The potential deal was made possible by the U.S. Department of State’s approval of a Foreign Military Sale to Italy of 5,031 BAE Systems Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) II guidance systems.

The APKWS, which can be inserted between the warhead of an unguided missile and its motor, features four fold-out wings which each carry a laser seeker, turning a missile that costs less than €100,000 ($117,000) into a guided weapon.

The solution would allow the Italian Air Force to avoid firing missiles like the AMRAAM – which costs ten times that – to destroy cheaply produced drones.

“The proposed sale will improve Italy’s capability to meet current and future threats by strengthening its homeland defense and serving as a deterrent to regional threats,” the State Department said.

The FMS approval also covers launchers, warheads and rocket motors, as well as technical support, taking the potential deal to $364 million, the State Department added.

Sources in Italy told Defense News no contract had been signed and the technology was still being evaluated. The likely recipient of the APKWS would be Italy’s Eurofighter jet, which is already guarding Europe’s borders against drone incursions.

This month, an Italian Eurofighter taking part in NATO air policing mission in the Baltics shot down an unidentified drone which flew into Latvian airspace.

In May, the Royal Air Force announced it was already using the system on its Eurofighters after a rapid acquisition which saw testing and deployment completed in two months.

“The Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) gives RAF pilots a highly accurate option to destroy aerial targets and allows them to engage drones at a fraction of the cost of traditional air-to-air missiles,” the RAF said at the time.

The companies signed a letter of intent on Sunday to combine General Cherry’s expertise in small drones and Patria’s unmanned-technology expertise and defense-industry experience, which will allow them to jointly develop unmanned vehicles for Western European defense needs, they said in a statement on Sunday.

The announcement is part of a broader wave of European defense-industrial cooperation with Ukrainian drone makers. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in December announced plans to produce various Ukrainian drones in Germany, while Ukrainian UAV makers including Skyeton and Ukrspecsystems are partnering or investing in the United Kingdom to produce drones there.

“Unmanned defense systems are central to the future of defenses,” said Mikko Leino, Patria’s executive vice president for defense and weapon systems, in the statement. “The partnership with General Cherry further reinforces Patria’s expertise in unmanned defence systems and drone development.”

As part of the collaboration, Patria plans to start drone production in Finland, which would help build up Europe’s defense capabilities and support the Finnish firm’s aim to be an innovative product developer, the company said in a statement on Sunday.

“Our unique battlefield experience, combined with Patria’s technological capabilities, can help drive a fundamental transformation of the European and global security architecture,” said Stanislav Hryshyn, co-founder of General Cherry, in the statement.

Patria didn’t immediately respond to phone calls and emailed questions about the cooperation plans, including whether the Finnish company will produce existing General Cherry drone models or when Finnish production could start.

General Cherry produces a range of drones, including one-way FPV strike drones and interceptor drones, and the company says its products are in use with more than 200 military units across the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Burnham will be in Ukraine to co-chair a meeting of the so-called Coalition of the Willing, a group of countries backing Ukraine, on Monday, when he is also due to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

He is set to announce that Britain has agreed to allow European missile manufacturer MBDA to release classified information on British-made components used in the SCALP long-range cruise missile, according to his office.

That will help enable France and Ukraine to establish local assembly lines for the missile, which shares British and French technology, according to Downing Street.

“Ukraine’s security is our security,” Burnham said in a statement, adding that Britain would stand by Ukraine “for as long as it takes.”

Britain has been one of Ukraine’s strongest supporters since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, providing military support, economic aid and diplomatic backing.

Britain was the first country to announce plans to supply Ukraine with Western-made battle tanks and long-range cruise missiles following the invasion and has pledged more than £25 billion ($34 billion) so far in military and civilian support.

REASSURANCE OF UK SUPPORT

Moscow warned London last week of “consequences” for supplying drones to Kyiv, accusing Britain of deepening its involvement in the war following a report ​that British-made drones had been used for long-range strikes against Russia ​for the first time.

Burnham is expected to use his visit to reassure Ukraine and its allies that Britain would continue to play a leading role in efforts to strengthen Ukraine’s security under his government.

The push to expand Ukraine’s domestic missile production comes as Ukraine increasingly relies on long-range drones and strike weapons to target Russian oil refineries and logistics facilities far behind the front lines.

