The European defensive campaign over the Middle East has underlined the fragility of its air forces, which are organized around small fleets of expensive manned fighters armed with small numbers of expensive precision-guided munitions. There’s a lot of capability but not a lot of capacity.
Stripped of conventional forces by US and Israeli attacks, Iran is increasingly fighting the war with inexpensive rockets, drones, and mines. These may lack the precision of Western weapons, but can be used at scale.
Even under relentless air attack, Iran has managed to launch scores of Shahed one-way attack drones at targets across the Middle East. A 200kg (440 lb.) Shahed can fly more than 1,000 km to deliver a 50-kg warhead, yet costs as little as $50,000.
In contrast, a $100m Typhoon fighter’s AIM-120 medium-range air-to-air missiles cost $1m apiece, and its AIM-132 short-range air-to-air missiles $250,000 each. Even if a Typhoon engages Shaheds with its gun, the cost disparity is striking. It costs more than the price of a single Shahed just to fuel up a Eurofighter Typhoon for a three-hour defensive air patrol and maintain it after it lands.
The high cost of European warplanes and munitions weighs on stockpiles. By favoring capability over capacity for both aircraft and munitions, the continent’s air forces have steadily shrunk in recent decades along with their munitions inventories.
Iran’s concentration on volume means it should be able to continue drone attacks far longer than France and the UK, and can sustain its aerial defense against them. Even the US and Israel, with their much bigger air forces and munitions stocks, risk losing a long war of aerial attrition.
Europe must pivot to affordable air defenses, and fast. It’s a lesson Ukraine learned the hard way as Moscow scaled up its deployment of drones, including the Iranian-designed Shaheds, some of which are now built in Russia.
Since Ukraine’s pivot to affordable air defenses, other European capitals have had ample warning that their boutique forces are unprepared for a new era of warfare. But they ignored the signals and now have to transform while under fire.
Europe must be prepared to defend against thousands, or even tens of thousands, of Shahed-style attack drones launched in barrages day after day. Given the scale of a maximal Shahed campaign (Russia has launched nearly 60,000 of them at Ukraine in just four years), manned fighters firing guided missiles simply cannot be the main line of defense.
High-end ground-based air defenses, such as Patriot and SAMP/T missile batteries, are similarly unaffordable and unavailable, and equally unsuited to the task. Instead, European countries should follow Ukraine’s example and develop layered air defense in which the most numerous assets are also the cheapest.
Ukraine’s anti-Shahed system works, and it’s common for Ukrainian defenders to take down 90% of drones in any particular mass raid. They have successfully done it once or twice a week, month after month, year after year, while also fending off other aerial threats. On March 23-24, for example, Russia launched its biggest air attack of the war using 982 missiles and drones. More than 900 of the drones were destroyed, the military said.
The outermost layer in the Ukrainian system is wide-area radio jamming that scrambles the satellite communication most Shaheds depend on for navigation. The cost: a few million dollars to protect an entire city for potentially years at a time.
The middle layer is roving aerial patrols, which don’t always involve expensive manned fighters. Instead, they might include helicopters, propeller-driven training planes, or even light cargo aircraft with gunners aiming out of their cockpits or cabins. There are also cheap, fast interceptor drones that range just a few kilometers but strike their targets with enough force to destroy them.
Ground-based gun teams form the innermost layer, taking aim at any drones that get through. The gunners might ride in pickup trucks with heavy machine guns bolted to their beds, or in German-made Gepard tracked gun vehicles first made in the 1960s. It costs a gun team a few hundred dollars in fuel and ammunition to shoot down a Shahed.
There are signs that European air forces are adapting. The UK’s radar-cued Rapid Sentry system, deployed to Erbil in northern Iraq, reportedly downed about 50 Iranian drones in the first three weeks of March — roughly 10 times as many as RAF fighters shot down in the same period.
But the RAF needs dozens of Rapid Sentries rather than the handful it currently possesses. Every European military should urgently be scaling up affordable air defenses, starting yesterday.
David Axe is a journalist, author, and filmmaker in South Carolina. For 20 years, he has covered war for Forbes, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vice, The Village Voice, Voice of America, and others. He has reported from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere. His current focus is on covering Russia’s wider war on Ukraine.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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