The war in Ukraine has emphasized the importance of air defense, with Kyiv urgently requesting additional systems and rockets from the West to safeguard its cities, troops, and energy grid against daily bombing raids.
A senior NATO diplomat remarked that missile and air strike defense is “a major part of the plan to defend eastern Europe from invasion and right now, we don’t have that.”
NATO foreign ministers will meet in Prague on Thursday for two days of talks to prepare for a summit of alliance leaders in Washington in July, where enhancing European defense will be a central issue.
Some European leaders and military officials have suggested that Russia could be capable of attacking a NATO member state by the end of the decade.
Russia’s extensive use of missiles, drones, and Soviet-era ‘glide bombs’ in Ukraine has intensified efforts among NATO members to increase defense spending after years of military budget cuts.
“[Air defense] is one of the biggest holes we have,” stated a second NATO diplomat. “We can’t deny it.”
The lack of additional air defense equipment provided by European NATO states to Ukraine in recent months has underscored the continent’s limited stocks of these expensive and slow-to-manufacture systems.
This has also led to several overlapping initiatives to find long-term solutions. Last year, Germany launched its Sky Shield initiative with more than a dozen other EU countries to develop a shared air defense system using the U.S. and Israeli technology.
‘Vulnerability in security’
Last week, Poland and Greece called on the European Commission to help develop and potentially finance a pan-European air defense system, a proposal that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen indicated she would support.
Some EU capitals have suggested raising common debt to fund defense projects.
In a letter to von der Leyen, Greek and Polish prime ministers Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Donald Tusk described air defense as a “major vulnerability in our security,” adding that the war in Ukraine has “[taught] us lessons that we can no longer ignore.”
The rise of cheap, long-range attack drones, as used by Russia against Ukraine, has exacerbated these concerns.
“Long-range strikes are no longer a superpower capability,” said one western defense official.
Immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S. deployed a Patriot battery air defense system to protect an airport in southern Poland that became a hub for shipping Western weapons to Kyiv.
However, NATO members have so few such systems to spare that their capacity to deploy any more beyond their own territories is severely limited, according to officials.
