Stockpiles and production: Analysis of the US exquisite interceptor supply

The DOD announced an engineering agreement with Lockheed to increase production of some of these interceptors, and Trump met with defense executives on Friday. Afterwards, he went on Truth Social, and he also said that they were going to quadruple production of what he referred to as exquisite class weaponry

But even with an uptick in production for interceptors and munitions, how long would it take to replenish our stockpile

Going back to the interceptor question, would that be able to be produced at the scale and pace of war

So a couple of things on this announcement. I would just say that the president's announcement on that Friday, at least from what I can tell right now

it sounds like it's mostly agreements that have already been made by the administration in the months preceding the Iran war

It's not clear if there are additional components to that, additional agreements

And the other thing I would also just note is that they're basically framework agreements that the parties have agreed in principle, say, to the price that's going to be paid

But they're not actual contracts and there has to be funding for those contracts

So it's important to recognize that these are agreements. We're not even at the contract stage

I would also just note that we really want to ramp up production

I think the last four years, there's been a lot of talk in Washington, D.C. about the need to ramp this up

particularly things like Patriot interceptors, you know, that Ukraine is also relied on

And one of the challenges we found, though, is that you just can't really turn the on button on, you know, overnight

You can give a flick it and you know the factories just start making it And it in part because there a number of bottlenecks in the process You know one is that we rely on rare earths materials from China and they do a lot of

the processing. So that can be a bottleneck. There's also oxidants that are used that only

a couple of factories in the US make. And so that can limit the supply. And then there's all these

like subcomponents, you know, in a missile or an interceptor. You know, when you purchase it from a

company, they don't necessarily make every single component in it. And so sometimes we, you know

we discover along the way that there's a particular component that is in short supply and that

subcontractor is not able to really boost their supply of that critical component. And then that

slows down the whole process. And then finally, there's the workforce issue. You know, things like

Patriot interceptors, stat interceptors, these are sophisticated pieces of technology. And so they

require a skilled workforce that's been taught and has the experience assembling these. And so

it takes time to find people to do that and to train them. So Ukraine has dealt with drone warfare

over the last few years. They have interceptor drones that they've utilized. Has the U.S. learned

lessons from Ukraine? Was the U.S. prepared for the current state of drone warfare, what we're

seeing right now? And if they weren't, why weren't they? Yes. I mean, in my mind, this is sort of one

of the more troubling revelations from the war, as the degree to which it appears anyway

that the United States was not prepared for this Shahed threat. Ukraine has been dealing with the Shahed drones and the Russian variant of it for four years now

And because of the number they dealing with they had to develop lower cost alternatives ways of intercepting them And one of those ways is they been really leading on interceptor drones

So these are drones that its sole purpose is essentially to fly in to the Shahed drone and destroy it

What's clear is that we don't really have these. You know, we've tested them

You know, we've procured them maybe in small numbers. But what's clear is that they're not available at scale to protect U.S. forces

And it's sort of startling to think that you can have watched the Ukraine war and not have had a real urgency around the need to protect the U.S. forces from these kinds of one-way attack drones

But the reality is we just haven't scaled up and made the right kinds of investments

And going to investments, is the current administration doing enough to invest in drone production and ways to combat drone warfare

Did previous administrations do a good enough job? Yeah. So, you know, I think the current administration, Trump administration deserves some real credit here

As soon as it came into office, it really has prioritized, you know, drone warfare, broadly defined

It's also really prioritized this issue around munitions and stockpiles. This has been a priority for the administration

Hexeth early on released this memorandum talking about the Army needing to lead in establishing

air littoral dominance and drones. And so there has been some really smart moves they've made trying to reduce regulations

and regulatory barriers so that the companies can move forward and we can move faster in this area The challenge though is that you know it still taking time I mean they making smart decisions today that

will pay off in the years to come. The problem, though, is right now the war in the Middle East

is happening. And so we're not ready in this moment, even though they've made, you know

in the last year, some really smart decisions. The payoff's not there yet. Right. Arab countries, they're on the front lines of defending against Iran. They've been

attacked a lot. Why is that? Yes. So I think what we can see is there is a clear Iranian strategy

here. You know, if you look at the math in terms of the number of, you know, missile and drone

strikes on Israel, a combatant in the war, a direct combatant versus the number that's been

they've, you know, devoted to striking Gulf states, the number is much higher for the Gulf

states than even Israel. There are a couple of things. One is simply geography. The Gulf states

are closer, they're easier to strike, particularly for some of its shorter range ballistic missiles

So that's some of it. But I think it's actually more a strategy calculation and that the Gulf

states did not want to be participants in this war. They tried to, you know, lobby against it

with the administration. And I think they see the Gulf states as the potential weak point

in the coalition and that if they can convince the Gulf states this is too costly, that there

a real cost to hosting American forces on your soil, they can use that to really put pressure

on Washington to end the war. And so we see them really targeting these Gulf states as a result

Well, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you so much for having me