Ukraine Is Being Blanketed With Hellfire... The U.S. Could Be Next

Last week, Russia blasted Kyiv with another blistering round of deadly missile strikes.

At least 17 people were killed and 40 more were wounded in a single two-hour barrage.

The strike included 24 ballistic missiles, four hypersonic and supersonic cruise missiles, and 115 drones.

And that’s just the latest in a seemingly endless string of attacks that have taken place since Russia’s invasion started four years ago.

What’s worse, though, is that attacks like these are only growing more deadly.

Last year, 2,514 Ukrainian civilians were killed by Russian strikes, with another 12,142 injured. That was a 31% jump over 2024.

And this year is already shaping up to be worse.

Through the first six months of 2026, 1,396 Ukrainian civilians have been killed, with 7,978 injured. That’s up 37% from the same period in 2025.

June alone was the worst month in that stretch — 293 killed, 1,990 injured.

It’s a grim and dispiriting development for a country that has experienced its most productive gains on the battlefield in 2½ years. And whose military has been wreaking havoc on Russia with its own drone strikes on oil refineries, cargo ships,  commercial warehouses, and other infrastructure.

And it boils down to one thing: an increasingly dire shortage of interceptors.

“Ballistic interceptors are what could have saved the lives of those killed today,” President Zelenskyy said afterward. “There are no missiles for the Patriots.”

According to Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s Patriot interceptor supply fell to roughly a third of 2025 levels in the first half of this year.

Not because Kyiv stopped asking but because the global supply has been stretched so unbearably thin.

And disturbingly, this isn’t just a problem for war-torn Ukraine. 

It’s an increasingly untenable — and potentially deadly — issue for us as well.

America Has the Same Problem

The fact that the U.S. has been quietly burning through its own missile defense stockpile is nothing new. 

We’ve known that for years. 

But what’s made things worse is that Operation Epic Fury has further depleted our already strained stockpiles to crisis levels.

For example, munitions for the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD) — one of the only interceptors capable of shooting down a ballistic missile in its terminal phase — is now nearly 80% depleted.

That inventory has plummeted from 452 missiles prior to the conflict to as few as 100. 

Patriot interceptors are down by half.

From about 2,200 pre-war units to something closer to 1,000, depending on whose count you trust.

Tomahawk cruise missiles — the ones that actually did the striking in Iran — are down almost 50% as well.

Senior U.S. commanders are calling the stockpile “dangerously low,” and that there are “no good alternatives to Patriot and THAAD for ballistic missile defense.”

They don’t exactly grow on trees, either. They’re going to take years to backfill.

The Army is currently producing about 20 new Patriot interceptors and 15 new Tomahawks a month.

Some systems won’t recover until 2027 at the earliest — and it’s going to take at least three years just to get THAAD back to pre-war levels. 

That tells you everything about the timeline the Pentagon thinks it’s actually working with.

Missile Defense Isn’t Optional

Obviously, the Pentagon is racing to address this problem.

Defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and RTX have been scooping up a steady stream of new contracts and building out production facilities to meet increased demand.  

Remember, Russia’s attacks on Ukraine have combined traditional ballistic missiles with advanced hypersonics and low-cost drone swarms. 

Similarly, Iran has used low-cost missiles and drones to wear down American resources.

So while we obviously need more supplies, we also need a more advanced defense patchwork — one capable of repelling these new threats. 

And that is what the Golden Dome aims to achieve.

Skeptics have called it too expensive. Too ambitious. A boondoggle.

But I think President Zelensky and the people of Kyiv would probably say different. 

And in fact, Europe has already taken that lesson to heart and is scrambling to build its own version of the Golden Dome.

America may be the most powerful military on Earth… but that doesn’t mean much if it’s burnt through 80% of its most critical interceptor systems fighting a single mid-sized adversary.

Imagine what a sustained conflict with a near-peer competitor like Russia or China would look like.

That’s precisely why Golden Dome isn’t optional.

It’s why the Pentagon just tacked on another $10 billion to accelerate the space-based layer of the program.

It’s why the Space Force is pushing billions into missile-tracking constellations like Next-Gen OPIR and Resilient MWT-LEO.

And it’s why companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, and Sierra Space are sitting on what’s shaping up to be a multi-decade, trillion-dollar-plus spending program that doesn’t depend on who’s sitting in the Oval Office in 2029.

Whether the threat comes from Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, or Tehran, the lesson out of Ukraine is clear.

That’s why I’ve identified the small, lesser-known player positioned to be a key piece of the Golden Dome — the kind of company that won’t show up in the Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman headlines, but stands to benefit just as much from the money already moving.

You can get the full details in my latest report right here.