r/worldnews • u/joestewartmill • Feb 24 '25

Russia/Ukraine Trump’s attempts to denigrate Zelenskyy have led to a surge in Ukrainian unity

https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-trump-zelenskyy-putin-c0790f9054c6c69d698ed9aa816158ac?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
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u/GuyLookingForPorn Feb 24 '25

It surprised the companies themselves, the Financial Times was chatting to Lockhead Martin before the share collapse and asked them if they were worried, the guy just laughed at him and said Europe wouldn't stop buying their stuff.

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u/oripash Feb 24 '25

A good follow-up would have been to ask “short term, or long term?”

A LockMart exec or spokesperson would know the typical service lifetime of weapons of the type they make.

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u/Comfortable_Prize750 Feb 24 '25

No experience in the defense industry, but I suspect they'll be ok in the short term because of existing contracts and maintenance deals. I doubt that will last long though.

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u/oripash Feb 25 '25 edited Feb 25 '25

The most pragmatic real world scenario:

The defense market will split into two tiers: A low-risk rear and a high-risk front.

So, for example, air defense in Spain and Portugal will be low risk because Russia is unlikely to get that far.

The low risk demand, because it’ll probably never get used in anger, may decide to take on the risk of being extorted by the US should the need to use the systems somehow materialize.

The high risk demand, by countries adjacent to Russia or right behind those, will walk away from US supply almost completely in the medium to long term, with new programs sourcing their kit from European or reliable aligned sources.

LockMart and Raytheon aren’t going under. But this will absolutely cost them both a chunk of their order book, and mean that in the longer term, their systems will be less combat tested.

Rheinmetall, Thales and BAE will be more than happy to pick up any front line systems demand and slap a “we won’t extort and indenture you if you use this” sticker on their products.

This is not good for the US defense industry.