The ability of Ukrainian forces to fend off superior Russian air forces holds important lessons for air defense for the NATO alliance.
Brian Everstine
Ukraine has relied on nimble air defenses to bring down Russian aircraft. Credit: Chris McGrath/Getty Images
NATO leaders adjourned from a summit at the end of June with a new refrain for the alliance: The Russian invasion of Ukraine requires a fundamental shift in defense, and the shift will come with increased spending on defense.
“We face the most serious security situation in decades,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said as the meeting closed in Madrid. “But we are rising to the challenge with unity and resolve.”
The increased spending and public attention on military modernization has already led to growing orders from Western capitals to ensure the alliance, and the individual nations themselves, will be more prepared for a potential conflict. As this flurry in proposed spending continues, military experts monitoring the air war say specific lessons have emerged that should highlight the mission sets that need to be the focus of the buildup, both in training and in new kit.
Most of the world expected a much more powerful Russian military to roll into Ukraine and topple Kyiv in weeks. But more than four months later, airspace remains contested, largely because of nimble Ukrainian air defenses, and this should prompt the world’s air forces to think about how they would respond. Additionally, the use of cheap, small uncrewed aerial systems and bespoke loitering munitions sent from friendly nations to Ukraine has demonstrated a changing concept of air superiority for forces in the conflict.
“We can learn a lot more from Ukrainian effectiveness than Russian ineptitude,” says Tyson Wetzel, a senior U.S. Air Force fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
The most important lesson learned so far in Ukraine’s fight against Russia has focused on the deployment of air defenses on the Ukraine side, which have been able to keep its skies contested against a much stronger Russian air force.
“[Russians] wouldn’t venture very far, partly because of what the Ukrainians were able to do with their defenses,” U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr., says. “And one of the things they were able to do with air defenses was not keeping static; they stayed fairly dynamic, which made it more difficult. If you can’t do dynamic targeting very well, you’re gonna have a hard time hitting moving targets.”
The maneuverability and creative flexibility in choosing when to fire means Western air forces need to seriously reassess their ability to suppress and defeat air defense systems that are not static, argues Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow in air power and technology at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
Suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) against high-end fixed targets has been “so fundamental to the way that we’ve set up our collective air forces for so long,” Bronk says. Once long-range radars and command radars are taken down in the early stages of a conflict, air forces likely will struggle to hunt and kill mobile systems like the Russian-made Sa-15s and Sa-17s that Ukraine is using effectively. In this invasion, Russian air forces largely did not target any Ukrainian air defenses in the early stages.
“Russian air defenses operated by the Ukrainians, they’re pretty capable systems,” says Gen. Mark Kelly, commander of USAF’s Air Combat Command. “And the Russians themselves, I think . . . they’re struggling with fighting Russian systems, and they’re not adhering to Russian doctrine. And we see the challenge that they have, but we also see the challenge of what happens if your joint force is organized, trained and equipped to operate with air superiority and not remotely designed to operate without air superiority. What happens when you don’t have it?”
Ukraine can be more informative for a potential conflict than recent experiences in places such as Libya and Syria, Bronk argues. Though Syria has powerful systems such as long-range S-300s, the government has been politically constrained on their use, and U.S. operations have used limited numbers of escort aircraft on planned missions. However, Ukraine has shown the effectiveness of stand-alone, pop-up threats from smaller systems targeting aircraft at medium and low altitudes. This has pushed Russian strike aircraft largely out of Ukrainian airspace, with a reliance on bombers firing long-range missiles from inside Russia’s own borders.
In a future conflict, if NATO was the side initiating hostilities, the Ukraine war has demonstrated the need to move quickly in surveillance, targeting and strike, Wetzel says. Initiatives such as the Pentagon’s push for joint all-domain command and control to instantly connect multiple sensors with available shooters are needed to reduce the time to sense, target and attack more quickly.
Western nations should adjust their armament and training to operate effectively against disaggregated air defenses, Bronk argues. NATO is highly dependent on the U.S. for SEAD and DEAD (destruction of enemy air defenses), and the U.S. itself is highly focused on smaller numbers of high-end threats using exquisite but limited numbers of penetrating assets. U.S. officials are quick to point to the American experience in Desert Shield and Desert Storm as examples of how to do this effectively.