The visit comes weeks after Zelenskyy traveled to Britain in late July as Burnham’s first international guest, following the Labour leader’s election as prime minister a week earlier.

The United States, which has been at war with Iran since Feb. 28, requested their temporary deployment under an agreement governing the joint use of military facilities.

Iran said at the time that their deployment would constitute complicity in “aggression and war crimes”, a charge that Sofia dismissed.

The two U.S. Air Force KC-135 planes left Bulgaria on Friday, Defense Minister Dimitar Stoyanov told reporters.

The U.S. authorities could not be immediately reached for comment.

The deployment of the aircraft, approved by Bulgaria’s parliament on July 22, led to protests by nearby residents who feared the planes would be attacked by Iranian missiles and drones.

Stoyanov said all the aircraft’s flights during their temporary deployment had been training missions over allied countries and that Bulgaria had “no information about direct threats to our national security.”

“We are working in full coordination with the U.S. government and had prior information, which is why all our decisions were well-founded,” he said.

India’s Defense Ministry told parliament this month it had “initiated efforts in a concerted manner to co-join” the effort.

The ministry stated earlier this year that India would try to join one of the two consortia working on a new generation fighter aircraft – at that time one involved France, Germany and Spain. The second includes the UK, Italy and Japan.

In June, however, France and Germany abandoned their joint effort to develop the landmark combat fighter at the heart of the program, opening the door for Paris to collaborate with a new partner.

India is exploring a potential partnership with France at a time when New Delhi lags behind in key fighter jet technologies, particularly engine development, and is also trying to beef up the fleet strength of its air force.

At the moment, India’s most advanced fighter jets are its 4.5-generation French Rafales.

The country is also pursuing a domestic project to develop a multirole fifth-generation fighter, with a prototype flight targeted for later this decade.

However sixth-generation fighters are expected to incorporate technologies that go beyond the stealth and advanced radar capabilities of fifth-generation aircraft. The futuristic jets center on a core fighter jet supported by drones and powered by what has been described as a “combat cloud.”

India’s objective in exploring a partnership with France, analysts say, is to gain access to advanced capabilities needed to develop the next generation of combat aircraft.

“India still has to transition to fifth-generation technologies so it would be good to make a parallel start on a sixth generation program to bridge the serious gap we face. That is why it is a good idea to get in with a grouping or a consortia working on the next generation fighter,” retired Air Marshal Anil Chopra told Defense News. “And some of the sixth-generation technologies that we may acquire might also be helpful as we develop our fifth generation program.”

In a report presented in Parliament on Aug. 9, a parliamentary committee which scrutinizes defense policies recommended that the defense ministry “step forward the planning process” for the development and acquisition of sixth-generation (6G) aircraft to enhance India’s air domain capabilities.

Analysts say China’s rapid air modernization is a major strategic consideration for India as it initiates efforts to join a development program for a next-generation jet.

“It has been a perpetual problem in Indian defense policy that India tends to lag almost one or two cycles behind what others are doing. But that space is no longer available given how rapidly air power is evolving and how quickly China is developing its capabilities,” according to Harsh Pant, the vice president of studies at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.

Analysts say discussions with France are likely to focus on issues such as a role in industrial participation, design and development, and access to intellectual property.

“At the moment India is engaged in exploratory discussions with France. We will want industrial workshare, but engine and radar technologies will have to come from French companies. So talks will center on what technology will be offered to India. France seems to be more open to sharing technology,” said Air Marshal Chopra.

India has a longstanding defense relationship with France, particularly in the aerospace sector. Besides the Rafales already deployed by the Indian Air Force, the two countries are presently engaged in negotiations for 114 more Rafale fighters for New Delhi, whose purchase India has approved.

“India needs a trusted partner as it tries to secure a place in the next generation technology cycle before it becomes too difficult or too expensive to catch up, and France is a good fit. It has been willing to engage in defense cooperation with New Delhi without the same political lens or considerations that some other suppliers have,” said Pant.

Dassault Aviation CEO Eric Trappier has repeatedly said that France has the know-how and the technology to independently develop a next-generation fighter jet.

