War In Ukraine Drives European Ground-Based Air Defense Renaissance

Russia’s regular poundings of Ukraine with ballistic and cruise missiles and one-way attack drones have spurred Europe’s greatest investment in ground-based air defenses since the Cold War.

In just over two years, more than a dozen European countries—with others to follow—have purchased or pledged to buy surface-to-air missile systems, reversing three decades of underinvestment in an unglamorous yet vital capability.

• More nations seek entry into European Sky Shield Initiative
• Germany proceeds with purchase of U.S.-Israeli Arrow 3 system
• Ukraine has successfully used long-range air defense as a deterrent
• UK is advancing development of DragonFire laser for warships

At the height of the Cold War, ground-based air defense was a staple of NATO militaries. Bases along the UK’s east coast had lines of Bristol Bloodhound missiles at readiness, while across mainland Europe—from Denmark through Germany to Italy—sites housing Nike and Hawk batteries stood to act as a last line of defense. But as the Cold War ended and the Russian threat evaporated, the missile sites were dismantled. Although some countries retained surface-to-air missile systems, many gave up the capability altogether, handing the entire air defense role over to combat aircraft.

Now, the defense industry in Europe and the U.S. is urgently working to rebuild production capacity to meet this renewed demand not only for new systems and ready-to-fire missiles but also for increased weapon stockpiles, which have been depleted by transfers to Ukraine. In 2023, 70% of European missile manufacturer MBDA’s exports were for air defense missiles alone, the company revealed in March.

Ukraine’s own air defense network has been buoyed by diverse donations of systems from the rest of Europe and has become a testing ground for those never used before in combat. U.S.- and German-supplied RTX Patriot surface-to-air missile systems have successfully engaged air-launched Kinzhal ballistic missiles and reportedly Avangard hypersonic weapons. Self-propelled air defense systems such as Germany’s Gepard have come back into vogue, downing Iranian-supplied Shahed drones and Russian cruise missiles. Meanwhile, a host of rapidly developed capabilities, including the so-called FrankenSAMs that combine Soviet-era radar sets with Western missiles and air-to-air missiles adapted for ground launch, have downed both cruise missiles and drones.

Surging air defense spending across Europe led to the creation in October 2022 of the German-led European Sky Shield Initiative (ESSI). Despite its name, the strategy is not about creating an impenetrable shield against Russian missiles but instead helping countries build air defense capacity by using the economies of scale associated with joint purchases of systems and their missiles. Future ESSI steps likely will include joint training and logistics programs for the purchased systems.

Eleven nations have joined the initiative, with more set to follow, though it has attracted criticism and sparked confusion. When Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk declared Warsaw’s interest in joining ESSI in April, Polish President Andrzej Duda and former defense minister Mariusz Blaszczak asserted that the initiative was merely a “German business project” aimed at encouraging sales of German-made air defense systems.

France also has tried to undermine ESSI; President Emmanuel Macron attempted during last year’s Paris Air Show to attract European nations to a French-led air defense program, with joint sales of man-portable air defense missiles to five countries as the most successful outcome.

Lawmakers in other parts of Europe have conflated ESSI with an attempt to build a European equivalent of Israel’s much-vaunted Aerial Defense Array, the system of counter-artillery rockets, air defense and exoatmospheric interceptors that downed virtually all of the ballistic and cruise missiles launched by Iran on April 14 in an attack intended to avenge the deaths of senior Iranian officers in an Israeli airstrike a few days earlier.

In all, Iran launched 300 projectiles against targets in Israel. Most were cruise and ballistic missiles, but there were also slow-moving one-way attack drones. All of these were engaged long before they reached Israel by fighters from a hastily arranged coalition of the U.S., the UK, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Israel and the U.S. have worked for decades and spent billions of dollars on perfecting the technology in these advanced air and missile defense systems for just this kind of attack.

That success has prompted some European politicians to suggest the region needs its own “Iron Dome” or missile shield. The difference is that the threat would not be from Iran but from Russia, a far more capable opponent equipped with more advanced systems and the ability to deliver more sustained attacks on a much larger scale.

“You can see why the word ‘shield’ has been used from a political perspective, but from an operational perspective, it is misleading and can raise expectations,” says Douglas Barrie, the senior fellow for military aerospace at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. “The challenge for air defense systems is that the threats they face have morphed and multiplied. . . . There’s now a spectrum of threats, all of which you have to honor or address.”

Barrie notes that high-end threats have become faster, more accurate and increasingly capable of maneuvering and that low-speed drone threats are easy to deal with individually but can overwhelm even the most advanced systems if they swarm in great numbers. For example, Russia’s use of such systems has been a war of attrition to make Ukraine burn through its stocks of ready-to-fire missiles.

