Air-defence doctrine assumed the incoming object was expensive. The incoming object is now often a small airframe with a camera and a cheap motor. The crew still fires what it was trained to fire. Each shot removes a round that took months to build.
Lockheed builds PAC-3 in Camden. RTX builds Patriot in Andover. The drone is a workshop job.
The Patriot work in Andover and Lockheed’s PAC-3 line in Camden do not expand because a minister gives a speech. Powder, seekers and canisters have lead times. RTX and Lockheed will take orders. They cannot print a finished interceptor between two budgets.
Navies are spending the same stock at sea. A destroyer in the Red Sea or the Black Sea has a fixed number of Mk 41 cells. An SM-6 or an ESSM fired at a cheap visitor is a cell that stays empty until the ship can reload. Reload at sea is still mostly a study.
European governments have voted more money for ammunition. Rheinmetall in Unterlüß and BAE in the UK can take the work. A hall that is quiet at 7am is not producing. The constraint is the building and the shift, not the communiqué.
Unit costs move. The shape of the problem does not. One side replaces an airframe the way a shop replaces a tool. The other replaces a missile the way a country replaces a production line.
Huntsville packs a lot of the American interceptor work. Camden packs PAC-3. Those two towns, plus the powder plants that feed them, are the Western answer to a workshop that can turn out airframes by the week. A budget line that buys hulls and ignores those towns has bought a ceremony.
Stinger and AMRAAM sit in the same squeeze. They are different missiles. They share a plant-and-magazine problem. A clip of a cheap drone falling does not restock any of them.
Planning that counts sorties and ignores restock is incomplete. The next war will spend magazines. The plants that refill them are the part of the story that does not fit in a clip.
Lockheed and RTX make the expensive round. The workshop makes the cheap one. The stockpile is what connects them.
The scarce object is the interceptor that can be built again after the first one is gone.