Winning the Salvo Competition: How to Rebuild the Air and Missile Defense Industrial Base

Center for Strategic and International Studies | Benjamin Jensen and Tobias Oestreich

Russian missile salvos against Ukraine are driving an urgent global expansion of air defense production capacity. Moscow is projected to launch 840 ballistic missiles at Ukrainian targets in 2026, causing Ukrainian interception rates to drop from 24 percent to 10.2 percent amid severe interceptor shortages. This crisis puts a premium on high-end interceptors such as Patriot, THAAD, AIM-120 AMRAAM, and IRIS-T.

Modern warfare demands unprecedented industrial scale. To address surging demand, German manufacturer Diehl Defence committed €1.5 billion in investments, increasing its workforce to 6,000 employees and boosting IRIS-T SLM missile production 20-fold since 2022. Simultaneously, U.S. contractor RTX aims to scale annual AMRAAM production by 58 percent to 1,900 units through artificial intelligence and automated component testing. Long-term air defense readiness requires transatlantic policy alignment, multiyear defense contracts, and reduced export barriers to sustain military stocks against expanding missile inventories from China and Russia.

Comment

Scaling missile production requires overcoming severe structural bottlenecks in microelectronics and solid-propellant rocket motor manufacturing. Raytheon’s automated Tucson facility and Diehl Defence’s Nonnweiler integration plant demonstrate that physical facility expansion alone cannot immediately alter output dynamics. Production lead times for critical seeker components and solid-fuel energetic materials remain bound by complex, multi-tiered subcontractor supply chains.

The deployment of machine learning test protocols for the AIM-120 AMRAAM demonstrates how digitised quality assurance mitigates component rework delays rather than expanding raw manufacturing throughput. At Nonnweiler, expanding integration space for IRIS-T SLM firing units addresses final assembly constraints while leaving sub-tier chemical processing pipelines vulnerable to materials shortages. Consequently, peak output rates for the IRIS-T SLM depend directly on precursor chemical availability across European chemical supplier networks.

Strategic Question for Discussion

Which factor presents a tighter constraint on scaling AIM-120 AMRAAM and IRIS-T SLM manufacturing — sub-tier chemical processing for rocket motors or specialized microelectronics testing capacity?

The available evidence points toward sub-tier chemical processing for solid rocket motors as the primary bottleneck restricting overall output. While digital workflows at facilities like Nonnweiler accelerate guidance assembly, raw energetic material synthesis remains tied to rigid chemical supply cycles. Consequently, missile assembly rates will remain constrained by precursor chemical availability regardless of downstream automation gains.

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