Boeing’s BSU-111/B Payload Delivery Unit is a wing-and-turbojet engine kit that converts a 500-pound Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) into a long-range JDAM (JDAM LR) dubbed the GBU-75. The result is a gravity bomb with the reach of a cruise missile.

Boeing said it has spent nearly $100 million of its own money on the program.

“Scaling production of the GBU-75 will provide the fleet with an affordable, sustainable solution designed to eliminate long-range land and sea-based threats to U.S. and international forces,” said Bob Ciesla, vice president of Boeing Precision Engagement Systems.

The BSU-111/B wing-and-engine kit is the latest modification to the JDAM family, which has previously seen the gravity bomb receive a tail kit that steered it roughly 15 nautical miles and a wing kit that further stretched that distance to 40.

The Kratos-designed TDI-J85 engine pushes that past 300.

The JDAM LR’s capabilities go beyond land strikes. The QuickStrike Long Range mining variant pairs it with a bomb carrying a ship-tracking sensor. Boeing has shown concepts loading large numbers onto Air Force bombers, though no Air Force buy has been announced.

The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, buys JDAM for both the Air Force and U.S. Navy. The first GBU-75s are bound for the Navy.

The Navy demonstrated the weapon back in April, when Super Hornets released two JDAM LRs over the Point Mugu Sea Range off California.

The April 1 round separated cleanly, fired up its engine and flew 34 minutes before landing within meters of its target. The April 3 round added altitude changes and maneuvering. Each covered roughly 200 nautical miles.

When announcing those tests in April, Capt. Sarah Abbott, the Navy’s Precision Strike Weapons program manager, emphasized the need to give the fleet’s JDAMs greater standoff range.

“As Naval Air Forces in theater continue to rely heavily on JDAM systems, the program recognizes a critical need to provide the fleet with greater standoff range,” she said. “This new capability allows pilots to engage targets from significantly safer distances, maintaining a tactical advantage in contested environments.”

Reusing existing infrastructure is a key aspect of the program’s appeal.

Navy budget documents describe JDAM LR as a modification to the baseline program, built on the existing production line and guidance hardware. Any jet that can drop a conventional JDAM can carry the new variant without modification, according to Boeing’s release.

The award, which had not appeared in the Pentagon’s daily contract announcements as of Aug. 5, is an undefinitized action, meaning Boeing began work before the two sides agreed on a price. The Government Accountability Office has long called these contracts risky because contractors are reimbursed for allowable costs, regardless.

Boeing’s release did not say how many GBU-75s the contract buys, how much they cost or when deliveries begin.

The warning envisaged attacks on the energy facilities, oil fields, refineries, electricity grids, water infrastructure, transport networks and other strategic assets of Washington’s closest Arab allies, according to a senior Iranian official.

The message, part of a broader Iranian effort to deter further U.S. military action by raising the prospect of severe economic disruption across the Gulf, was delivered through a flurry of high-level diplomatic contacts after Trump threatened on July 28 to strike Iran’s energy network and infrastructure, the sources said.

Two senior Iranian officials, two Gulf sources and a senior regional diplomat with knowledge of the discussions said Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi spoke with his Saudi, Turkish and Qatari counterparts, as well as Pakistan’s army chief. All spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Araqchi urged Washington’s Gulf allies to use their influence with Trump to dissuade him from launching renewed strikes, the senior diplomat said, warning that any attack on Iran would prompt retaliation against U.S. assets and critical infrastructure across the Gulf.

His message was consistent in every conversation, the diplomat said: “We’re ready to retaliate, but finding a diplomatic solution is the best way to avoid wider escalation and destruction across the region.”

“The Iranian warning was unequivocal: if America targeted Iran’s infrastructure, they would retaliate by striking Gulf energy facilities and other regional targets,” one Gulf source said.

The diplomatic campaign underscores how Iran is seeking to turn Gulf vulnerability into leverage, confronting regional governments with the prospect that any renewed U.S.-Iran confrontation could place the infrastructure underpinning their economies directly in the firing line.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman subsequently spoke with Trump, urging him to delay military action, return to negotiations, secure a ceasefire and pursue a diplomatic settlement, the senior diplomat and Gulf sources said.

The warning was intended for every Gulf state, another Gulf source said, but was conveyed primarily through Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In recent years, Iran has repaired ties with its Gulf neighbours, including its former regional rival, Saudi Arabia.

Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia have all urged Washington to resume talks with Tehran and avert renewed conflict amid Iranian warnings that another round of U.S. strikes could “turn the region into a fireball,” the second Iranian official said.

On Aug. 2, Trump said he agreed to cancel the attack on Iran “subject to being able to rapidly make a deal”.

THREATS OF WIDER REGIONAL ESCALATION

“Saudi Arabia believes further escalation will only bring more destruction,” the first Gulf source said. “That is why it urged Trump to give diplomacy a chance.”

While urging Washington to pursue diplomacy, Riyadh also made clear it would defend itself if threatened. The second Gulf source said Saudi Arabia warned that any attack on its territory would be met with a military response.

Ali Shihabi, a Saudi analyst close to the Royal Court, said the kingdom’s assessment is that further escalation is unlikely to achieve the desired result.

“The Kingdom believes a combination of proportionate military responses and sustained pressure on Iran in the Strait of Hormuz offers the strongest path toward a practical diplomatic settlement,” Shihabi said.

Iran’s clerical leadership has repeatedly demanded the closure of U.S. military bases in the Gulf and called on Gulf Arab states to stop sharing intelligence with Washington, which Tehran believes has been used to facilitate attacks against it.

“They still remember Saudi Arabia’s Aramco,” he added, referring to the September 2019 drone and missile attacks on the Abqaiq and Khurais facilities that temporarily knocked out more than half the kingdom’s crude oil production and exposed the vulnerability of Gulf energy infrastructure.

“The enemy continues to threaten Iranian infrastructure. If Iran suffers damage, it will inflict far greater damage in return,” added the Iranian official who cited the target list including power grids and refineries.

From Tehran’s perspective, Trump now faces two unpalatable choices, the senior Iranian official said: escalate a conflict that could engulf the Gulf and disrupt global energy supplies, or accept a negotiated outcome that falls short of the decisive victory Washington seeks.

One of the principal obstacles to an agreement, the senior regional diplomat said, is Washington’s reluctance to allow Tehran to emerge claiming victory.

“The United States wants something it can present as proof that it won the war,” the diplomat said.

The missiles are principally the Army’s surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). The U.S. has used “virtually all” of these weapons, according to two of the sources.

The degree to which the military is running out of ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles has not been previously reported.

The long-range munitions are an important part of the military’s arsenal, allowing accurate strikes from a safe distance. U.S.-supplied ATACMS have played a key role in the war in Ukraine, allowing Ukrainian forces to attack targets inside Russia. The PrSM is a newer, more advanced generation that will replace the ATACMS, which have a shorter range.

Analysts say such weapons — which cost over $1 million each — would also be important in any conflict with China.

The sources declined to say how many of each munition the U.S. had left.

President Donald Trump launched the Iran war jointly with Israel in February, predicting that the conflict would last a short time.

But as the war drags on, the three people familiar with the matter expressed worry that the falling missile supplies could limit the U.S. ability to deter adversaries, including Russia and China.

A fourth person familiar with the matter said that while Central Command — which oversees U.S. forces in the Middle East — has nearly used up the land-based missiles it had before the war began, it has been able to reload from U.S. military supplies elsewhere in the world.

The sources interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Asked for comment on the stockpile data, the White House issued a statement from Trump, saying the U.S. had “far more munitions than anyone in the world” and “far more than we need.”

“Our defense companies are, at this moment, making more munitions than they have ever made before, in addition to expanding their plants and equipment at record levels,” Trump said.

Analysts agree that certain munitions, including artillery shells and several types of missiles, are being produced at record levels but caution that supplies might far short of what is needed for a prolonged war.

Lockheed Martin, which makes the ATACMs and PrSMs, along with the anti-ballistic missile THAAD system, did not immediately respond to questions about Trump’s statements or about supply levels.

Raytheon, which makes Tomahawk missiles and Patriot interceptors, two important U.S. weapons, also did not immediately respond.

Responding to a request for comment, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said: “America’s military is the most powerful in the world and has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the President’s choosing. We have executed multiple successful operations across combatant commands while ensuring the U.S. military possesses a deep arsenal of capabilities to protect our people and our interests.”

The supply figures have circulated inside the federal government over the last week during tense conversations inside the Trump administration about how much longer the U.S. can continue striking Iran without drawing down the stockpile to levels that would limit the military’s ability to respond to crises elsewhere.

