US's empty stockpile a danger to Sweden

Niclas Vent

This is a commentary text.

 Analysis and positions are those of the writer.

Published 15.21

The US now has so few air defense missiles that a war against China could be lost in just a few hours.

It is a pure horror situation for countries that are completely dependent on American supplies.

One of them is called Sweden.

In a war against China, the US would need 38,291 qualified air defense missiles, according to the think tank Heritage Foundation in a new report.

There are now 3,100 missiles in the stockpile.

Production is also so small that at the current rate it would take between 29 years and 86 years, depending on the type of missile, to cover the need.

And then it is only about what is needed for a single crisis.

Facts

The Inventory Gap

The Heritage Foundation has examined the shortage of four types of qualified missiles with regional coverage:

THAAD, SM-6, SM-3, and the Patriot missile Pac-3 MSE.

The gap between what is available and what is needed is 17,870 Pac-3, 5,325 THAAD, 11,000 SM-6, and 1,200 SM-3IIA—a total of 35,395 missiles.

Today, the United States produces 620 Pac-3 MSE, 96 THAAD, 125 SM-6, and 24 SM-3IIA per year—a total of 865 missiles.

It would take between 28.8 years and 86.2 years to reach the level needed to confront China.

Source: Heritage Foundation

In purely military terms,

 the problem is easy to describe:

To meet, for example, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the United States must aggressively forward-base its own aircraft and ships to the western Pacific.

But the bases are few, and would immediately become targets for China's enormous arsenal of missiles.

It would be a storm of fire and death unparalleled in modern times.

The first four days of the Iran war this spring, when the United States and its allies had to deal with a rain of more than 500 ballistic missiles, will seem like a pillow fight in comparison.

Air defense is absolutely necessary to give American forces time to strike both China's missile platforms and a possible carrier fleet.

If Chinese missiles can instead unhinderedly descend on US bases in Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Guam, the war will be over before it has even begun.

All of this would be

 worrying enough.

But a big black cloud is rolling in much closer to the Swedish horizon.

It's about Patriot, the air defense system that Sweden bought from the US in 2018 and the only one we have that has any chance against ballistic missiles.

The US can currently produce 620 of the most advanced Patriot missile, the Pac-3 MSE, per year.

At that rate, it will take almost 29 years to build up sufficient stocks for a war against China.

And that doesn't even include the needs of the 15 other countries that use Patriot.

One of them is Ukraine.

The stockpiles there are largely empty, and we are now seeing results every other night when Russian ballistic missiles hammer Kiev almost unhindered.

In Linköping last Friday, I listened to Anatoly Kryvonozhko, the commander of the Ukrainian Air Force, the war hero whose air defenses have fought off 125,000 Russian targets since 2024 alone.

When it came to Patriot, he sounded almost resigned.

– As you can see, the adversary has increased the number of ballistic missiles being sent against Ukraine. Without the right interceptors, there is nothing we can do, he said.

The ammunition shortage is spreading from the US throughout our entire alliance. It is the same everywhere.

Which brings us to Sweden.

Our supplies are not deep either. If they burn out, we will quickly become dependent on new deliveries.

The exact number of missiles the Armed Forces have is secret, and should reasonably remain so, but we do not need a figure to establish one thing beyond all doubt:

If we were forced to face even a fraction of what Ukraine is doing, we have too few.

The problem is big, serious and without easy solutions – but it must be solved.

When US intelligence assesses that Russia could test NATO with a limited attack as early as this autumn, it cannot happen quickly enough.

Facts

Sweden's purchase of Patriot ammunition

The exact number of Patriot missiles the Swedish Armed Forces have is secret, but open sources reveal a lot.

When we ordered Patriot in 2018, we were authorized to buy 300 missiles: 200 older Gem-T and 100 modern Pac-3s. This would have given a total cost for the system of $3.2 billion, or roughly SEK 28–32 billion, depending on the exchange rate.

Since Sweden was reported to have paid SEK 12 billion, anyone can calculate that nothing close to 300 missiles was included.

In fact, a Pentagon document from December 2019 only lists one completed Pac-3 sale to Sweden: 16 missiles.

The Swedish Armed Forces received additional money in the spring of 2022, which was to go towards anti-aircraft ammunition, among other things, and orders were placed later in the year, but the number was never disclosed.

The current government has summed up its investments in Patriot ammunition at 7.5 billion kronor.

Most of it has gone to new production of, an estimated, around 100 Gem-T missiles from a factory in Germany that is not yet operational.