If the war in Ukraine has shown anything, it is that the skies are no longer impassable. The large volume of (something that is possible largely thanks to the low manufacturing cost of some models) allows repeated massive attacks to be launched that anti-aircraft defenses are not capable of stopping in their entirety.
A good example of this type of offensive is the one carried out by Ukrainian forces just a year ago. kyiv smuggled drones into Russia and launched them against airfields. unmanned vehicles 41 Russian fighter planes hit and caused damage worth 7 billion dollars (about 6,000 million euros, at the current exchange rate).
NATO has drawn two conclusions of Operation Spiderweb. It is a new type of military tactics that can be imitated and, in turn, is a new class of threat that must be studied in depth with the aim of preventing enemies from making similar movements.
In that sense, the deputy supreme commander of NATO’s Allied Forces in Europe, John Stringerhas warned, in statements to which aerial threats are now much more numerous and have greater range than existed the last time the West fought a major war against a similarly capable adversary.
The result is that Western countries can no longer take for granted that their territories remain safe as their armies fight abroad, as powerful missiles and low-cost, long-range drones have become an aerial threat to places once considered safe.
To this, we must also add the problem that the low cost of weapons makes it possible to frequently carry out saturation attacks, in which air defenses lose a significant portion of their effectiveness as they are not capable of shooting down a large number of targets simultaneously.