WARNINGS OVER WEAPONS SUPPLIES

One of the sources said the drawdown of the ATACMS and PrSM stockpiles reflected a decision by the Trump administration to avoid riskier ways of attacking Iranian targets, such as by using piloted aircraft to drop bombs.

Because these weapons allow the military to attack targets from a distance, analysts say they would be valuable in a war against an adversary with strong air defenses, such as China.

They have been used to strike targets inside Iran, according to a March report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

According to the report, PrSM stockpiles were low to start with, since it is a relatively new munition, but the U.S. military has ordered a large number of them for 2027. The Army has said that ATACMS are being phased out and that production is shifting to the newer PrSM missiles.

Military leaders have for weeks warned the president that stockpiles of defensive weapons — including Patriot interceptors, which are effective against ballistic missiles — were dwindling, said two of the sources.

Last week, several media outlets reported Trump had decided not to launch another massive offensive inside Iran in part because his military advisers had warned about the U.S. stockpile.

A U.S. official disputed those accounts, saying Trump chose not to move forward with another attack because of pressure from Gulf states.

The Middle East conflict has sparked intense debate about Trump’s authority to prosecute hostilities against Iran without congressional authorization. No request for a declaration of war or an authorization to use military force has been submitted to Congress.

DEFENSIVE WEAPON STOCKS ARE ALSO DIMINISHED

Last week, CSIS published a report estimating that between February and July about 65% of Patriot interceptors had been expended and that the number of THAAD ballistic missile interceptors in U.S. stockpiles was at least 38% lower than at the start of the war.

Patriots and THAADs are systems that detect and destroy incoming missiles and are among the most effective in the country’s arsenal.

While Reuters has not seen the supply figures, those numbers match internal U.S. data, two of the sources said.

The U.S. also burned through a little less than half of its global supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles, which are generally launched from ships, since the start of the war, one of the sources said.

Reuters could not independently verify that number.

The Tomahawk is a Navy weapon, launched from destroyers, cruisers and submarines, and has long served as the sea service’s principal means of striking heavily defended targets without risking pilots.

Raytheon, a unit of RTX, has reached a tentative multi-year agreement with the Pentagon aimed at boosting Tomahawk production, alongside increases in other munitions, as Washington races to rebuild stockpiles.

The agreements come as demand for Patriot and THAAD interceptors has increased following conflicts in Iran and Ukraine that strained U.S. missile inventories. They also come days after a Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis estimated the United States had depleted roughly two-thirds of its pre-war Patriot interceptor inventory during the conflict with Iran.

Defense officials said the agreements are intended to support the department’s long-term procurement objective of nearly 14,000 Patriot and THAAD interceptors by providing sustained demand signals to critical suppliers throughout the defense industrial base. The initiative is designed to triple production capacity for Patriot Advanced Capability-3, or PAC-3, Missile Segment Enhancement interceptors and quadruple production capacity for THAAD interceptors.

DoD said it will work directly with key component suppliers instead of relying solely on prime contractors, encouraging investment in advanced tooling, facility modernization and workforce development needed to sustain higher production rates.

“Building the Arsenal of Freedom requires robust, dynamic supply chains at every level of the industrial base,” Michael P. Duffey, under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said in a statement. “Framework agreements with munition components suppliers like Northrop Grumman are vital to accelerating the tripling of PAC-3 and quadrupling of THAAD interceptor production.”

The agreements establish a second source for Patriot solid rocket motors, expand production of ignition safety devices for PAC-3 interceptors and increase manufacturing capacity for key THAAD structural components, including mid-body shells, muzzle covers and rail car assemblies.

The initiative is part of the Defense Department’s Acquisition Transformation Strategy and was developed in coordination with the Missile Defense Agency, the Munitions Acceleration Council and the Economic Defense Unit to strengthen the resilience of the missile production supply chain.

The poll, conducted Friday through Sunday, also showed the Republican president’s approval rating ticking higher to 37%, up 3 points from last month when his rating tied the lowest of his presidency.

Trump has offered shifting objectives for the conflict such as aiding Iranians to topple their leaders, taking out Iran’s ballistic-missile capabilities and preventing it from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The poll found that 69% of Americans — including four in 10 Republicans — think Trump has not “clearly explained the goals of U.S. military involvement in Iran.”

White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales said Trump will not make decisions based on “fluid opinion polls” and reiterated the president’s resolve to prevent Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon.