The hiccup is that France’s public finances are under significant strain, with the country having one of the European Union’s highest debt burdens and largest budget deficits, complicating the funding of a future fighter project that may cost tens of billions of euros.

France is currently the only country in Western Europe with a fully sovereign, end-to-end modern fighter ecosystem, centered around the domestically developed Rafale. The fighter is built by Dassault Aviation, with avionics and radar supplied by Thales, an after-burning turbofan engine developed by Safran, and a range of missiles supplied by MBDA.

Rudy Ruitenberg in Paris contributed to this report.

In November 2025, U.S. Army Europe and Africa, in collaboration with the Department of the Army and U.S. European Command, charged the unit with learning from dedicated drone forces, including those fielded by Ukraine, and feeding those lessons back to the Army to support the Pentagon’s push for U.S. drone dominance.

The official, who spoke on background, said in a statement that after the massive, multinational Exercise Saber Junction in August and September, the battalion will return to its airborne infantry mission.

The statement did not include the unit’s name or the number of soldiers.

The move, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, comes as Acting Chief of Staff of the Army, Gen. Christopher LaNeve, issued the Army’s strategic roadmap titled “The Army Azimuth.”

In the public statement, LaNeve said the Army needed to “counter enemies who employ stand-off weapons, including unmanned systems and WMD.” For American troops, he emphasized, “the fundamentals of Soldiering, ensuring a strong grounding in warrior ethos, individual Soldier readiness, and small unit tactical skills.”

The Pentagon has focused heavily on expanding its drone arsenal following a June 2025 executive order directing the U.S. military to enhance its unmanned aerial systems capabilities. Following that order, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a July 2025 memorandum in which he said that “U.S. units are not outfitted with the lethal small drones the modern battlefield requires,” and pledged to revamp the military’s drone acquisition and fielding efforts.

U.S. Central Command this month announced the creation of a multinational task force that will use one-way attack drones in the air, on the water and underwater alongside regional partners. CENTCOM’s task force follows its 2025 establishment of Task Force Scorpion Strike, which is based in the Middle East and outfitted with one-way attack drones.

Following revelations from families about some U.S. service members aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln struggling with mental health after 250 days without a port visit, sailors, retirees and lawmakers told Military Times that troops were absorbing consequences of longtime flaws within the sea service that have been worsened by the current conflict.

The Navy has struggled for years to meet high operational tempo demands, they said. Deployments are regularly extended, scheduled maintenance is missed and the shipbuilding pace remains glacial, leading to delays in delivery and an undersized fleet.

The issues have spanned multiple presidential administrations but have been compounded by the handling of the Iran war and ensuing military operations, sources said, leading to dire circumstances for some sailors.

Leaders have disputed the descriptions of deteriorating conditions aboard the Lincoln and denied reporting about quality-of-life concerns.

Asked recently by reporters about families’ concerns over the length of the deployment, President Donald Trump dismissed the question, saying that it’s “not nearly long enough.”

Asked about those same concerns, Adm. Daryl Caudle, the service’s chief of naval operations, told Military Times, “Sailors first is not a slogan — it’s a warfighting imperative.”

“The sustained pace of operations in the Middle East has only reinforced that taking care of our sailors and maintaining combat readiness are inseparable,” Caudle said.

‘We need more ships’

Following outcry about conditions aboard the Lincoln, the Navy moved the Nimitz-class carrier USS George Washington from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East, where it arrived Wednesday. The ship is reportedly replacing the Lincoln, which will now steam toward its homeport of San Diego.

The move temporarily leaves the western Pacific without a U.S. aircraft carrier, the presence of which is a key part of the U.S. military’s effort to deter China in the South China Sea and reassure regional allies.

Operational tempo concerns, meanwhile, are nothing new for the service, according to retired Vice Adm. Fozzie Miller, who served as commander of U.S. Fifth Fleet and U.S. Central Command from 2012 to 2015.

Miller joined the Navy in 1979. From his early days in uniform, the service’s goal, he said, was to operate at a level that was neither too harsh for the individual sailor nor too unbearable for the equipment vital to mission success. An adequate number of warships was integral to maintaining that balance.

“We could use more carriers or less [operational] tempo,” Miller said. “It’s one or the other, but we’re a global Navy with global responsibilities, and so if we’re going to fulfill those, we need more ships.”