“Where our air campaign kicked off before the ground invasion, we were able to take out many of the surface-to-air defense systems to clear areas so [we could] provide air superiority over the areas where the ground forces were operating,” Brown says. “That’s not the way the Russians have operated; they really haven’t looked at suppressing any air defenses. And I would say, their air power moves more closely to where they have ground superiority.”
But few European NATO members have these penetrating capabilities at the moment, with just a trickle of F-35 deliveries, and few have the stockpiles and training on stand-off munitions. Western weapons such as the Raytheon GBU-53/B Storm-Breaker, MBDA Brimstone and new MBDA SPEAR 3 are potentially very useful in this mission set, but not if aircrew are not regularly training on them, Bronk says.
The UK Royal Air Force is better- suited than other European nations to address the need for SEAD, with its F-35Bs and Eurofighter Typhoon force with Storm Shadow missiles, though those are expensive and small in number, Bronk notes. This momentum can continue with increased buys of SPEAR missiles and more training for SEAD/DEAD, though it could come at a cost to other mission sets.
Across NATO, and especially for F-35 operators, there is potential to specialize to improve the broader capabilities of the alliance, Wetzel says. This could be as simple as having a nation serve the SEAD mission on F-35s, as certain USAF “Wild Weasel” wings are specialized on that same mission.
Another area “ripe for investment” is airborne electronic attack (EA), which has atrophied across much of the Western alliance, Wetzel says. The U.S. Air Force, for example, stopped flying dedicated EA aircraft in the late 1990s, and the U.S. Navy is looking to rid itself of ground-based EA-18G Growlers in its current funding request. NATO, for its collective defense, could increase its airborne EA capabilities.
Much of the focus for EA has been on self-protection jamming, for example with capabilities on the Saab JAS Gripen 39E/F, the Typhoon’s European Common Radar System Mk. 2 and the Northrop Grumman AN/APG-83 Scalable Agile-Beam Radar on F-16s. Less attention has been paid to the strike escort mission important for SEAD. Boeing’s electronic attack jet lost in recent competitions in both Germany and Finland, though the company says both have inquired about the jet again in recent months.
Germany is moving ahead with plans for a Eurofighter ECR variant, which will “no doubt be an excellent capability, but it will take a long time to realize,” Bronk says. Airbus, in announcing the concept in 2019, said it could be available by 2026, but there were not any orders at that time.
Early on in the invasion, Ukraine’s fleet of Baykar Bayraktar TB2 medium-altitude long-endurance drones became notorious for effectively targeting Russian forces in the open. However, these high-profile attacks, with video quickly posted on social media outlets for instant global consumption, “massively distorted” the effectiveness of the drones, especially as Russia became more organized, Bronk says. In a future conflict, TB2s and similar systems such as General Atomics MQ-9 Reapers will have a high attrition rate, Wetzel argues.
Now that the battle has shifted to the wide-open east of Ukraine, the enduring lesson on threats from the air should be about systems much smaller than the TB2. Quadcopters dropping small weapons and loitering munitions such as AeroVironment’s Switchblade and the secretive Phoenix Ghost sent by the U.S. to Ukraine have continued to be effective, and these are changing the character of air superiority, Wetzel says.
In Ukraine and in future conflicts, these cheap “suicide drones” will require a reconceptualization of maintaining superiority—the U.S. cannot depend on using an F-22 to fire an AIM-120D to take down a $10,000 quadcopter, for example, he says.
“While I don’t believe we’ve fired the last [advanced medium-range air-to-air missile (Amraam)] in anger, we still need to be prepared to fight Russian fourth- and fifth-generation fighters. We also need to focus on the low-dollar threat,” he says.
Emerging technologies, such as directed-energy base defense systems like the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Tactical High-Power Operational Responder and smaller systems with a low cost per shot, will be the air defense of the future inside a theater of conflict. Patriot batteries and Amraams are ineffective and too costly.
Within the U.S. military, for example, this might require an agreement between the Air Force and Army on who is responsible for this mission, Wetzel says. A suicide drone or quadcopter dropping a grenade is not that different from a mortar, after all.
While more spending has been announced since the invasion started, less has been confirmed and committed. Bronk expects that there will be a “bottleneck in spending” in the next year or two, focused on a limited number of production lines. Addressing the lessons is not as simple as throwing money at munitions and being done with it. Nations also need to focus on live exercises, large-scale training and more emphasis on day-to-day operational spending.
“It’s an opportunity and such a clear demonstration of requirements, but at the same time it’s not going to be a simple task,” Bronk says.