“What matters most to the American people is having a commander in chief who takes bold action to keep them safe,” Wales said.

Approval of the conflict has been below 40% since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on February 28 — a stark contrast to the opening months of other recent conflicts.

While each had different context, the Iraq War from 2003 to 2011 had the support of about 70% of Americans in its early months. During the early days of the Afghanistan War, which lasted from 2001 to 2021, about 90% of the country backed the war, according to polling by Gallup.

‘No idea’ why US at war

Public disapproval of the war is weighing on Trump and his Republican Party ahead of the November midterm elections when the president’s allies will defend slim majorities in the U.S. Congress.

“It’s not clear why we started a war with them. I have no idea,” said Alex Womack, a retired turbine repair specialist from Stockbridge, Georgia, who became a Republican in part because he liked how Republican President George H.W. Bush handled the Gulf War in 1991.

Womack, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps during that conflict, said his support for Trump has ebbed because of the war. “I don’t think he’s doing very well, personally,” he said.

To date, 18 American soldiers have died in the conflict while thousands have died in Iran and in Lebanon, where Iran-allied fighters have battled Israeli forces.

The war has pushed gasoline prices sharply higher, a blow to the finances of many Americans. Gasoline prices are averaging just over $4 a gallon nationwide, up from about $3 a gallon just before the war started on February 28.

“This puts pressure on the party in a myriad of ways, all of them bad,” said Alex Conant, a Republican political strategist and a White House spokesman during the presidency of George W. Bush. “The White House officials have been saying since January that they need to win economic arguments. It’s hard to win the economic arguments when you’re clearly focused on foreign policy.”

Independent registered voters in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll said they were favoring the Democratic congressional candidate over the Republican by 36% to 20%. Independent voters also favored Democrats over Republicans on economic policy, the poll found.

Trump vowed to stay out of wars

In campaigning for the 2024 presidential election, Trump said he would keep the U.S. out of enduring conflicts. He initially estimated the Iran war would last four to five weeks. He has bristled over comparisons to other wars, including the Vietnam War, which lasted two decades and claimed the lives of more than 58,000 U.S. soldiers.

Rhyan Anderson, an independent from Fairburn, Georgia, who voted for Trump in 2024, said he thinks Trump should focus on domestic problems rather than on helping Israel or other allies.

“My biggest thing is just focus on the people who are actually in the country,” said Anderson, who works two jobs in security and data collection and said he voted for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. “I know we have allies and things like that, but there’s a lot of people here that really need help.”

Since mid-March, the Reuters/Ipsos survey has asked respondents whether they support or oppose military strikes on Iran. At that time, 37% said they supported the war.

That compared to 27% approval on the day the war began, when the Reuters/Ipsos survey also gave respondents the option to choose unsure, which 29% did.

The latest Reuters/Ipsos survey, which was conducted online and nationwide, gathered responses from 1,246 U.S. adults and had a margin of error of 3 percentage points in either direction.

The previously unreported findings offer a rare glimpse into how military and security-linked institutions in China are leveraging cutting-edge U.S. AI models as a shortcut to developing specialised systems of their own, despite Washington’s efforts to restrict Beijing’s access to advanced chips and other strategic technologies.

The documents show widespread use of a technique known as “model distillation,” in which outputs from a powerful AI system are used to train smaller, specialised models that can be deployed locally without the enormous computing requirements needed to build frontier AI systems from scratch.

Reuters’ review, which included research compiled by the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation and shared exclusively with the news agency, showed distillation is widely used by researchers linked to the People’s Liberation Army and other military institutions.

The papers suggest Chinese defense institutions see leading U.S. AI models as both a source of technical insight and a way to close the gap with American rivals.

The dispute centres on unauthorised extraction, not distillation itself, a widely used industry practice.

The issue has emerged as a major flashpoint ahead of U.S.-China talks on AI governance and safety. U.S. officials have accused some Chinese entities of using distillation to extract capabilities from American AI models, potentially undermining export controls and infringing intellectual property rights.

China has rejected the accusations, saying Washington is pursuing AI “hegemonism” while arguing that U.S. firms have engaged in similar practices.

Chinese developers have also disputed claims that their AI advances rely on foreign models. AI startup Moonshot last week denied allegations by the Trump administration that its Kimi K3 model was built using distillation, saying it was driven by proprietary innovations.

