00:00This week, President Trump said he would allow Ukraine to build its own Patriot interceptors.
00:04Some both President Zelensky and the country at large are desperate for.
00:08But this will not be easy, as Bloomberg notes, a Patriot missile takes years to build,
00:12meaning Ukrainian production of these missiles will not materialize on the near-term timelines they need.
00:17Plus, Ukraine's ability to swiftly produce drones and missiles may not apply to Patriot production,
00:21given strict U.S. technology controls.
00:24All right, here to help us break this all down is Axios' future of defense reporter, Colin Damaris.
00:29Colin, thank you for joining us.
00:31Patriots to Ukraine.
00:32The president says they're going to get them.
00:34It's not really as simple as that, right?
00:36Lockheed Martin holds a license, and as we just referenced, production.
00:39There's several tiers of these missiles.
00:41The top-tier PAC-3 variant is $5 million each, and it's one of the most advanced air defense weapons
00:47in the world.
00:48How realistic is this?
00:50Yeah, well, the announcement definitely caught me off guard when I was scrolling through Twitter and I saw the clip.
00:54I think this will be years in the making.
00:56This is not going to be like an overnight success by any means.
01:00If you look at Germany and Japan, those two guys are also assigned building privileges, and they have a ways
01:07to go as well, especially Germany.
01:09I wonder if you could look at this in the context of the war that continues in the Middle East
01:14and sort of how the stockpile of these Patriot missiles has been depleted or impacted, at the very least, by
01:20what's been happening with Iran.
01:22Yeah, I mean, the Pentagon will tell you the stockpiles are fine.
01:25Everything's Gucci.
01:26Don't worry about it.
01:27But CSIS put out a study the other week saying it might take years to replenish some of these high
01:33-end interceptors that, Christina, you referenced.
01:35We did speak earlier in the show and earlier this week with the Admiral CNO, Navy Admiral Cottle, about this
01:42exact issue.
01:43And he was saying, well, you know, the Navy hasn't had to fire as many of its munitions, and it's
01:48doing okay.
01:48But I asked him about that timeline because there is a production gap.
01:51And if you've depleted about 40% of your stockpile and there's a five-year gap, what do you do
01:56in that intervening time, especially looking at other regions, you know, likely to have a flare-up in the Indo
02:01-Pacific or down in South America again, depending on the president's objectives in the Caribbean?
02:05He said they are making strides to contract that time closer to two to three years, but that's still two
02:10to three years with a stockpile that wasn't where it was.
02:14Is this a national security concern, and is it something that they're able to tackle in that intervening time?
02:19I mean, yeah, I think a lack of interceptors is a national security concern.
02:23I think you will also see Admiral Cottle, the CNO, push really hard on directed energy maybe to fill the
02:29gap or at least in the near future get some laser or microwave weapons out there.
02:34He's very passionate about that.
02:36I think I've written six or seven headlines all saying the same thing, that Admiral Cottle really wants lasers ASAP.
02:42Yeah, we talked about that Trump clash battleship, and I said lasers, and he was like, yeah, lasers, lasers.
02:47That was his training, he said, at the postgraduate school.
02:50It was on lasers.
02:52Colin, I want to just ask you sort of how this would play out in actual fact so we know
02:56who has the ability to build these patriots.
03:00As you tease that out in your head, would a factory be built in Ukraine?
03:04Would it be built in a country nearby?
03:06What have we learned about how this might happen in actual fact were it to?
03:09I think a lot of it's still up in the air.
03:12There's been talks about, obviously, in Europe, building out there.
03:15Do you also have to consider the fact that these factories might get bombed by Russia or something, right?
03:20There's a huge issue here with contested logistics, distributing your supply chain, making sure your factory doesn't get targeted by
03:27a long-range strike.
03:28It certainly won't be near the front line, I would say.
03:30You also wrote an article recently, we've been speaking in other segments, about NATO and all of these systems working
03:36together and what that means for Ukraine.
03:37You talked about Ukraine-UK defense spending, saying more than 50,000 Ukrainian personnel have been trained on British soil
03:43as part of Operation Interflex.
03:45London has committed billions of pounds in security aid to Kiev, plus a UK-Ukraine combo topped the Pentagon's first
03:52drone dominance challenge.
03:54Ukraine is showing we must rethink warfare.
03:56Cheap, mass-produced, precise is now dominant.
03:58We asked you last time you were here, if thinking about these interceptors is the wrong way to do it,
04:04if the U.S. should be focusing more on Ukrainian-style drones and interceptors that way.
04:08Talk to us about that and how real this Ukrainian competitor system Freya is.
04:13What do we know about that system?
04:16Freya also caught me off guard, if I'm being honest.
04:18I saw that on Zelensky's Twitter.
04:21That's definitely kind of a domestic ballistic missile defense conglomerate they're trying to build.
04:26The point about the UK-Ukraine combo, I think, is really interesting because in the UK's defense investment plan that
04:32just came out after a bit of delay, Ukraine's name dropped, I think, like 35 times over 81 pages.
04:38And that spans everything from space connectivity to missile interceptions and that sort of thing.
04:42So they're definitely taking to heart what's being learned over there.
04:45And I do think, obviously, these exquisite missile defenses, overhead defenses can and should coexist with something cheap like that
04:54UK-Ukraine drone dominance combo we saw as the winner of the first competition.
04:59Thank you very much.
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