The US is quadrupling THAAD and PrSM capacity and tripling PAC-3 MSE. The FY2027 request puts roughly
$95bn into missiles and munitions — about a tripling. This book asks the only question that
matters for owning it: where does the chain physically narrow, and who is paid at that point?
The core asymmetry
The expansion headlines are capex, not revenue, for the company announcing them. The market has already worked this out:
the spenders are still down YTD (LHX −5.4%, NOC −3.8%) while the receivers ran hard
(DCO +92%, CRS +73%, ATI +68%). Buying the prime on the announcement is the worst version of the trade.
Where it actually narrows
Not at assembly. At energetic chemistry — 155mm output was still ~56k shells/month against a 100k goal after $6bn
invested, because the constraints are energetics, tooling and trained people. Below that sits the
SRM duopoly (six domestic makers became two) and titanium sponge, where the US has zero domestic capacity.
Why the international names decoupled
Europe and Korea sold off on peace-deal expectations, Germany's F126 cancellation and Korean Q2 misses — a
war-consumption de-rating. The US bottleneck is a stockpile-rebuild and capacity story that survives a ceasefire.
Those two things are being priced as one trade. They are not one trade.
Region
Verdict
Capex
Provenance. Prices, YTD, forward P/E and consensus targets are Bloomberg at the close shown above — those are sourced facts.
Chokepoint scores, investment scores, verdicts and one-liners are analyst judgement, not Bloomberg outputs, and the raw
five-question inputs are kept in chokepoint_scores.tsv so the scoring is auditable and separable from the
price data. Capacity, contract and policy figures cited in the layer headers come from company releases, CRS/CSIS and trade press —
see value-chain.md for the source list. Two items are explicitly flagged as unverified in this build:
IHI Aerospace's SRM position, and the defence-revenue split at Toray, Shin-Etsu and TDK. Toho Titanium returned no price and is
unrated. Not investment advice.