Trump Just Admitted We're Running Out of Missiles

Two nights before Trump stood at the NATO summit in Ankara and promised Ukraine a license to build its own Patriot interceptors, Russia fired 29 ballistic missiles at Kyiv.

Ukraine’s air defenses stopped zero of them.

That’s the number sitting underneath everything Trump said next.

Standing beside Zelenskyy, Trump said the U.S. would give Ukraine “the right to make Patriots.” He said American companies are already building four new plants and could get Ukraine producing “in 2–3 months.”

Take that timeline with a grain of salt. But what came next was even more illuminating.

“We have Patriots, but we don’t have that many,” Trump said. “We need them for ourselves too.”

That’s not a talking point. That’s a frank admission.

Lockheed Martin builds roughly 600 PAC-3 interceptors a year — or about 50 a month.

Ukraine alone could need something closer to 2,000 a year for full coverage of its cities, power grid, and military infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Russia is producing an estimated 120 ballistic missiles a month, increasingly aimed at the gaps in Ukraine’s defense.

It’s not just Ukraine drawing down the pool, either.

The Iran war has burned through roughly a third of the entire global Patriot interceptor stockpile, with Gulf states alone firing more than 1,100 of them in the past few months.

Unfortunately, simply giving Ukraine license to produce Patriot missiles isn’t exactly a short-term fix.

Licensed production isn’t something you flip on. When Germany got a license to build PAC-2 interceptors, meaningful output still wasn’t expected until late this year or next — years after the deal was signed.

Poland’s effort to localize missile production took nearly a decade, and Poland wasn’t doing it under Russian bombardment.

A Patriot interceptor isn’t sheet metal. It’s classified seeker technology, hit-to-kill guidance, and secure software the U.S. has historically guarded even from close allies.

So the license Trump promised in Ankara is a real, long-term commitment. It is not a fix for what let 29 missiles through in one night.

In any case, while Lockheed Martin builds the PAC-3 interceptor, RTX builds the Patriot weapon system itself. That includes the radar, the launchers, the engagement control station, and the GEM-T interceptor.

So while Lockheed Martin will undoubtedly benefit from higher missile demand, RTX is actually better positioned.

The company’s Q1 2026 sales hit $6.9 billion, up 10% organically — driven specifically by higher volume on Patriot and GEM-T.

Adjusted earnings per share for the whole company came in at $1.78, up 21% year over year. Munitions output across RTX’s critical programs rose 20% in 2025, and management has guided for more of the same in 2026.

RTX closed 2025 with a $268 billion total company backlog.

On top of that, the Defense Logistics Agency handed Raytheon a $50 billion umbrella contract last year covering Patriot systems, spare parts, and sustainment for U.S. and international customers over the next 20 years.

And that’s before a single Ukraine deal gets signed.

Raytheon also just booked over $600 million in new Patriot orders from the Netherlands and $400 million more from the U.S. Army for missile-defense sensors — in a single quarter.

Most importantly, though, RTX was one of a select group of companies named to the Missile Defense Agency’s new contract vehicle supporting the Golden Dome — the program built to solve exactly the capacity problem this Ukraine story just put on public display.

Every dollar the world spends chasing this shortage — Ukraine, the Gulf, or the U.S. homeland — eventually runs through RTX’s order book. That’s the trade, independent of whether Trump’s 2–3-month promise to Ukraine ever materializes.

Of course, RTX and Lockheed are the obvious plays, and a lot of this demand has already been priced into their shares.

The less obvious opportunity is in the smaller contractors building the sensor fusion and AI-driven tracking layer that lets a stretched interceptor supply hit its target instead of missing it — squeezing more defense out of every missile actually being built.

That’s why I’ve been tracking one such company for the Golden Dome specifically, and this kind of global squeeze makes its technology more valuable, not less.

Trump just told us we don’t have enough missiles to go around. That’s not a reason to look away from this trade. It’s the reason to be in it before the rest of Wall Street catches up.