Sunny Cheung, a Jamestown fellow who analysed over 60 of the papers, said Chinese military scientists are systematically capturing the reasoning steps of Western models to adapt them for surveillance, cyber warfare and tactical decision-making.

“Teaching a model the right answer is one thing but teaching it the reasoning behind the answer is much harder,” said Cheung.

“These papers show Chinese military-linked researchers are trying to transfer that expensive, proprietary reasoning from Western models into smaller systems they can control and deploy locally.”

Reuters verified the academic literature and identified an additional two dozen military-linked case studies.

One paper published last year by researchers in PLA Unit 96941, a military intelligence and cyber-warfare unit in Beijing, described using OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 to process sensitive military source code.

The researchers said third-party models were unsuitable for handling classified information. To overcome that limitation, they used GPT-3.5 to summarize software code and trained a domestic model on those summaries to run entirely within Chinese military networks.

The White House, Pentagon, China’s foreign ministry, the PLA and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.

WIDE USE, FROM MONITORING TO MILITARY

Chinese researchers have used distillation for purposes ranging from content monitoring to military deployment, Reuters’ and Jamestown’s review of the papers showed.

At the North University of China, which has close links to the country’s weapons industry, researchers used Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku to generate synthetic training data for a text classification model for social media monitoring and content moderation.

Anthropic said it does not provide commercial access to Claude in China or to Beijing-controlled firms and uses monitoring systems to detect policy violations.

The company added that distilled models may lose the original systems’ safety safeguards, potentially allowing sensitive capabilities to be transferred to models beyond its control.

A 2024 paper from the PLA’s National University of Defense Technology described using distillation to shrink an image-processing model for deployment on unmanned aerial vehicles, allowing drones to analyse live video and support navigation and targeting decisions in real time even when communications are cut.

Similarly, researchers at China’s Academy of Military Sciences used distillation to run a target-recognition model on tactical hardware during simulated maritime operations involving drones, ships and unmanned submarines, a study published earlier this year showed.

BENEFITS AND LIMITS

China has embraced distillation as it seeks to compete with the U.S. in frontier AI while facing constraints on advanced computing resources due to Washington’s export controls on high-end chips.

Central and local governments have promoted “model lightweighting” and edge computing, directing subsidies and research funding toward technologies that enable AI models to run on drones, satellites and other devices with limited processing power.

Experts caution, however, that distillation has significant limitations.

As Chinese AI models close the gap with their U.S. counterparts, military researchers are also examining distillation as a potential security risk.

In January, researchers at the Army Engineering University published a paper on the threat of “data-free distillation,” a method of reverse-engineering a model’s capabilities without direct access to its core parameters.

To counter that vulnerability, they proposed defense mechanisms designed to mask the hidden logical information exposed in a model’s public outputs.

Distilled models also inherit only selected capabilities and cannot fully replicate the broad intelligence of frontier systems.

Trevor Koverko, co-founder of AI data company Sapien, said distilled models remain less capable than their teacher models.

“It is best understood as transferring selected capabilities into a cheaper, locally controlled system, not achieving independence from frontier AI.”

After decades of relying on the U.S.-made Patriot interceptor system and its hit-to-kill PAC-3 munition as the most proven air defense against ballistic missiles, three new tracks are now leveraging international cooperation and a dire global need to develop and manufacture cheaper interceptor platforms.

Some officials, meanwhile, are hoping the sense of urgency leads to the fielding of the first new prototypes by the end of 2026 — years faster than today’s Patriots can be made.

It’s an ambitious ask.

The missile defense world has long described the mechanics behind anti-ballistic defense as akin to hitting a bullet out of the sky with another bullet, multiplied in difficulty by the number of simultaneous air threats coming in — a stark reminder of the mass air raids seen today in Iran and Ukraine that stretch air defenses to the breaking point.

Today’s anti-ballistic momentum began with U.S. President Donald Trump’s seemingly off-the-cuff comment at the NATO summit in Ankara earlier this month, when he pledged to grant Ukraine permission to produce Patriot missiles for the first time.

“We’re going to give a license to you to make Patriots. That’s pretty cool. This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving ‘em enough,” Trump said, adding that the companies that make the system’s components, primarily Lockheed Martin, had not yet been consulted on the plan.

Five days later, Ukraine and nine European countries launched a coalition in Paris to field Freyja, an entirely new anti-ballistic system centered on a Ukrainian interceptor priced at roughly one-fifth of a Patriot round.

