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Germany To Send Additional Patriot System To Ukraine
(www.barrons.com)
Glad to see it. Definitely needed looking at the recent attacks and tax money well spent.
As i understand it those systems cost over 1 billion $ to purchase, so this is a massive commitment. Especially since the real value in the ccurrent situation might be even higher (severly limited supply, timely delivery, desperately needed). Imo underscores our leadership in terms of supplying air defense systems (patriot systems, iris-t, gepard etc).
Ofc it would have been better to have it supplied earlier, but at least looking at the situation as is, it doesn't really suprise me that it wasn't. We've already supplied 2 systems and only have a handful in general. And those are needed to meet NATO obligations, selfdefense capabilities, and also keeping personel within our own forces trained. So i assume this was never planned to be delivered, if it werent for the latest developements.
The US being the producer and apparently having a ton of them in storage could easily provide more. But i guess that won't happen looking at the standstill we've seen for quite a while now.
For me the question that remains is how it looks longterm in regards of new production and placing orders (which should have already happened a long time ago). The european equivalent seems to be SAMP-T, not sure how it looks there in regards to orders and production. That would probably be on France/Italy, since Germany seems to stick with Patriot systems long term (having selected it for the European Sky Shield Initiative). If orders haven't been placed they really should be. And i bet for Patriot the US even when not supplying any new of their own would love to get payed to produce new ones.