President Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday that the U.S. will grant Ukraine a license to manufacture its own Patriot interceptor missiles — a move that hands over closely guarded American defense technology while U.S. stockpiles sit depleted after years of proxy-war drain.
The offer, made during a televised meeting at the NATO Summit in Ankara, Turkey, marks a sharp shift in how Washington arms Kyiv: from shipping munitions to licensing the blueprints. "We'll give them the right to make Patriots," Trump said. "We'll show them how to do it. It's very complex, actually... This way he can't complain we're not giving them, make them yourself."
The stakes for ordinary Americans are plain. According to an April report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the U.S. military has expended between 45% and 61% of its Patriot missile stockpile — between 1,060 and 1,430 of 2,330 missiles — since the Iran war began. Those numbers are from April; the real figures are almost certainly worse. The Department of War has not confirmed the estimates.
In other words: Washington has burned through more than half of America's air-defense interceptors fighting other nations' wars, and now the president is offering the manufacturing rights to yet another country.
The New York Post framed the deal as a humanitarian necessity, noting that Ukraine let 23 Russian missiles strike Kyiv without interception on Sunday — killing at least 22 — because global Patriot stocks are so low. The Daily Caller led with the stockpile crisis and the CSIS data. Both outlets quoted Ukrainian Ambassador Olga Stefanishyna, who argued the license will "free up U.S. defense capacity to backfill and modernize U.S. forces." That claim deserves scrutiny: handing a foreign government the tools to produce interceptors does not replenish the missiles America has already fired.
Follow the money. Lockheed Martin, which produces the PAC-3 interceptor missiles, signed a deal with the Department of War in January to boost annual capacity from roughly 600 to 2,000 missiles over seven years. Trump said the company is building four new plants and claimed production timelines could shrink to two or three months — a far cry from the current 42-month average delivery time CSIS documented. RTX's Raytheon unit, which makes the Patriot system's radars and launchers, did not comment. Neither company responded to requests for comment. Lockheed and Raytheon stand to gain enormously from expanded production, whether the missiles are built in Texas or under license in Kyiv.
Former President Joe Biden denied Zelenskyy's request for the same license, the Post reported — so both parties have funneled Patriots overseas, just by different methods. Biden shipped the hardware; Trump is shipping the recipe. Either way, the stockpile shrinks and the contractors get paid.
Ukraine would join Japan, Germany, and Poland as the only foreign nations licensed to produce the Patriot system. Trump said Kyiv could be up and running by this fall.
The open question: how many interceptors does the United States need to defend its own skies — and what happens if they're not there when Americans need them?