Rear Adm. Thomas Moore, who led the Navy’s acquisition program and went on to become commander of Naval Sea Systems Command, told Congress in 2013 that the service is “an 11-carrier Navy in a 15-carrier world.”

The demand is unlikely to dwindle, he said.

Thirteen years since Moore’s statement, the Navy is still at 11 carriers. With the USS Nimitz scheduled to retire at the end of next year, that number may soon be 10.

The USS Harry S. Truman and USS Gerald R. Ford are currently sidelined for maintenance after deployments, the latter of which notched a post-Vietnam record 326 days at sea in May after it was extended to support operations in the Middle East. The Nimitz-class USS John C. Stennis is undergoing a years-long overhaul.

The USS Ronald Reagan, also a Nimitz-class, is expected to be deployable by the end of August after a 17-month repair period. The Nimitz-class USS George H.W. Bush is in the Middle East.

“We just don’t have enough aircraft carriers right now in this rotation to sustain all the things we want to do, and I think this is a long-standing problem,” said Steven Wills, a Navy surface warfare officer who retired after 20 years.

In 2014, the Navy began implementing the Optimized Fleet Response Plan, or OFRP, deployment model, which places maintenance, training, evaluations and a single eight-month deployment within a 36-month cycle.

The service says the framework is intended to produce a more comprehensively manned and trained force while providing predictability to deployment schedules for sailors and their families.

In 2016, however, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that heavy operational demands led the Navy to increase ship deployment lengths and reduce or defer ship maintenance.

Those decisions made deployments less predictable, ate into training time, contributed to declining ship conditions and increased the time ships required for much-needed maintenance.

From fiscal 2014 through 2019, Navy ships spent more than 33,700 additional days in maintenance beyond intended scheduling, leading to fewer vessels available for training or operations.

An upended supply network

While the Navy has long struggled with carrier availability, current U.S. leadership has created more operational tempo issues through poor planning and insufficient wartime support, according to lawmakers and a sailor who deployed in support of the Iran war.

“Logistics was a complete failure the entire time out there — food, supplies, parts,” said the sailor, who served aboard an Independence-class littoral combat ship and was granted anonymity due to fear of reprisal.

Iranian attacks damaged the Navy’s longstanding logistics hub in Bahrain in February, disrupting the regional supply network supporting ships operating in the Middle East.

The Navy shifted the new logistics hub to Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that sits more than 2,000 miles away from the service’s carrier strike groups in the Middle East.

Diego Garcia’s distance proved to be problematic, the sailor said, with the hub requiring the LCS to place a food order 30 days in advance.

Those orders were nearly impossible, however, with an influx schedule exacerbated by poor planning, the sailor added. Sailors were unable to resupply from the hub, instead grabbing whatever could be salvaged from replenishment-at-sea oilers.

“There’s no excuse for why, if we’re at war, we can’t get an expedited food order,” the sailor said.

Rep. Mike Levin, D-Calif., told Military Times that the logistical issues described by the sailor were due to preparation failures.

“I’ve spoken to a lot of people who’ve been deployed, and you know, the basic problem seems to be that if they were going to use Bahrain as a hub to restock, to get food and to provide rest and all that,” Levin said. “If that was the idea, well, clearly that didn’t work out. After February, March — [the administration] should have thought of that.”

‘People can break, too’

At least two sailors attempted to jump overboard from the USS Abraham Lincoln, families of Lincoln sailors previously told Military Times.

While the individual mental circumstances of the incidents remain unknown, the frantic operational tempo of combat operations inevitably takes a natural toll on service members, according to one sailor who has deployed to the Middle East aboard an aircraft carrier during the current conflict.

“Just like machines, people can break, too,” said the service member, who was granted anonymity for fear of reprisal from leadership. “They need rest.”

Time to rest was not always available. Losing sleep was sometimes part of ensuring safety.

If equipment broke, sailors would, at times, work well beyond normal shifts until it was fixed. In some instances, completion of the task could mean the difference between life and death.

In a 2021 review, the GAO found that just 14% of Navy officers surveyed slept at least seven hours per night during a recent deployment, while 67% reported five hours or less. GAO also found that the Navy routinely assigned fewer sailors to ships than workload studies indicated were needed to safely operate them.