Creating an Israeli-like missile shield over Europe would be “technically infeasible and prohibitively expensive,” a report by the European Council on Foreign Relations concluded in November. The report noted that even Ukraine, which has the most missile defense systems in Europe, is forced to be selective about which critical infrastructure and population centers it protects.

Furthermore, unlike in Israel, where the primary threat comes from the east, the threat in Europe could come as easily from the Atlantic as from the east, Barrie notes. “Governments should not fall for the trap that the threat only comes from the east,” he warns, adding that Russia is capable of parking submarines full of cruise missiles in the eastern Atlantic, while long-range aviation fleets of Russian Tupolev Tu-95s Bears and Tu-160 Blackjack cruise missile carriers could add another threat axis. “The problem for NATO is that there are multiple front lines,” Barrie says.

Nowhere is this more true than in Poland, which is assembling what will become one of the most potent air defense umbrellas anywhere in Europe, with a mix of medium- and long-range and point defense surface-to-air missile systems designed to provide an anti-access/area denial system against an aggressor like the Russian armed forces.

At the heart of this effort are eight batteries of the Patriot system, tailored for Polish use and equipped with 360-deg.-field-of-view RTX Lower-Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensors and Northrop Grumman’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS). The setup reflects concerns about the multiple directions from which Poland could be attacked, including Kaliningrad, Russia’s well-armed exclave on the Baltic Sea that neighbors Poland.

“We need a system like this. . . . We don’t have choice here in Poland,” Polish Air Force chief Maj. Gen. Ireneusz Nowak told Aviation Week. “We need to be ready. If something happens, we are going to be the first to be attacked, together with the Baltic states” (AW&ST May 20-June 2, p. 50).

Nowak said Poland has learned from the Ukrainian experience by acquiring a wide range of effectors to counter different threats “proportionately.” Systems like the Patriot would be reserved for high-end threats, such as incoming ballistic missiles and advanced air threats. Poland’s Narew medium-range system, equipped with the extended-range version of MBDA’s Common Anti-Air Modular Missile (CAMM), would tackle air-breathing threats such as aircraft and cruise missiles while the country’s Pilica+ system would deal with threats at short range and provide point defense.

One of the hurdles Poland faces is that mobile systems can cover only a small area when deployed, posing a considerable challenge when trying to protect such a large country.

“Ground-based systems are just part of air defense,” Nowak said. “It is important not to put too much emphasis on a single part of the system. You must also have fighter aircraft to contribute to air defense to cover the sectors the ground-based systems cannot.”

Israel benefited from having a buffer of friendly countries between it and Iran, which allowed allied fighters to engage the Iranian drones before they reached its territory. Europe does not have that option.

Beyond defense, air defense systems also can act as a deterrent, Barrie notes. Regularly and unpredictably moving air defense systems can tie up the aggressor’s resources as it tries to figure out where those systems will be, with the ambiguity around their locations making them difficult to strike. This approach could be crucial for smaller nations like the Baltic states, and indeed, Estonia and Latvia are jointly acquiring Diehl’s infrared imaging system tail/thrust vector-controlled (IRIS-T) SLM system. Ukraine has even been deploying its surface-to-air missiles as offensive weapons, reportedly using elderly Soviet-era S-200s to down a Russian Air Force Beriev A-50 airborne early-warning aircraft and a Tupolev Tu-22M3 bomber, which forced the Russians to change their operational profiles.

Europe is thinking ahead toward future threats as well. The European Defense Fund is supporting two efforts to develop a hypersonic interceptor through the MBDA-led Hypersonic Defense Interceptor Study (HYDIS²) and Hypersonic Defense (EU HYDEF).  These would form a component of the European Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) project Twister, short for Timely Warning and Interception with Space-based Theater, aimed at developing a hypersonic defense system for the region.

New European air defense missiles are also in development. Poland and the UK are studying CAMM-MR, a longer-range version of CAMM, while Diehl is developing the IRIS-T SLX, a longer-range IRIS-T with a range of up to 80 km (50 mi.), and MBDA in Germany is exploring the development of a low-cost anti-drone missile.

The UK’s recent experiences downing Houthi drones in the Red Sea while protecting merchant shipping in the region have prompted the country’s defense ministry to accelerate the introduction of directed-energy weapons in a bid to bring down the cost per shot. Following successful tests of the DragonFire laser demonstrator, UK defense ministers are contracting with the company to turn it into a viable weapon for installation on British warships. This could bring a laser weapon into the UK inventory five years earlier than planned.