Ukraine wants to make its own Patriot missiles. That's a bad idea.

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived at the G-7 summit in Evian, France, last week, he was ready with his latest set of military and economic requests. Near the top of his list was a new item: a license to produce Patriot anti-ballistic missile interceptors inside Ukraine.

Ukraine’s deficit of air defenses is, at this point, well-known. The country was running low on air defense interceptors even before February, when the Iran war diverted much of the limited supply away from Kyiv and toward the Middle East. Zelensky argues that giving Ukraine a license to produce Patriot missiles domestically would be a win-win, allowing his country to better defend its skies while also lessening the global interceptor shortage.

Ukraine’s desire to protect its airspace and infrastructure from attack is understandable. But even if the United States hopes to support Ukraine in this goal, acquiescing to Zelensky’s request for a Patriot production license is neither a wise nor an effective approach for doing so. The move would not measurably lessen Ukraine’s air defense deficit, but it would create substantial risks to U.S. national security by making it easier for competitors to get access to sensitive information about U.S. military systems. The Trump administration should therefore decline this request.

Ukraine’s air defense problem is one of simple math. Today, multiple times per week, Russia attacks Ukraine’s cities with dozens of missiles and hundreds of drones. At its current pace, Russia will fire over 900 ballistic missiles and hundreds of thousands of attack and decoy drones at Ukraine over the course of 2026.

While Ukraine has become quite proficient at disabling drones, it relies almost exclusively on American Patriot missiles to intercept ballistic missiles and some types of cruise missiles. And global supplies of these advanced air defense interceptors are increasingly scarce. The United States produces only about 650 per year (though there are plans to expand this to about 2,000 by 2030). In other words, even if Ukraine received every Patriot missile that came off U.S. production lines, it still would have too few interceptors to defend its skies completely, especially since multiple interceptors may be required to defeat one incoming ballistic missile.

If this upside-down math was not enough, Ukraine’s competition for scarce Patriot munitions has increased dramatically since the U.S. war in Iran began. The conflict severely depleted the air defense stockpiles of both the United States and its Gulf state partners. Some reports suggest that the U.S. military burned through as much as half its Patriot missiles, creating a deficit that now must be replenished. Addressing U.S. needs and restocking Gulf states is now at least as important (and quite possibly a higher priority) for the Trump administration than supplying Ukraine.

Zelensky’s proposed solution — allowing Ukraine to directly manufacture Patriot missiles — may thus sound like a reasonable fix. However, giving Ukraine a Patriot production license will not address the country’s needs on the required timeline.

It will take significant time to set up a Patriot production line in Ukraine. Germany’s planned production of Patriot GEM-T missiles offers an example. RTX and MBDA agreed in early 2024 to form a joint venture to support the manufacture of these missiles inside Germany. The production facility itself, however, is expected to be complete only by the end of 2026, with full rate production levels reached only by 2028 at the earliest, four years after the project’s initiation.

With a more agile and innovative defense industrial base, Ukraine might be able to move more quickly. But some hurdles, like meeting U.S. security requirements, will be time-consuming and cannot be sidestepped.

Ukraine will also face an obstacle not encountered by German firms or manufacturers in the United States: incoming Russian missiles.

If Ukraine were to start building its own Patriot production lines, such facilities would be near the top of Moscow’s target list. Ukraine would therefore have to allocate some portion of its scarce Patriot stockpile to protect nascent construction instead of other infrastructure. It is quite possible that, with repeated strikes, Ukraine’s Patriot production might never get off the ground.

Other challenges are fundamental to the Patriot missile’s design. A major reason for the anemic annual production rate of Patriot interceptors is the scarcity of necessary inputs, including critical minerals, motors, and precision electronics. Limited supplies of these crucial components create bottlenecks.

Opening new Patriot production lines inside Ukraine will only worsen these pressures. If it were to get a license, Ukraine is unlikely to produce Patriot missiles inside Ukraine from start to finish but instead would assemble the interceptors using imported components.

A new Patriot assembly line in Ukraine cannot increase total global production, then, unless input shortages are also addressed. At best, this will take years to achieve, as evidenced by the lengthy horizons set by American manufacturers for ramping up their own munition production. In the meantime, having Patriots assembled inside Ukraine will pull required components away from existing production lines, reducing what the United States is able to manufacture for its own military forces or other partners.

Even if these logistical issues could be overcome, there is one final reason that giving Ukraine Patriot blueprints is a mistake: U.S. national security. U.S. Patriot systems are considered the gold standard in mobile air defense against ballistic missiles (perhaps only surpassed by the THAAD), giving U.S. military forces an advantage over competitors. The technologies involved are closely protected by export controls.

The two countries that currently have licenses to co-produce Patriot missiles, Germany and Japan, had to navigate complex legal requirements to qualify for this access. This included building and maintaining factories that meet precise standards, including for domestically sourced inputs; guaranteeing the information security of all technical information; and committing to end-use agreements that restrict the use and export of finished missiles.

It is not clear that Ukraine could meet these standards, especially in the near term, and any shortcuts could put U.S. national security and military secrets at risk. It is well-known that Ukraine is widely penetrated by Russian intelligence (and vice versa). As a result, if Ukraine had access to sensitive or classified information about the technologies and production of Patriot missiles, it would be reasonable to assume that this intellectual property could eventually end up in Russian hands. Simply observing production processes could be enough for skilled professionals to reverse engineer U.S. interceptor missiles and then sell proprietary knowledge to other U.S. competitors, compromising the security of U.S. personnel and assets worldwide.

If giving Ukraine a Patriot production license were really the solution to its air defense problems, then U.S. policymakers would have to weigh the serious risks such a decision would pose to U.S. national interests against the benefits of helping Ukraine defend itself. Since having approval to produce its own Patriot missiles will not address Ukraine’s near- or medium-term needs, any risk to U.S. national security is unacceptable. The choice to deny Zelensky’s request should be a straightforward, if unpleasant, one for the Trump administration.

The unfortunate reality is that there is no immediate fix to Ukraine’s air defense shortage. In the near term, Ukraine’s air defense gap creates urgency for finding an off-ramp to the ongoing war. Efforts to achieve a mutual deep-strike ceasefire should be a priority, one that might also be appealing to Moscow as Ukraine’s own drone campaign imposes increasing costs on Russia’s oil industry. Ongoing efforts to find Patriot substitutes that can be mass produced at low cost should continue.

In the longer term, Ukraine’s predicament underscores the need to double down on efforts to increase Patriot missile production and puts the onus on Europe to develop its own anti-ballistic missile systems that can supplement and eventually replace those of the United States.