patriots

Defending champions the Seattle Seahawks came from behind to beat the New England Patriots 13-10 in the opening game of the NFL season.

For the first time in 10 years the season began with a rematch of the Super Bowl, in which the Patriots were dominated by a Seahawks defence known as ‘the Dark Side’.

Again they stepped up after Seattle lost quarterback Sam Darnold to a hip injury in the game’s opening drive, claiming three interceptions in the final quarter at Lumen Field.

The Patriots went into a 10-0 lead, with rookie tight end Eli Raridon scoring the first touchdown of the season in the second quarter.

Back-up quarterback Drew Lock got the Seattle offence going late in the third quarter, with Jason Myers cutting the gap with a field goal.

Seahawks cornerback Nehemiah Pritchett claimed his first career interception at the start of the fourth quarter, after a Drake Maye pass was deflected by rookie Rodney Thomas.

On the next possession Lock found wide reciever Jaxon Smith-Njigba in space and last season’s offensive player of the year charged through the Patriots defence for a 45-yard touchdown.

Julian Love then picked off Patriots quarterback Maye, giving Myers the chance to edge the Seahawks in front with a 26-yard field goal.

New England were well within field-goal range with 21 seconds remaining, but chose to go for the win rather than settle for overtime, and the move backfired as Maye’s hopeful pass towards Mack Hollins was intercepted by Josh Jobe in the end zone.

The only game in which Maye threw multiple interceptions last season was the Super Bowl, and he was picked off on the Patriots’ final three possessions in the season opener.

Seattle head coach Mike Macdonald said initial tests showed Darnold had not fractured a hip.

Week one continues with the NFL’s first regular-season game in Australia. The Los Angeles Rams meet the San Francisco 49ers in Melbourne on Thursday (01:35 BST, Friday).

The statistics are sobering — so sobering that Defense Department officials refuse to confirm, deny or discuss them.

From Feb. 28 through July, the first five months of the war with Iraq, U.S. forces burned through almost 60% of the nation’s advanced defensive missiles — the Patriot and THAAD interceptors that protect American troops.

When the war began, the Pentagon had almost 2,800 Patriot and THAAD missiles in its worldwide inventory, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent think tank. By the end of July, that number had dropped to about 1,100, CSIS reported. Almost two-thirds of the Patriots and almost 40% of the longer-range THAAD were gone.

“This is a generational annihilation of our theater missile defense capability,” said Tom Karako, director of CSIS’s Missile Defense Project. “There’s no way you can look at this and not see it’s a setback.”

The White House and the Pentagon have not challenged the CSIS figures, although they have issued sweeping denials that any shortage exists.

“We have far more munitions than anyone in the world, and far more than we need,” President Trump said in July.

That’s true, but misleading. The U.S. military still holds vast inventories of short-range offensive missiles. But the sophisticated defensive missiles that protect U.S. troops no longer are abundant — as even Trump has acknowledged.

“We have certain types of munitions [of which] we have unlimited, virtual unlimited supply,” he said last month. “We have others where it’s a little bit tighter.”

The result is a squeeze that has prompted U.S. commanders to husband Patriot and THAAD interceptors as scarce assets.

For much of August, when a frayed de facto ceasefire was in effect, U.S. forces did not respond with high-end missiles when Iran attacked oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.

But when Iran launched rockets against U.S. bases in Jordan last week, Patriots reportedly were used to knock the incoming missiles down. (The Pentagon has declined to confirm or deny those reports.)

The U.S. weapons arsenal “no longer has the capacity to deter a Chinese attack against Taiwan,” the Council on Foreign Relations warned in a report last month. Defense planners share the same concern over a potential Russian assault on the Baltic states.

The conservative Heritage Foundation has forecast that the Pentagon’s inventory of missiles would run out “within the first week of a Taiwan conflict.”

In Europe, a U.S. defense official told the Associated Press last month that the shortfall was “beyond critical.” If Russia attacked a NATO country, the official said, U.S. forces in the area would “take punch after punch in the mouth.”

The core question is whether the United States has so few missiles that it cannot credibly deter China or Russia from attacking their neighbors.

“You’ve got to be strong enough to send a clear message that our enemies should not try anything because we’re a credible force,” said Leon Panetta, President Obama’s former defense secretary. “Now we’re losing a lot of that credibility — and that’s dangerous.”