By 2023, surface-fleet sailors were averaging 5.25 hours of sleep every 24 hours, below the Navy’s standard of providing at least 7.5 hours of sleep opportunity. GAO identified crew shortfalls and mattress problems as challenges to managing fatigue.

For its part, the Navy has implemented measures to try to address the issue, including initiating a study involving about 1,600 sailors wearing Oura rings to monitor sleep and other biometric indicators while underway.

But lack of sleep, according to personnel, has been just one detriment experienced during the conflict with Iran. Service members have also faced food shortages onboard the carrier, the sailor said, with quality that fluctuated between bad and horrible.

“It was either undercooked, overcooked or unrecognizable at all,” the sailor said.

As extensions piled on, a decline in morale took on a recognizable tone at the phone center or in conversations at the galleys. Humor darkened even more than usual, and port visits meant less and less.

“These things have been happening on deployments for always,” said Parker Moore, a nuclear reactor operator who served aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln before its recent deployment. “It is bad, but it is always bad.”

During Moore’s time on Lincoln, the stigma surrounding mental health remained prevalent. There were mental health professionals aboard the ship, but if a sailor sought help, the service member could be taken off their job.

“They’re terrified to disappoint the people around them,” Moore said. “If I don’t do my job, there’s only 30 people who can do it, right? So now there’s only 29 people.”

Following the report on mental health issues aboard Lincoln, the Navy said it had not observed an increase in suicidal ideation or suicide attempts. The service did note, however, that additional counselors and resources were being sent to the crew.

Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, visited Lincoln on Saturday and issued a statement claiming that the ship had the lowest number of mental health cases among the Navy’s 11 active aircraft carriers.

Lack of transparency

The Pentagon under the Trump administration has become increasingly tight-lipped over the information it provides to Congress.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth released a memo in October 2025 informing Defense Department personnel, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that authorization was required for any communication to leaders on Capitol Hill.

Hegseth also dodged several questions from lawmakers during a July Senate hearing on the Iran War.

When Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., asked the Pentagon leader whether previous statements about Iran’s military being “destroyed” and “made combat ineffective” were true, Hegseth declined to answer.

Hegseth has also not held a Pentagon press briefing about the Iran war for more than 100 days, with the last coming on May 5.

To alleviate concerns over short-term problems with current military operations like those aboard the Lincoln, Congress must be able to carry out oversight, lawmakers said.

Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., told Military Times that the Pentagon should be sharing information that would allow political leaders to assess whether the president and defense secretary were deploying assets in the most mission-effective way.

Invoking the War Powers Resolution would allow lawmakers to hold the current administration accountable, some Democrats have argued.

The resolution requires the executive branch to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying military forces and allows lawmakers to enforce the removal of military forces within 60 to 90 days unless Congress has declared war or authorized military force.

Levin supports that approach, he said, and asked that his Republican colleagues stand up and ask tough questions.

Republican members of the House and Senate armed services committees did not respond to Military Times’ requests for comment.

“I think back to George W. Bush,” Levin said. “I disagreed wholeheartedly with Iraq, but you think about the steps that he took. You think about … Secretary Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, others — their consistent engagement.”

For the LCS sailor, planning deficiencies are already rearing their head.

Though the ship did assist with the Navy’s blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, turning away more than a dozen vessels, it will now be sidelined longer than scheduled because of deferred repairs.

It is one example, the sailor said, of there being no long-term plan for ship rotations.

“‘We’re gonna keep you out here,” the sailor said of the impression made on them, “until your ship can’t operate or function anymore.’”

The goal is to create a variant of the SeaSparrow that can be used by the 12 nations in the NATO SeaSparrow Project Office consortium, or NSPO, according to the Navy Sources Sought notice. The deadline is Oct. 19.

The NSPO is looking for a weapon that can be employed against a wide variety of threats. The NSV SeaSparrow “should have capability against current and future threat classes spanning a variety of threat characteristics including velocity (low-speed to high-speed), altitude (sea skimming to high diver), maneuverability (non-maneuvering to high Gravitational (G)-Force maneuvers), and signatures,” the Navy said.

The NSV is also meant to defend the fleet against massed salvos of missiles and function despite jamming.

