” meaning a pivot from long-range weapons outside the battlefield to ones that need to be dropped within conflict zones. But CSIS’ Karako said there’s been no significant switch to plentiful GPS-guided, freefall weapons like Joint Direct Attack Munitions in the months since that statement. "We have 140,000 JDAMS, we have low-cost munitions today. The reason that we're not using them, and the reason that we're hemorrhaging our Tomahawks instead, has to do with extreme risk aversion,” Karako said. “That risk aversion calculus is not going to change just because you have some new entrance, low-cost, low-range missile. We have, today, plenty of munitions that we could use, but we're not using.” A month after Caine made his comments, a F-15E went down over Iran. The complicated rescue of the two U.S. airmen pushed President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to proclaim the military had “achieved overwhelming air dominance and superiority” over the hostile territory.

Airpower experts previously told Defense One that broad terms used by the administration painted an inaccurate reality of the dangerous situation U.S. pilots find themselves in over the region. That lack of total control also limits which munitions the military is willing to use. “Despite efforts to gain air supremacy over Iran, the U.S. was only able to gain localized air superiority over some parts. That reduced the ability to drop JDAMs instead,” Wasser said. “Switching to a strategy that relies on JDAMs would mean accepting more risk—or taking steps to further degrade Iranian capabilities to allow for greater U.S. use of the skies without threat.” Experts told Defense One the Iran war has exacerbated long-standing problems with how the military uses and buys munitions. And while it’s possible the Pentagon could weather this conflict, the resulting mission depletion will likely make future wars—particularly with China—a struggle. “These missiles will also be critical for a potential Western Pacific conflict,” an April CSIS report said. “Even before the Iran war, stockpiles were deemed insufficient for a peer competitor fight. That shortfall is now even more acute, and building stockpiles to levels adequate for a war with China will take additional time.” Until production on existing munitions and interceptors ramps up and the Pentagon buys a new mix of high- and low-end missiles, Karako said the military should look at the plentiful munitions it already has—and use them. “The more immediate thing that we could be doing is changing our tactics,” Karako said. “We've hemorrhaged our long-range stuff, and the thing that we could do is we could start using gravity bombs, but we're not willing to do that … Everytime CENTCOM fires a Tomahawk at somebody without air defense, an angel loses its wings in PACOM.”

As the U.S. military’s critical munitions are overused in the Iran war and underproduced at home, companies are eagerly pitching new low-cost solutions, and the Pentagon is keen to make big deals. But defense experts say those new, cheaper missile options—and the push to rapidly produce existing weapons—aren’t the short-term fix needed to overcome the long-existing problem exacerbated by the Iran war. However, they will provide the military much-needed options in the future. At the Space and Missile Defense Symposium last week, Boeing unveiled a low-cost seeker missile, with crucial hit-to-kill guidance technology used on the PAC-3 missile, made of commercial, off-the-shelf components. At the same conference, Northrop Grumman released its “cost-effective” 50 millimeter gun-based drone defense system to “address a critical short-range air defense gap.” And last month at the Farnborough International Air Show, Lockheed Martin announced a more affordable, proximity-detonation version of its Patriot missile. But those solutions will likely only have a significant impact on the Pentagon’s stockpiles if the Iran war drags on and if officials quickly award contracts. “The push for low-cost munitions is unlikely to have a material effect on the Iran War—at least not anytime soon,” said Becca Wasser, Bloomberg Economics’s defense lead. And, she said, making enough new weapons, at the right cost, is only part of the problem. “Getting to a lower cost for exquisite munitions will take time. It requires developing new weapons or adapting old ones, which means going through new testing and evaluation processes,” she said. “If the Iran war drags on for years, that’s when the drive for lower cost interceptors and munitions could have an impact,” because “wars of attrition require enormous amounts of material—and the lower price tag helps.”

Right now, the Pentagon is blowing through its prized Patriot and Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense missiles, and they won’t get replaced anytime soon, defense analysts say—even with novel framework deals. In the last year, top officials have been pushing those deals with major defense primes and are continuing the administration’s rallying cry for the firms to build and innovate faster. Some of those are starting to bear fruit. This week, RTX netted a seven-year, $22.9 billion Tomahawk missile contract with the U.S. Navy under a new deal, showing that the military is making big bets on legacy systems as it pursues newer options. But those legacy munitions still take time to manufacture. In a recent report, the American Enterprise Institute think tank found that it would take 27 years for defense contractors to produce THAADs at the current maximum annual rate of 96 interceptors a year to reach quantities the Pentagon wants.

There “will be a window of vulnerability for several years until inventories return to their previous levels, and another several years before they get to the levels that war planners desire,” according to a May report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “These newer, lower-cost munitions absolutely should be part of the way we fix this. But we shouldn't be kidding ourselves that they're going to be ready quickly en masse, are operational, and our forces are trained and understand how to use them,” said Todd Harrison, AEI’s defense budget expert. “It will take years, some sooner than others. And I think it remains to be seen if they're going to be available in large quantities sooner than the reorders of the more exquisite existing weapons.”