Knowing that U.S. forces have been left without thousands of weapons needed to deter conflict, Karako said, could in itself be provocative. “It could tempt an aggressor to do something, knowing that we have fewer [missiles] to thwart them.”

The obvious remedy is to build more interceptors — a process Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered even before the war began. But ramping up missile production won’t immediately replenish the stockpile.

Before the Iran war, defense contractors were producing only about 620 Patriots and 96 THAAD each year — fewer than half the number expended during a few weeks this spring.

At current production rates, it will take at least three years to return the Patriot inventory to its prewar level, and at least four years for THAAD, CSIS reported.

Defense experts warn that the stocks need to be even larger than they were before the war to credibly deter China or Russia.

Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and principal author of the CSIS estimates, says most analysts believe it will take years after replenishing the stocks expended in the Persian Gulf to build a credible deterrent against China.

The Pentagon has enough munitions, both offensive and defensive, to continue fighting the campaign against Iran, he added — but some of those less-sophisticated weapons can be used only at shorter ranges, which means placing more troops in harm’s way.

Cancian said the CSIS figures were based on publicly available Pentagon budget and acquisition documents, updated in some cases from recent press reports — but not from leaks of classified information.

The roots of the missile shortage began long before the war with Iran. Trump and Hegseth are not the only ones to blame, although their belief that Iran would quickly capitulate appears to have been a major factor.

Nor did former President Biden cause the shortage, as Trump has claimed Biden gave several hundred Patriots to Ukraine, but the shortfall is far larger than that.

The underlying problem, defense experts say, is that the United States designed its missile defense programs for a world in which only a few major powers like China and Russia posed serious threats.

But the landscape of military technology has changed. Missiles and drones have become cheaper and easier to acquire, and countries like Iran can strike targets at great distances without making a huge investment in weaponry.

That’s a transformational change — and the Pentagon has been behind the curve, argues Michael C. Horowitz, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “This is the kind of situation in which great-power militaries like the United States struggle,” he said.

So the Trump administration faces several challenges. It needs to replenish its depleted stores of advanced defensive missiles — a process that has only just begun, and which Congress has not yet funded. Meanwhile, Horowitz and others argue, it also needs to build less expensive missile and drone systems to fill the multiyear gap before Patriot and THAAD inventories can be restored.

The Pentagon has begun that process, deploying several relatively inexpensive anti-drone missile systems.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year included $7.7 billion for low-cost missile and drone programs, but 13 months later, more than 90% of the money remains unspent, Horowitz said.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military is experiencing a “beyond critical” shortage of advanced missile interceptors in Europe largely driven by President Trump’s war with Iran, a U.S. defense official in Europe and a NATO official told the Associated Press, raising concerns about vulnerabilities in NATO countries to a potential Russian attack.

The U.S. defense official said the most concerning shortfall involves Patriot missile interceptors, which can shoot down Russia’s high-speed ballistic missiles. The NATO official confirmed the low inventories of Patriots among American and NATO forces in Europe. Both spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters.

In the event of a Russian ballistic missile assault on, for example, a military headquarters or power plant, NATO could be in a similar position to Patriot-starved Ukraine and be forced “to take punch after punch in the mouth,” the U.S. defense official said.

In Europe, the American military “definitely” does not have enough Patriots to stop any possible sustained ballistic missile attack and would have “very limited” capability to defend against a single ballistic missile strike or a stray Russian missile that goes off course, the U.S. official said.

It illustrates the cascading fallout from Trump’s decision to launch a war against Iran, a conflict that reaches the six-month mark on Friday. U.S. missile stocks in Europe have been moved to the Middle East, where U.S. and Gulf allies have fired off significant numbers of interceptors, including Patriots, to thwart Iran’s drones and missiles. Some of those attacks have killed and wounded American troops.

Though a Russian ballistic missile attack against NATO countries is not imminently expected, CIA Director John Ratcliffe went to Moscow this week to warn Russia not to attack, The Wall Street Journal reported. Trump played down the significance of the rare and secretive trip, saying it was “sort of semi-routine.”

European and NATO officials say Russia could be in a position to attack countries in the alliance by 2030. Patriot stockpiles are projected to rebound by then. In the meantime, Russia’s war in Ukraine could hinder its ability to carry out any missile attack on Europe as it would be a challenge for Moscow to fight an air war on two fronts.