The weapon “should be able to work in complex natural, contested, Radio Frequency (RF), Electro-Optical (EO), and/or Infrared (IR) environments.”

“The missile should have the capability to discriminate and resolve between multiple closely spaced targets and provide threat-track measurements to support missile guidance, navigation and lethality functions,” the Sources Sought notice continues. “The missile should have the capability to handle threat countermeasures.”

The notice included a graphic that appeared to depict surface ships — including two aircraft carriers — being targeted by a dozen missiles and torpedoes, plus a hostile fixed-wing aircraft and a helicopter. The friendly ships appeared to be using active illumination to paint some threats, while the SeaSparrow used its on-board sensors to intercept others.

NSPO seeks a modular, open-source design that would give the U.S. government “maximum rights in technical data, computer software, and computer software documentation (including source code), design artifacts, and interface specifications.”

“This approach will simplify future upgrades, promote interoperability across consortium platforms, and outpace evolving threats,” the notice said.

The NSPO wants contractors who can provide a complete missile system, including airframe, propulsion, guidance and software. The missile should have no more than a 10-inch diameter and fit inside a Mark 41 vertical launch tube.

The Sources Sought notice emphasized that the missile and its technical data should be releasable to the entire NATO SEASPARROW Consortium: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and the U.S. Other users include Thailand and the United Arab Emirates.

The Block II RIM-162 Evolved SeaSparrow is currently manufactured by Raytheon, which doubled production to more than 350 missiles in 2025. Amid naval operations in the Persian Gulf, where Iran has launched numerous missiles and drones against dwindling stocks of U.S. and allied interceptors, future demand for short-range air defense weapons is likely to be brisk.

First fielded in 2004, the Evolved SeaSparrow is descended from the 1950s AIM-7 Sparrow radar-guided air-to-air missile.

Though the original Sparrow had a mixed combat record as an aerial combat weapon in the Vietnam War, the Evolved SeaSparrow was intended as a low-cost defense against anti-ship missiles, aircraft, helicopters and fast attack boats. The current version has an estimated range of around 30 miles.

Russia has been ramping up both its barrages and the production lines feeding them: it launched a record 351 missiles at Ukraine in July, including 153 cruise and 198 ballistic and hypersonic, while its factories ran at 110% to 120% of monthly production targets – already reaching their annual production goals for Zircon and Oniks missiles by early August, according to Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence.

“The enemy currently has the capability to launch more than 70 (77) missiles of various types from different launch systems, ships and aircraft,” Maj. Robert “Magyar” Brovdi wrote in an Aug. 10 Telegram post. “The enemy is working to increase the size of a single simultaneous salvo to as many as 200 missiles.”

“Even if they only manage half of that, it will all be flying at us,” Brovdi told the Associated Press the same day.

A mixed barrage struck Kyiv shortly after midnight local time on Thursday, with more than a dozen explosions heard across the capital – a fraction of the salvo Brovdi says Moscow is building toward.

The strike killed at least 15 people and injured dozens across the capital alone, damaging several residential buildings, a school, a children’s hospital and a kindergarten, according to Kyiv officials.

Magyar’s warning is that the country would likely face even higher numbers of dead in a combined attack of hundreds of Russian ballistic and cruise missiles.

Ukraine’s air defense network can intercept most drones and cruise missiles with cheaper systems, but Patriot and a handful of similar European systems are among the few systems capable of reliably intercepting ballistic and hypersonic missiles. Those interceptor stocks are at their lowest levels in years.

Ukraine fields two and a half times fewer interceptors than it did in 2025 while Russia fires twice as many ballistic missiles a month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CNN on Aug. 12, with allied deliveries this year running at one-third of last year’s levels.

“Patriot systems capable of shooting down ballistic missiles are essentially on a ‘starvation ration,’” Air Force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat said in April after Russia fired more than 700 missiles over the winter, per Censor.NET.

The shortage runs so deep that the Air Force decided in early August to stop publishing attack tallies for ballistic missile intercepts because of the negative impact on morale.

“I understand that everyone already knows everything and sees that the topic is very sensitive, especially for the capital,” Ihnat wrote in an Aug. 13 Facebook post.