A week after that, Lockheed Martin unveiled a cheaper, faster-to-produce Patriot missile of its own. And on Wednesday, the company announced the Pentagon had awarded it another $53.86 billion for PAC-3 production, bringing its multiyear deal up to $58.62 billion and aiming to triple production capacity by the end of 2030.

The new anti-ballistics arms race has manifested largely as a result of the munitions shortage created by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, during which American forces have fired at least 1,060 to 1,430 Patriots at roughly $3.9 million apiece, draining an estimated two-thirds of America’s pre-war Patriot inventory, according to a new analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The diminished stockpile is compounded by the ongoing war in Ukraine, where ballistic missiles are the only threat Kyiv still needs help taking down and the one munition it has completely run out of.

With three new anti-ballistic tracks opened in July alone, NATO and its allies are aiming to shore up air defenses as quickly as possible.

Here is where the primary Patriot interceptor stands, and how the three new alternative pathways in the arms race stack up.

The standard: The Patriot interceptor

The Patriot, the U.S.-made gold standard of ground-based air defense, pairs a radar, a command post and launchers with two families of interceptor missiles, each fielded in several variants.

Lockheed Martin builds the PAC-3 MSE, the hit-to-kill round that rams ballistic missiles out of the sky, while Raytheon, which also makes the Patriot’s radars and ground systems, builds the older PAC-2 GEM-T, a round that explodes near its target and works best against aircraft and cruise missiles.

The MSE is the only Western munition that has reliably killed Russian ballistic missiles — from Iskanders to modified S-300s — in Ukrainian service. It has even downed the air-launched Kinzhal, which flies at hypersonic speeds.

That record is why the Pentagon on Wednesday awarded Lockheed a multiyear deal now worth up to $58.62 billion to triple production capacity by the end of 2030. Today, each round costs roughly $3.9 million.

“This is a once-in-a-generation moment, and we are moving with wartime urgency to deliver the Arsenal of Freedom,” Lockheed chairman and CEO Jim Taiclet said in a statement.

The grant: Ukrainian PAC-3s under US license

Trump’s pledge in Turkey would make Ukraine only the second country outside the U.S. licensed to build Patriot missiles, after Japan, which has produced them under license for decades.

Germany, the Netherlands and Spain are only now standing up a joint production line. Berlin is negotiating a license of its own and Germany’s existing GEM-T work runs through a joint venture with Raytheon rather than a national license, according to The Associated Press.

The license under discussion for Kyiv would likely cover the missiles — rather than complete batteries — and could mean final assembly from imported component kits instead of production from scratch, the AP reported.

Poland has offered to host the joint production on its territory for safety and security reasons, according to Polish news agency PAP.

“It is about securing this production, so that this production takes place in a safe location,” Polish Deputy Defense Minister Magdalena Sobkowiak-Czarnecka said in Washington on July 23.

Zelenskyy said he met with Lockheed Martin representatives while visiting the U.S. for Sen. Lindsey Graham’s funeral on July 28, posting on Telegram that “Our teams are already working on specific solutions to move to joint production as soon as possible.”

The cost of the licensed PAC-3, meanwhile, would stay the same at close $4 million per round.

Yehor Chernev, deputy chairman of the Rada’s committee on national security, defense and intelligence, estimates Ukraine needs at least 18 to 24 months to launch a first pilot production line, “followed by more time to complete the first weapons,” per The Associated Press.

Zelenskyy is pushing for even faster joint production.

“We expect that by the end of 2026, our Ukrainian team will have the technical capability to produce U.S. missiles,” he said on July 15.

The analogue: Freyja

Freyja is a full Patriot-style anti-ballistic system that includes an interceptor, launcher, radar and command-and-control network.

The system, designed by Kyiv startup Fire Point, is built around its FP-7.X interceptor missile and various capabilities supplied by European partners.

Zelenskyy called Freyja “an analogue of Patriot, but a system for more mass production and a cheaper system.”

His comments came as he formally launched the Integrated Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition in Paris on July 13 alongside nine other countries, including Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

The FP-7.X flew for the first time in early June and is built to kill ballistic targets at roughly 15 miles up using a high-explosive fragmentation warhead rather than the PAC-3’s hit-to-kill collision — which may come in later versions — at a target price of approximately $700,000 per interceptor, or roughly one-fifth the price of a PAC-3.

The company says it will build three interceptors a day starting in August. Zelenskyy wants the system up and running within 12 months, and the coalition is targeting its first real ballistic intercept for the end of 2027.

