NATO weapons producers vastly overcharge for their weapons.

11 July 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

On July 8th, Britain’s Guardian headlined “US only has 25% of all Patriot missile interceptors needed for Pentagon’s military plans”, and reported that

The United States only has about 25% of the Patriot missile interceptors it needs for all of the Pentagon’s military plans after burning through stockpiles in the Middle East in recent months, an alarming depletion that led to the Trump administration freezing the latest transfer of munitions to Ukraine. …

The determination last month to halt the transfer, as described by four people directly familiar with the matter, was based in large part on the Pentagon’s global munitions tracker, which is used to generate the minimum level of munitions required to carry out the US military’s operations plans.

According to the tracker, which is managed by the joint chiefs of staff and the Pentagon’s defense security cooperation agency, the stockpiles of a number of critical munitions have been below that floor for several years since the Biden administration started sending military aid to Ukraine. …

The situation also became more acute following Trump’s move to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities last month, the people said, when the US fired close to 30 Patriot missiles to intercept Iranian ballistic missiles fired in performative retaliation at the Al Udeid base in Qatar. …

The larger problem has been with the ability for the US to manufacture the weapons to quickly backfill the depleted stockpiles, two of the people said. … The principal concern appears to revolve around the Patriot missiles, which the US produces 600 per year. …

America’s weaponry is just far too costly. Making up for these shortfalls would take years to do, if it could be done at all — and doing it would skyrocket America’s military costs even more than they already are. Although America competes effectively against Russia in military aircraft such as bombers, which were the leading edge during WW2, the far more dominant weaponry today are missiles and drones and the weapons to shoot those down, and America is way behind Russia, and even behind China, in those. U.S. weaponry costs far more than Russia’s and China’s, but is generally inferior to both. That is why America, which spends 65% of the world’s military costs (and hides the fact by spending much of it outside the official ‘Defense’ Department), loses so many wars. The solution that America’s Government always proposes and imposes is to increase its military spending even more than they are. Polls show that the American people strongly oppose that ‘solution’, but are ignored by the President and by the lawmakers, because America’s armaments firms virtually control the Government; the Government doesn’t control them — they always get what they want (which is higher prices and higher stock-market valuations). Thus, an extraordinarily extensive Yale poll of nearly 5,000 Americans, published on June 27th, found that when respondents were informed of what was in Trump’s budget-and-tax bill, only 11% approved, 78% disapproved of it. And America’s military inferiority to Russia — which annually spends less than 10% of what America spends on its military — is rarely even mentioned in the American press. The media could as well be controlled by the same billionaires who control the armaments manufacturers. Control of the media is necessary in order for billionaires to continue to control the U.S. Government — as they do.

While Trump has tried to convey to the public that the pause in U.S. weapons-supplies — especially Patriots — to Ukraine was part of his strategic plan, that allegation from him was a lie, because the pause was actually instead forced upon him by America’s inability to compete effectively with Russia in the production of weapons.

The Patriot air-defense systems are a typical example of this. On June 27th, America’s Miitary Watch magazine headlined “Why Ukraine Can’t Seriously Deplete Russia’s S-400 Air Defence Arsenal: Massive Production Scale Allows For Rapid Replenishment”, and reported that Putin had claimed that Russia each year produces as many air-defense systems as the entire rest of the world combined, and the magazine noted that regarding the S-400 air-defense system, “Russia’s continued exports of the system, namely to India and Belarus, and its efforts to seek new export clients, has served as one of multiple important indicators of a lack of strain on the arsenal.”

Russia charges foreign countries approximately $1.25 billion per S-400 system. America charges foreign countries approximately $2.5 billion per Patriot system. Based on battlefield results up through 2023, neither system was particulary effective; one couldn’t yet say which system was superior to the other. However, that seems to have changed. America’s Patriots have not been improving their performance during the past two years, but the S-400s have. A comprehensive 16 May 2025 Italian article “Strategic Implications of India’s S-400 Deployment in Operation Sindoor: A Geopolitical and Technological Analysis of Air Defense Dynamics in South Asia” found that,

Comparatively, the S-400’s performance stands in contrast to the U.S.-made Patriot system, which faced criticism for vulnerabilities during attacks on Saudi Arabia in 2019 and Ukraine in 2022-2023. A 2025 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) notes that the Patriot PAC-3 struggled against low-cost drones, a weakness not observed in the S-400’s operation against Pakistan’s swarm drones. The S-400’s integration of artificial intelligence for target assessment and anti-jamming capabilities, as highlighted by CAWAT, enhances its effectiveness against electronic warfare threats, a feature absent in Western equivalents. This technological edge has positioned the S-400 as a cornerstone of India’s defense strategy, with potential implications for global arms markets as nations like Turkey and Qatar express interest in Russian systems, per a 2025 SIPRI arms trade update.

Even Ukraine’s ‘news’-media, which praise the U.S.-and-allied weapons in order to keep getting more of them, admitted in May that, “One Patriot missile, which is in short supply, costs around $3 million to launch, … whereas one Shahed costs Russia $100,000-200,000 to launch.” That’s the stuff of an impending military defeat of Ukraine, and of NATO. It won’t look good, for Trump, and for NATO.

