Experts say Trump's plan to license Patriot missiles for Ukraine could take years
"These things aren't like flipping on a light switch," one expert told ABC News.
Defense experts cautioned that President Donald Trump's offer to license Ukraine to produce Patriot missiles would take years to materialize and do little to address its immediate needs.
"The problem is that these things aren't like flipping on a light switch," said Bradley Bowman, a scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute that focuses on foreign policy and national security. "You can devote the money necessary, but that's not going to manifest itself and increase production capacity for a significant period of time."
"Unfortunately, time is, in many cases, the thing you don't have," he added.
Trump's comments, made Wednesday on the sidelines of the NATO summit, are a major victory for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has long raised alarm bells about the rapid depletion of U.S. Patriot PAC-3 interceptor missiles -- widely considered the most effective tool to counter Russian missiles and drones.
Russia has unleashed waves of missile and drone attacks on Kyiv in recent months, including a barrage of strikes on Monday. The Ukrainian air force said it was unable to intercept any of the missiles in the Monday attack, pointing to a shortage of interceptors.
Several national security experts said granting the license appeared to be an optics play from the White House and warned it wouldn't address Ukraine's imminent needs.
Producing Patriot missiles in Ukraine, they said, would take years and require the nation to overcome several logistical obstacles, including supply chain hurdles and high security standards.
The interceptors are made in the U.S. by defense giant Lockheed Martin, which produced around 620 Patriot missiles last year. But the missiles are being used in Ukraine and the Middle East at a much faster pace than Lockheed can make them. That shortage is prompting efforts to speed production and build facilities outside the U.S. -- in concert with a wider push for Europe to reduce its reliance on U.S. defense.
Just Wednesday, Lockheed confirmed a Reuters report that it was exploring a maintenance facility in Europe for Patriot missiles in partnership with Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden, saying in a press release that the new facility would "strengthen NATO's integrated air and missile defense readiness by providing in-region maintenance and sustainment capabilities that help keep PAC-3 missiles ready, reliable and rapidly deployable."
Building capacity could take years
The road to production, however, is long. In 2024, Germany began the process of developing the less-advanced variant of the Patriot -- the PAC-2 GEM-T interceptors -- but production isn't expected until 2027, the European manufacturer said.
Though Ukraine might be able to move faster, building up capacity would still take years. Trump said on Wednesday that he had not yet notified manufacturers of the decision to grant a license for Ukraine.
"The White House likes grand gestures, and this would qualify as a grand gesture," said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic & International Studies. "It sounds like missiles are going to start coming out of the factory in a couple of months, but that's not going to happen."
Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. Olha Stefanishyna expressed optimism after the meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy, saying Ukraine welcomed the White House's "readiness to cooperate on Patriot missile capabilities" and has "always wanted the US to be our main partner in this." However, she clarified that no firm commitments had been made.
"We look forward to turning these positive signals into concrete decisions," Stefanishyna wrote in a statement.
Expert: Urgency to supply Patriots could decrease
Some experts went further, saying the license might actually hurt Ukraine by letting the U.S. off the hook for providing Patriot missiles in the short term.
Jennifer Kavanagh, a military analyst at the national security and foreign policy think tank Defense Priorities, said the licensing arrangement might seem like a win-win for the U.S. and Ukraine but is, in fact, a "lose-lose."
"If the solution to Ukraine's air defense problem is that we're going to give them licenses, it suggests that the urgency of actually getting them Patriot missiles could go down -- it could end up being a net negative for Ukraine's near-term security," Kavanagh said.
Trump hinted at as much on Wednesday when asked if the U.S. would supply Patriot missiles to Ukraine while it builds out its own capacity.
"We have Patriots, but we don't have that many. We need them for ourselves, too," Trump said.
Zelenskyy told reporters on Thursday that Ukraine expects to receive missiles for Patriot systems from the U.S. and some European partners soon.
"In the coming days, we will receive a package from the United States of America, and I also had separate agreements with the Europeans. There are no dates there yet, but there will be additional PAC-3s," he said.
Limited production capacity
The topline number of Patriot missiles -- sophisticated devices with a number of subcomponents -- is also capped by limited production capacity down the supply chain.
"Unless Ukraine is building all the components themselves, then it's going to have to get those from the United States, which means that those components won't be available for production in the United States," Cancian said.
Kavanagh said more challenges await Ukraine down the road, too. In order to produce the Patriot technology, Ukrainian facilities would have to meet U.S. security requirements. Though Kavanagh said the president can waive that review process, doing so would expose sensitive technology to Russian intelligence.
"There's serious risks of turning over this type of technology to Ukraine, in the sense that it will be, in my view, highly likely that that means that Russia will then eventually have access to the tactical specifications of Patriot missiles, which would obviously put U.S. forces at risk," Kavanagh said.
If Ukraine did get the license and start producing Patriot missiles, those facilities would immediately be targeted by Russia -- and Ukraine may then need more interceptors in order to protect the development sites.
"A top priority for Russia would be to find those facilities and destroy them, and that's going to be one more thing that Ukraine will have to protect -- which, ironically, will increase their requirement for air missile-defense-capacity capability," Bowman said.
Practical realities aside, scholars called the licensing proposal as a signal of increased buy-in from the White House, whose support for Ukraine has shifted repeatedly.
Franz-Stefan Gady at the Center for a New American Security, a bipartisan policy organization, wrote in a statement that the promise was "welcome" and "signals durable US commitment to Ukraine."
"Even if this is just a grand gesture that never produces anything, as an indicator of a much more open relationship, a more helpful relationship with Ukraine, that's really important," Cancian added.
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