Lessons on “duels” and costs from Ukraine and Iran
Many have in the last period put questions about the relationship between the different levels of defense and offense in the air warfare domain, from drones through cruise and ballistic missiles to the air defenses arrayed against them. My own thought has been that there must be a linkage between these various categories of expensive and less expensive (respectively) weapons systems, and that the linkage, rather than any single system, also deserves our attention. I have therefore consulted an extensive database (courtesy of Lars-Erik Lundin), in order to look for evidence of such linkages. The following points seem on a provisional basis to be validated by so far downloaded documents. Provisional, because in this field material always keeps coming in.
First a word of caution. It is tempting to speak of “the lessons of the air war” in general, as though there were just one war and one set of lessons. There are as we know at least currently two relevant theaters, Ukraine and the Iran–Israel exchanges, and they are teaching different things, at different tempos, to observers who may tend to generalize from whichever one they happened to see last. Before any of this is translated into procurement decisions or campaign rhetoric, that note of caution should be kept in view.
First point: two theaters, two grammars. What the two wars share is the arrival of the combined salvo, the deliberate mixing of cheap drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles in a single attack, timed to saturate a defense and exhaust its magazines. Both have made unmanned air defense, not the manned aircraft, the decisive instrument; and both have exposed the same vulnerability, that the defender runs out of interceptors before the attacker runs out of things to throw.
But the differences matter more. Ukraine is a war of mass and attrition, fought largely at short and medium range, in which drones have become the connective tissue of the whole battlefield and neither side holds durable air superiority. The Iran–Israel exchanges were a war of range and quality: discrete, high-end salvos across a thousand kilometres, met by a layered and largely Western-backed defense systems (Arrow, David’s Sling, Patriot, THAAD, Aegis) with the United States as an indispensable backstop. Israel showed that a determined ballistic assault can be blunted; it also showed how quickly interceptor stocks are drawn down when in full use. Ukraine has neither comparable in-between depth nor comparable backstop, and that asymmetry, not any single technology, is what counts.
Second point: on drones, the attacker is at present winning the duel. Here the honest reading is uncomfortable for the defense. As Fabian Hoffmann (of the Norwegian Defense University) has recently argued in a podcast conversation with Professor Phillip O’Brien, the offense-defense duel in the drone domain currently favours the attacker over the long run, because the pace of iteration on the attacking side outruns the counter-drone response. Each generation of jamming, spoofing or short-range interception invites an adaptation: fibre-optic control that cannot be jammed, autonomous terminal guidance, cheaper airframes in greater numbers. And the adaptation arrives in weeks, not procurement cycles. I would not overstate this into a law of nature; defenses do improve and layered electronic and kinetic systems already impose real attrition. But the burden of proof sits with those who claim the defender can win this particular race, and for the moment they cannot show it.
Third point: on cruise missiles, the defender is, for now, holding. The cruise-missile contest reads more favourably. In both theaters anti-cruise defenses have broadly kept the upper hand: the threat is fast but comparatively predictable in flight, and modern interceptors and fighters have shown they can engage it. This is the one domain where the defender’s investment has so far paid its way. The caveat is again one of magazine and cost rather than capability, since a saturating salvo can still overwhelm a finite battery, but the underlying technical balance is not, at the moment, running against the defense in the way the drone balance is.
Fourth point: on ballistic missiles, including the hypersonic variety, the defense side is struggling to keep pace. Ballistic missiles descend at several times the speed of sound; the manoeuvring and “hypersonic” glide variants add unpredictability to that speed. Only the most capable interceptors, the Patriot with the PAC-3 hit-to-kill round foremost among them, have shown they can consistently defeat this threat, and even they do so at the outer edge of what is physically possible: a projectile striking a projectile at closing speeds that leave no margin for error. The Middle East showed that it can be done; Ukraine shows what it means to lack it, as Russia invests heavily in exactly the ballistic segment against which Ukraine has the thinnest cover. The rational response, deeper Patriot PAC-3 stocks complemented by other systems is under way, but production measured in tens of interceptors a month cannot be conjured quickly. Everyone now understands that magazine depth is itself a strategic variable. The point has just been underlined from an unexpected direction: reporting from Washington in early August suggests that the American campaign against Iran has drawn down US air-defense stocks to levels alarming enough to delay deliveries to European and Asian customers. Even the indispensable backstop, it turns out, has a finite magazine, and this depletion is of course carefully noticed in Moscow and Beijing.
Fifth point: the balance among the three is not uniform, and that is the crux. Set the three side by side and a pattern emerges that should discipline our planning. The offense enjoys its clearest and most durable advantage at the cheap end, with drones; the defense holds most firmly in the middle, against cruise missiles; and at the high end, against ballistic and hypersonic weapons, the defense can succeed, but only with the most expensive systems and in finite numbers. The attacker’s dominant move is therefore to combine all three, forcing the defender to spend scarce high-end interceptors while cheap drones arrive underneath. The strategic error to avoid is generalization: dimensioning a force as though one balance held across all three domains. It does not. A posture calibrated to the cruise-missile case will fail against the drone case and bankrupt itself against the ballistic one.
Sixth point: the spillover will not stay inside the air domain. The exponential character of these developments will not remain politely airborne. When a few thousand dollars of airframe can threaten a main battle tank, a warship or a fuel depot, the calculus of every expensive, manned, concentrated platform is called into question. Not abolished, but forced to justify itself against dispersal, deception and unmanned alternatives. We already see the logic migrating: uncrewed systems on and under the sea, in the ground manoeuvre force, in logistics. The deeper lesson from Ukraine is less that “drones win” than that the advantage is shifting towards whatever is cheap, numerous, attritable and rapidly upgradable, and that this preference will reshape land and naval procurement as surely as it has reshaped air warfare.
Seventh point, which may be the real story: the domain of economics. All of this returns us to cost, and here one should be blunt. A Patriot interceptor is a multi-million-dollar object; the attacking drone it may be asked to destroy can cost a few tens of thousands, sometimes less. No defense budget can survive that exchange ratio applied at scale, and no serious officer intends to fire million-dollar rounds at hobby-grade airframes for long. That single asymmetry explains most of the present direction of developments: the scramble for cheap counter-drone effectors, meaning guns, electronic warfare and interceptor drones priced to match the threat; the search for magazine depth over exquisite single-shot performance; and the quiet recognition that a war of this kind is decided as much by industrial economics and unit cost as by the elegance of any one weapon.
In closing, for now, where a parliamentarian in an election year is probably most tempted to begin, with a simple conclusion: buy drones, or buy Patriots, and be done. The evidence consulted supports neither slogan; it supports something harder and more complex: that offense and defense are now separate duels in three different price brackets; that the cheap end is where the attacker is winning and the expensive end is where budgets go to a dead end; and that the prudent state matches its defenses domain by domain while keeping a very close eye on the cost of every exchange it invites.
That is a less satisfying or comforting message than victory through technology. But it has the advantage of being true to what these two wars are actually teaching, provisionally, and subject to the next tranche of material and next action-reaction developments.
Michael Sahlin