Framework deals aren’t contracts

The Pentagon has already inked framework agreements for low-cost and traditional munitions. Overall, experts say they are a step in the right direction. “It's not a contract, but it helps give the companies a demand signal they can take to their boards and their shareholders, and…it reduces their risks, so they can make increased capital expenditures, or capex, investments,” said Jerry McGinn, a CSIS senior fellow and the director of the Center for the Industrial Base. McGinn teased an upcoming CSIS analysis that found publicly-traded companies with framework agreements increased their capex investment by 31 percent from the second quarter of 2025 to the same quarter this year. “They're clearly investing more and it's hard not to tie it to those framework agreements. But the challenge is that the framework agreement is an agreement…It's a best faith effort. It's not a contract,” he said. Congress still has to appropriate the money, the companies have to get on contract, and then they have to deliver, McGinn said. And none of that is guaranteed. McGinn said he’s keen to watch how many contracts come out of the framework deals. One of the first major contracts was a seven-year, $35 billion undefinitized contract with Lockheed Martin for THAADs, which leaves some aspects of the agreement open—to be finalized before the contract starts. Undefinitized contract actions, or UCAs, require special approval and are used for urgent work that all parties “agree needs to begin before final agreement can be reached on price.”

Lockheed Martin executives said they’re up to the task. “If you look at the framework agreements we've signed, we've leaned into the ask that the country has made of us. Lockheed Martin has never shied away from stepping up to the line and doing what's been asked,” Johnathon Caldwell, Lockheed's vice president of strategic and missile defense systems, told reporters at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium. “We're in an unprecedented era where speed matters, and we're able to bring capabilities to market in weeks and months, not years and decades. We're putting our money on the table, and our commitment.” It’s a tall order for companies to surge production capacity of those munitions, especially amid supply chain bottlenecks for major components such as solid rocket motors. But it helps that the Pentagon’s actually allocating and committing money to those problems, Bloomberg’s Wasser said. “The framework agreements are just that—-agreements, not contracts. Until these are on contract, you won’t see a lot of companies surging production,” she said. “All these efforts—sending the demand signal to industry, qualifying more [solid rocket motor] suppliers, ramping up missile procurement—help, but they don’t solve the problem.”

Low-cost munitions, long-term solutions

Lockheed’s more affordable version of the PAC-3 missile comes with some tradeoffs, and a timeline. “We basically modified the front end, modified the back end, took out the [Attitude Control Motors], so it's no longer hit-to-kill,” Jason Reynolds, Lockheed’s vice president and general manager of integrated air and missile defense, told reporters during a briefing at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium, adding that it integrates with existing munitions systems “at reduced range.” However, PAC-3 ACE isn’t expecting a first flight until early 2028, and won’t go to production until 18 months after that. “Everybody wants more air defense interceptors as quickly as possible, and anything that is as capable or nearly as capable as a PAC-3 MSC is a very attractive offer,” Reynolds said on the sidelines of the conference. There’s no doubt that a more affordable version of the highly-sought after PAC-3 is useful, said Tom Karako, CSIS’ director of the Missile Defense Project. But the question remains: Will the Pentagon buy it? “PAC-3 ACE is not a contract. It's a concept that they've had for a while and they rolled it out,” he said. “I think the time is right for PAC-3 ACE, but it's a concept, and if you're really attacking the root cause problem, you know the root cause here is the customer.” A few weeks after the PAC-3 ACE contract was announced, Boeing unveiled its Ultra Low-Cost Seeker. It’s a push to make the company’s precision-guided technology, which makes Patriot missiles deadly and expensive, more accessible and affordable. “The system uses commercial off-the-shelf components that Boeing adapted for military use,” the company said in a news release this month. “ULCS leverages our seeker expertise developed on programs like PAC-3 MSE, but delivers a different seeker capability that can be applied at low cost to numerous defensive and offensive products to address lower-complexity threats.” The seeker is still under development, and more flight tests are expected in 2027. Officials declined to provide exact figures on how much more affordable the new product was compared to existing technology.

Overall, there seem to be more options for cheaper replacements to hypersonic or cruise missiles than for top-tier air defense missiles like Patriots and THAAD weapons, said Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral and senior fellow for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. New entrants are also getting in the low-cost missiles game—and landing contracts. There’s Anduril's Barracuda, Zone 5 Technologies’ Rusty Dagger, and Coaspire’s cruise missile. “We’re seeing it in hypersonic missiles with a company called Castelion…But we're not seeing it in air defense weapons,” Montgomery said. X-Bow Systems revealed its modestly priced $100,000 drone destroyer at the Farnborough International Airshow. The company also landed a $11 million deal this week with the Missile Defense Agency to develop and test low-cost interceptors.