Impressed by the complexities of current trends in the domain of air warfare, this author thought it useful to seek AI answers to a series of specific prompted questions both as regards developments drones in different domains, ground, water, air (and space) and – in the air warfare domain – as regards the differing roles of drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles and the “duel” developments within each of these between offense and defense, and likely “winners”. What are the lessons learned so far, including relevant “war economy” aspects? The cases of Ukraine-Russia and Iran-US/Israel were referred to as the obvious cases in point.
The article below is based on AI responses to a selection of these prompted questions.
It is tempting to speak of “the lessons of the air war” as though there were one war and one lesson. There are at least two theatres — Ukraine and the Iran–Israel exchanges — and they are teaching different things, at different tempos, to observers who too often generalize from whichever one they saw last. A certain caution is therefore in order before we translate any of this into procurement decisions or campaign rhetoric.
Two theatres, two grammars
What Ukraine and the Middle East share is the arrival of the combined salvo: the deliberate mixing of cheap drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles in one attack, timed to saturate a defense and exhaust its magazines. Both wars have made air defense, not the aircraft, the decisive instrument, and both have exposed the same vulnerability — that defenders run out of interceptors before attackers run out of things to throw.
The differences matter more, however. 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 no side enjoys durable air superiority. The Iran–Israel exchanges were a war of range and quality: discrete, high-end salvos across a thousand kilometers, met by a layered and largely Western-backed defense — Arrow, David’s Sling, Patriot, THAAD, Aegis — with the United States as an indispensable backstop. Israel demonstrated that a determined ballistic assault can be blunted; it also demonstrated how quickly interceptor stocks are drawn down when in full use. Ukraine has no comparable depth and no comparable backstop, and that asymmetry, not any single technology, is the point one should carry over.
Drones: the duel the attacker is winning
On drones the honest reading is uncomfortable for the defense. As missile expert Fabian Hoffmann of the Norwegian Defense University has argued in conversation with blogger Phillip O’Brien, the offence–defense duel in the drone domain currently favors 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 — fiber-optic control that cannot be jammed, autonomous terminal guidance, cheaper airframes in larger numbers — and the adaptation arrives in weeks, not lengthy procurement cycles. However, one should 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 at present they cannot show it.
Cruise missiles: the one duel the defender is, for now, holding
The cruise-missile contest reads more favorably for the defender. In most cases, 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 domain where the defender’s investment has, so far, paid its way. The caveat is again one of magazine and cost rather than capability — a saturating salvo can still overwhelm a finite battery — but the underlying technical balance is not, at the moment, running against the defense the way the drone balance is.
Ballistic missiles, including the hypersonic variety
Here the trend line is steep and the defense side is struggling to keep pace. Ballistic missiles descend at several times the speed of sound; the maneuvering and “hypersonic” glide variants add unpredictability to that speed. Only the most capable interceptors — the Patriot with the PAC-3 hit-to-kill variety foremost among them, perhaps the only one, at present — have shown they can consistently and effectively 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, plus a build-up of complementary systems such as SAM/T and, on the Russian side, the extended S-400/S-500 family and next-generation programs — is under way, but production runs measured in tens of interceptors a month cannot be conjured quickly, and everyone now understands that magazine depth is itself a strategic variable. And, significantly, then there is the cost-effect problematique, as below.
The balance among the three
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 logically 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, or simplification — dimensioning a force as though one balance were to hold across all three domains. It does not, and a defense posture calibrated to the cruise-missile case will fail against the drone case, and bankrupt itself against the ballistic one.
Spillover into the wider force
The exponential character of these developments will not stay discretely inside the air domain. 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 warfare manoeuvre force, in logistics. The deeper lesson from Ukraine is less “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 the air.
The economics, which may be the whole story
All of which 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 current direction of travel: the scramble for cheap counter-drone effectors, for guns and 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 or hyper-capability of any single weapon.
The temptation — for a parliamentarian in an election year perhaps especially — is to draw a simple conclusion: buy drones, or buy Patriots, and be done. The evidence clearly supports neither slogan. It supports something harder to put on a placard: that offence 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 die, 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 message than victory through technology. It has the advantage of being true to what these two wars are actually teaching.
Concluding comment
These are clearly but early, preliminary and short answers to questions and issues that are bound to be penetrated over and over again in think tanks and defense planning office, weeks, months and years ahead. Still the concepts of multi-domain “duels” offense-defense and also between the various air warfare means combined with the economic aspects – as pointed to in this selection of AI answers – provide useful, even indispensable, food for thought.