“We have an ambitious goal: to have an MVP ready by the first half of next year,” Davyd Aloian, deputy secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told Reuters on July 27. “That is a prototype that can already demonstrate its first practical results.”

The Lockheed cost-cutter: PAC-3 ACE

Lockheed unveiled the PAC-3 Adapted Capability Effector, or ACE, at the Farnborough International Airshow on July 20.

Built on the PAC-3’s fire-control system and fully linked to the Patriot and the Integrated Battle Command System that allied air defenders already run, it is designed to counter airbreathing threats — meaning weapons that rely on oxygen for propulsion — along with cruise missiles and close- and short-range ballistic missiles, a tier below the high-end targets the MSE was built to counter.

“American and allied warfighters need a solution that is battle-tested and budget-smart, and PAC-3 ACE delivers exactly that by building on the unrivaled performance of the PAC-3 MSE,” Tim Cahill, president of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, said in the announcement.

Lockheed says it will develop and produce the round jointly with American and European industry partners.

International manufacturing is also under consideration, with the munition’s first flight expected in early 2028.

The company advertises ACE at less than half the price of an MSE, or roughly $2 million a round, without disclosing an exact figure.

The U.S. has supplied large quantities of ‌weapons to allies while also using munitions in its own military operations in Iran, raising concerns about inventories of key air defense and precision-guided weapons.

The Lockheed award converts a previous one-year deal worth $4.7 billion awarded in April into a seven-year draft agreement, creating a multiyear procurement plan for the interceptors from fiscal 2026 through 2032, the Army said.

Pentagon negotiators ​are pressing contractors to move much faster, with tentative production agreements struck earlier this year at the center of efforts to increase missile output. The administration of President Donald Trump has also steadily increased pressure on defense contractors to prioritize production over shareholder payouts. Trump signed an executive order in January to identify contractors deemed to be underperforming on government contracts while continuing to distribute profits to shareholders.

Industry executives have welcomed the production agreements, but said Congress must first appropriate funding before companies can invest more heavily in components and production capacity.

Exact terms and delivery dates for many Pentagon munitions deals are still under negotiation.

A similar framework deal had been struck with Raytheon’s parent company RTX to boost production of Tomahawk cruise missiles from the current rate of about 60 per year for the U.S. to eventually 1,000 units annually.

Lockheed, a Bethesda, Maryland-based defense contractor, said the funding would allow it to follow through on a promise to triple PAC-3 MSE production capacity by the end of 2030 and increase jobs at its Camden, Arkansas, plant by 50%, to about 1,850 from 1,200. Lockheed previously announced Patriot PAC-3 missile interceptor production would go to 2,000 units annually.

Lockheed Martin said it is investing $8 billion to $9 billion through 2030 to modernize more than 20 U.S. facilities, including new munitions centers in Alabama and Arkansas.

PAC-3 MSE is a hit-to-kill interceptor used within the Patriot air defense system to counter ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and aircraft.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, estimated this week that the U.S. military has fewer than 1,000 Patriot interceptors on hand and fewer than 250 THAAD interceptors — two key air defense systems. Both have seen recent heavy use in the Middle East.

The House’s version of this provision, known as Section 219, proposes further integration between the U.S. defense industrial base and Israel’s. It comes amid a dramatic shift in U.S. public opinion about military aid to Israel.

Both the House and Senate versions of the provision would shift the model of security cooperation the U.S. and Israel now employ.

Though there is already co-production between the two countries on weapons systems, those efforts historically have been limited to defensive systems like the Iron Dome. The House version creates an executive agent position within the Pentagon who would seek out and advocate for co-production opportunities.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., tried unsuccessfully to pass an amendment striking the measure when the bill was being debated in committee last month. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., has also been a vocal opponent.

Proponents of the measure, including House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers, R-Ala., have argued it “actually improves oversight and accountability of these programs by designating a single official responsible for them.”

Elias Yousif, fellow and acting director of the Conventional Defense Program at the Stimson Center, said the provision could create a situation in which there would be less oversight than traditional foreign military aid, which must be approved by Congress.

“There are all these ways in which co-production’s more ill-defined nature means that it creates opportunities for the executive branch to navigate the regulatory environment more easily,” Yousif said.

John Ramming Chappell, an advisor on legal and policy issues in the Center for Civilians in Conflict’s U.S. program, said he was unsure how the U.S. could benefit from the change.

