Will Ukraine expose incompetence of our defense contractors?

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Ukraine is bombed every single day. Its capital, its factories, its military headquarters, all of it sits under Russian missiles, and its supplies are scarce. And this year, in the middle of all of that, Ukraine will build five million drones. Five million. That is more than all of NATO combined.

The United States, safe behind two oceans, will build fewer than a hundred thousand. We cannot build a Patriot missile fast enough to matter. We have burned through our surface-to-surface missiles fighting Iran, and we do not have the stockpile to go back if we have to. A nation being bombed can build. A nation at peace cannot. Something has gone very wrong here, and it is worth being honest about what it is.

There is an argument to license Ukraine to build its own Patriots, and according to The Atlantic, the hold-up has been Raytheon and Lockheed. Officially, they worry about intellectual property theft and technology transfer. Unofficially, as one Republican put it, their real fear is that the Ukrainians will find a way to improve the Patriot and then build it at scale, faster and cheaper than our own production lines can. Read that again. Our defense contractors are afraid that a country at war will embarrass them by building a better missile for less money. That is not a national security argument. That is protectionism.

The consolidation of the American defense industry was, at first, necessary. Our own government piled on the restrictions, the burdens, and the compliance costs until the small companies could not survive and had to merge. But now that they have merged, there are only a handful of them left, they move slowly, and they answer to no competitor. Our defense industry has quietly become a jobs program instead of a defense program. And the government that made it that way is the same government now proposing to fix it with more of the same.

We have watched this movie before. Look at Boeing. I like Boeing. The 777 is a marvel, one of the safest planes ever built. But Boeing let the bean counters beat the engineers. Everything became a cost control, and when the engineers said a change was a bad idea, the accountants overruled them, and then 737s started falling out of the sky. Boeing leaned on an export subsidy from the government because it did not want to compete with Airbus. And Airbus, innovating while Boeing was cost-cutting, even as Airbus is arguably subsidized too, ate its lunch. That is what protection does. It does not make you strong. It makes you comfortable, and then it makes you slow.

When the government sets out to protect an industry, costs go up, timelines stretch out, and innovation dies. That is not a theory anymore. It is the reason we cannot build a missile.

The stakes are not abstract. We were promised a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. There is no deal. Iran has every incentive to drag this out, and we do not have the missiles to go back to war if the president decides he must. You cannot deter an enemy with a defense industry that treats its own inventory like a trade secret to be rationed out.

License Ukraine. Hand them the technology and let them prove our contractors wrong. Let a nation being bombed every day shame a nation at peace into remembering how to build. Our defense industry has become sclerotic, and it is failing at the one job it exists to do. It is time to unleash the free market on the military industrial complex.

Five million drones, under fire, with the lights flickering in Ukraine and we will build a hundred thousand in perfect safety and call it a success. That is not a defense. That is a jobs program with a flag on it.

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