Apparently, Russia’s vast superiority as a manufacturing nation is enabling it to quickly adapt its weaponry as weaknesses in a weapons system become exhibited on battlefields, whereas America’s inferiority as a manufacturing nation prevent its weapons from even keeping up with previously displayed performance-deficiencies, much less adapting the given system to the most recently displayed performance deficiencies in it.

For example, back on 30 January 2025, I had headlined “A Possible Turnabout in the Ukraine War”, and reported that drones engineered by teams likely hired by American billionaires but produced and assembled in Ukraine, had, during the prior two months, done serious damage to oil facilities throughout Russia, so that possibly the war might become a stalemate. But the past six months have shown that Russia had, by then, already adapted to these (U.S.-)Ukraine drones, so that they no longer have been posing any serious threat to Russia. (The U.S.-led team seem to have responded to that by increasing their sabotages against oil tankers carrying Russian oil.)

But what is particularly clear is that in virtually any performance-per-dollar-of cost measure, Russia — even if the S-400 is no better than the Patriot (which now seems doubtful) — means that Russia can produce and field two of them (the S-400s) for every one of them (Patriots) that America produces and fields.

This ratio of at least a two-to-one advantage of Russian weapons-production as compared to America’s weapons-production is evidenced right across the board in virtually all weapons-systems in those two countries. And this is the basic reason why all of NATO together simply cannot keep up with Russia in the war in Ukraine (which war Obama started — Putin didn’t, he has responded to that).

Consequently, here was Mark Rutte, the leader of NATO, speaking to the New York Times, as published on July 5th:

We have an enormous geopolitical challenge on our hands. And that is first of all Russia, which is reconstituting itself at a pace and a speed which is unparalleled in recent history. They are now producing three times as much ammunition in three months as the whole of NATO is doing in a year. This is unsustainable.

Ammunition is to war what food is to a human (or to any other animal). According to NATO, Russia produces 12 times as much of it as do all of the 32 NATO countries put together. That is what Rutte meant by “unsustainable.” He meant that Russia is going to win the war in Ukraine. But he didn’t say it. Clearly, no way is possible to outproduce Russia on the most fundamental war-weapons of all — ammunition — before Ukraine will simply have already become defeated by Russia (whenever that will be).

So: what is actually BEHIND all of this? This is what’s behind it: Unlike in America and the rest of NATO, whose weapons-manufacturers are motivated for profit to their private investors and are controlled by billionaires, Russia and China never privatized theirs, so their weapons are produced by Government-controlled firms and consequently are motivated and designed and produced for the purpose of protecting the nation against any potential foreign invader (such as NATO), and NOT to produce profits to any private investors (such as is the case in The West).

The historical fact is that ever since the Soviet Union in 1991 ended, and the claimed reason-for-being of NATO — to protect against ‘the communists’ — ended, the U.S. ‘defense’ industries’ profits took off like a rocket and soared way beyond all other industrials and beyond the entire stock market, because there was really little-to-no remaining national-security reason for buying these weapons — the U.S.-and-allied Governments were buying their products only because the billionaires who were funding those winning politicians’ careers were now free to charge whatever they wanted to charge for their weapons, even if those weapons didn’t really work very well. The only remaining reason now for this military production has been those billionaires’ profits. In fact, the U.S. ‘Defense’ (aggression) Department is so deeply corrupt that it is the ONLY federal Department that has never been audited. And that corruptness is what’s behind this. (Yet America’s Congresses and Presidents keep increasing the ‘Defense’ Department’s budget as-if it were the very model of integrity and efficiency — which all of them know is the exact opposite of the reality.)

These politicians’ jobs — and re-elections, and promotions to even higher political positions — all depended upon those billionaires, and not really upon serving the public, at all. No matter how bad a job they’d do as leaders of their respective nations, their career-success was assured by serving these billionaires (who also controlled the political media, etc., so as to keep those politicians in office).

And this is why now, throughout the U.S. empire, these nations’ leaders are dead-set on greatly increasing military spending, irrespective of their electorate, because what really counts, for these politicians’ career-success, is instead these politicians’ s‘electorate’ or funders — the mega-donors to their political campaigns. And, since the mainstream ‘news’-media are ALSO controlled by billionaires who LIKEWISE profit from these politicians’ leading those countries, the ‘news’-reports favor, and even endorse, likewise only corrupt politicians. And any such politician who gets voted out of office can then get promoted to the EU (or even to be President of the UN General Assembly) or else to the board of these billionaires’ corporations and ‘non’-profits; so, there really is no downside, not even for losing. But non-corrupt politicians stand little if any chance of becoming elected at all.

If this sounds like a desperate situation for the public, that’s because it is. It requires extreme changes, no merely moderate ones — it requires replacing the present system. I have elsewhere described my view of what that would be. (In any case, it would need to be an even more profound change than that of America’s first Revolution, in 1776, because this one would need to redefine what “democracy” MEANS — and not merely what the nation’s Constitution and laws ‘should be’ in order to supposedly ‘embody’ it.) Getting there would not be easy or quick (nor was it so for the Founders of America). If America can’t make this change — this fundamental change of its system — then this dictatorship by the billionaires will only keep getting even worse than it already is. And who would want that, except the billionaires, and their millions of agents — and fools?

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.