“But when we put an official message – 28/0 (ballistic missiles intercepted) the result is that all our media write ‘The Air Force did not shoot down a single missile,’ and amplify it throughout the country. Meanwhile, enemy media will only copy all this and replicate it for themselves, giving a standing ovation!”

The problem for Kyiv is that anti-ballistic interceptors remain the only immediate answer to the ballistic-missile threat, and they have been in short supply worldwide since the Iran war began.

The United States has burned through roughly two-thirds of its combined Patriot and THAAD stockpile since that war started, from more than 2,700 missiles to fewer than 1,000 by late July, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Each PAC-3 replacement costs roughly $3.9 million and takes up to two years to build.

“There are no good alternatives to Patriot and THAAD for ballistic missile defense,” the center’s experts concluded.

Ukraine is working on several tracks to resolve the antiballistics shortage, negotiating Patriot co-production agreements with Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, though both makers have begun hedging, and backing Freyja, a cheaper European interceptor program led by Ukraine’s Fire Point.

Experts put licensed Patriot production 24 to 30 months away, and Freyja’s first intercept is not planned until the end of 2027, leaving interceptors from allied stockpiles as Kyiv’s only immediate answer to protecting its cities from increasingly large missile attacks.

“If [the United States] can sell us 5%, we will go through the winter and save people’s lives,” Zelenskyy said last week. “If they can sell us 10%, we will destroy all the Russians’ ballistic missiles. I have 1%.”

New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Authority was aware the flight from Christchurch pivoted following the agency’s issue of a Notice to Airmen, or NOTAM, to the aircraft, a CAA spokesperson told Military Times.

The Russian Air Traffic Management Corporation notified the CAA of the space activity, the spokesperson said, causing the authority to issue the NOTAM to the U.S. Air Force flight.

In a follow-up statement, the spokesperson said that the CAA was made aware by the Russian air traffic agency of a planned missile launch and associated potential hazard to international airspace within New Zealand’s Oceanic Flight Information Region.

“As a result, we put in place a danger area and issued a NOTAM to alert aircraft operators to the potential hazard,” the spokesperson said. “This does not prevent aircraft from flying through the area, operators make their decisions based on the information available.”

NOTAMs alert aircraft operators of potential hazards to allow them to make operational decisions around flight planning.

“Much of our Oceanic FIR is over international waters, where we have limited control over activities,” the spokesperson said, referring to the roughly 30 million square kilometers of international waters that spans across the South Pacific Ocean, Southern Ocean and Tasman Sea.

“It is normal practice for Airspace Authorities and Air Traffic Service Providers, provided with such hazard notifications to issue NOTAMs,” the spokesperson continued.

Flight-tracking data from Flightradar24 shows a U.S. Air Force C-17A Globemaster III took off from Christchurch International Airport, New Zealand, on Tuesday at 9 a.m. local time, with the call sign ICE28.

The site shows the aircraft landed around 11:30 a.m. back at Christchurch.

The flight was a routine resupply mission scheduled for this time of year, a U.S. Pacific Air Forces spokesperson told Military Times.

“Christchurch is the gateway to Antarctica,” the PACAF spokesperson said. “Both the United States Air Force and New Zealand Defense Force conduct operations and logistical support out of Christchurch in support of our Antarctic science programs.”

The turnaround happened during the U.S. Air Force’s annual Winter Fly-in period, or WinFly, which usually occurs toward the end of August and delivers teams, equipment and cargo to McMurdo Station and Scott Base, both in Antarctica, ahead of its research season.

The PACAF spokesperson declined to comment on whether this flight was in direct support of the WinFly, but a 2012 Air Force release details that a C-17 delivered over 300 passengers and 230,000 pounds of cargo that year to Antarctica.

“Using Christchurch International Airport, New Zealand as the base of operations, the mission of WinFly is to deliver advance teams and cargo to the remote research center in preparation for the main season of Operation Deep Freeze,” the release reads.

Operation Deep Freeze provides support to the U.S. Antarctic Program, managed by the National Science Foundation, that allows for continuous scientific research in the region.

Boeing’s C-17 Globemaster III is a cargo aircraft capable of fast delivery of troops and loads to main operating bases or forward bases in deployment areas. The aircraft can also complete tactical airlift and airdrop missions as well as aeromedical evacuations.