U.S. Patriot transfers to Ukraine played a role in the drawdown, but the Iran war wasn’t expected

The Patriot missile shortage is most acutely felt in Ukraine, where officials are begging for more air defense support and where previous U.S. transfers also have drawn down some supply. Kyiv says only U.S.-made Patriots can stop Russia’s advanced ballistic missiles, which increasingly are getting through Ukrainian defenses, including as part of a barrage overnight into Thursday.

The U.S. supplied hundreds of Patriot missiles to Ukraine over the course of the 4 1/2-year-long conflict, but the Iran war was the tipping point for shrinking inventories, said Ed Arnold, senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a military think tank in London.

The supply to Ukraine was planned for and reasonably measured, he said, whereas stocks in the Middle East have been unexpectedly and quickly drained, exposing supply chain constraints.

The U.S. military in Europe also is grappling with critical shortages of the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, a medium-range ballistic missile designed to strike behind enemy lines, the two officials said. But the overall munitions picture in Europe is less dire than on air defenses alone because some European militaries have their own offensive missiles, such as the Taurus and Storm Shadow, which are both long-range air-launched bunker-busting missiles.

U.S. Army Col. Martin O’Donnell, a senior NATO military spokesperson, said it is “simply not the case” that the number of Patriot missiles in Europe is beyond critical.

NATO, he said, is able to “block punches” and has enough air defense munitions available to defend itself as well as to donate to Ukraine.

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement Thursday that claims of U.S. munition shortages “are false.”

“We have everything required to strike at the time and place of the President’s choosing,” Parnell said. “Across multiple combatant commands, we have already executed successful operations while maintaining a deep, ready arsenal to defend our people and our interests.”

Europe has few alternatives while stocks are low

The dearth of Patriot interceptors in Europe would leave few alternatives for shooting down Russia’s more advanced ballistic missiles, which can be combined with swarms of inexpensive drones to overwhelm defenses, experts say.

Ukraine and some allies already use systems that can destroy slower-moving drones without expensive missiles. But ballistic missiles are a challenge because they dive steeply toward targets at more than five times the speed of sound, leaving little time to stop them.

The Patriot system tracks the missile, predicts its path and launches within minutes, all while carrying out complex calculations to ensure the interceptor finds its target. One Patriot battery can only cover a limited area: for example, a small military base but not a whole city.

One alternative could be France and Italy’s SAMP/T NG air defense system. France has promised to speed up the delivery of the system — the upgraded version of the current SAMP/T — to Ukraine, which the manufacturer says is better able to counter ballistics.

The new iteration, however, has not yet been battle tested and the current version of the SAMP/T has a smaller range than the Patriot.

While U.S. and European militaries have warships that can serve as mobile air defense, they may be too far from a target to protect it and could risk getting sunk.

Patriot stocks have plunged during the Iran war

Ukraine has received Patriots from American and European stockpiles since Russia’s 2022 invasion, with the U.S. providing about 600 of the interceptors during the Biden administration, said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel who is now senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

But the greatest expenditure has been during the Iran conflict, which has used up 65% of U.S. Patriots, amounting to roughly 1,500 of the nation’s 2,330 interceptors, CSIS says. About 600 missiles, including those destined for Europe, should be made this year, with a production goal of 2,000 Patriot missiles a year set for 2030, Cancian said.

NATO says Europe’s first Patriot missile production facility is expected to open in Germany in September, with deliveries possibly beginning early next year. The first deliveries should go to countries that have already placed orders, including Germany, the Netherlands, Romania and Spain, the U.S. defense official said.

But for now, that means some countries, such as Germany, have bought expensive Patriot systems but are in the “ridiculous” position of not having any ammunition to fire from them, said Arnold of the London think tank.

Germany’s defense ministry said it does not comment on stockpiles.

Russia also has limitations

Moscow likely cannot carry out a sustained air assault on a NATO target while it launches almost nightly attacks on Ukraine, Arnold said.

Ukraine’s recent strikes into Russia also have exposed weaknesses in Russia’s air defenses, which could prompt Putin to think twice about provoking a retaliatory attack.

“The uncomfortable truth is possibly the best air defense that we have is Russian constraints,” Arnold said.

Burrows and Finley write for the Associated Press. Burrows reported from London. AP writer Konstantin Toropin contributed to this report.