“Expanding cooperative projects with Israel gives Israel more leverage over the United States and makes it even more difficult to promote accountability in the relationship as US and Israeli government priorities diverge and clash,” Chappell said. “Beyond that, it’s unclear how much the U.S. will actually benefit from cooperative projects, they haven’t historically been subject to meaningful oversight, and they expose the U.S. to potential national security risks.”

Despite passing in the House, the Senate version of the NDAA — including its version of Section 219, titled Section 1217 — could face a tougher battle. Several Democratic senators have said they will not vote on the NDAA until there is debate about the measure.

“The Senate’s bill has stalled, and next steps remain unclear, but it’s likely that Senate and House stakeholders [will] negotiate a compromise bill with the presumption of including some version of this provision,” Chappell said. “While Congressman Smith, ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, has expressed his opposition to the provision, it’s unclear if he’s going to push to remove it in negotiations.”

If the NDAA passes with a measure like the House’s Section 219 or the Senate’s 1217, legislators have some leverage over how exactly it could play out, Yousif said.

They “need to be much more forceful about closing regulatory gaps that the administration has used in the past to circumvent accountability and transparency,” Yousif said. “Whether that means definitional gaps on what constitutes assistance and what doesn’t, or demanding more transparency mechanisms, reporting requirements — I think those are all opportunities and potential levers that lawmakers and others have.”

But this time, the Pentagon is in a hurry. The Iran war has exposed the problem of relying on costly long-range missiles such as the Tomahawk. To remedy that, DoD is putting out a call for long-range, autonomously guided Ground-Based Affordable Mass, or GBAM, weapons that cost less than $250,000 apiece.

The Pentagon also wants the GBAM munitions to be ready for demonstration within three months, and full-scale production within 18 months.

The goal of the GBAM initiative is to supplement expensive smart munitions with “affordable, scalable long-range effects, and “enable commanders to service a broader target set, preserve exquisite munitions for their intended purpose, and sustain operational tempo throughout a prolonged conflict.”

To facilitate that, the Defense Innovation Unit has created the GBAM Challenge. Contestants will pitch ideas in the form of a pitch deck or white paper, with a deadline of Aug. 5.

Winning teams will be invited to a Phase II flight demonstration at a government test site in early November, where they will give a 30-minute presentation — and get a $250,000 cash prize.

The top Phase II contenders may receive up to $5 million “to immediately deliver operational test quantities to units.” They may also be eligible for other funds, including Prototype Other Transaction agreements, follow-on production contracts and Small Business Innovation Research awards.

“In total, the government has budgeted up to $250 million to support prize execution and follow-on transition activities associated with this effort,” DIU pointed out.

However, grabbing that pot of gold will require much work. For starters, the timeline is tight. The Pentagon wants “mature, affordable, long-range precision strike systems that can be demonstrated within 60 to 90 days, certified, and scaled into production within 12 to 18 months.”

DIU doesn’t specify whether GBAM will be a missile or a drone, though it does say GBAM will be “aligned with the Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems (DRPM-UxS) mandate to field low-cost autonomous capabilities at scale.”

Either way, the U.S. military wants a “favorable cost-per-effect at operationally relevant ranges while minimizing the logistical, training, and sustainment burden on employing units.” This means a ground-launched weapon with a range of at least 600 nautical miles, and a minimum payload of 35 pounds while ideally allowing for 100 pounds.

It should have automatic target recognition and autonomous terminal guidance, and be “ideally mission-proven” to function in jamming and GPS-denied environments. This includes “Alternative Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) or redundant navigation capabilities suitable for GPS/GNSS-denied operations in maritime and other ‘feature-poor’ environments.”

DIU is also looking for a weapon that doesn’t require any proprietary launch equipment, with “remote and low-signature launch methods strongly preferred.”

Companies should have an “existing production capacity or credible path to producing 100+ systems monthly.” And with a price tag of “cost-per-effect below $500,000 based on system reliability and mission success rate, with a sub-$250,000 all-up flyaway cost at scale.”

In addition to GBAM, the U.S. military is pursuing other strike weapons that don’t cost as much as traditional missiles, and can be mass produced as needed. They include the Family of Affordable Mass Missiles, or FAMM-BAR, program to launch cruise missiles from cargo planes, as well as the Low-Cost Containerized Missiles hypersonic weapons program.