Specialise European Air Forces

The paper’s key findings are:

• As NATO’s European air forces attempt to transition towards a primary focus on the threat from Russia, and the need to have credible capability in that high-threat, high-intensity context, most are likely to struggle to do so without reducing the breadth of mission sets and capability areas that they currently attempt to cover.

• Fast jet pilots must work in an extremely physically and mentally demanding role. Despite the vital role of advanced synthetic training, many European air forces will struggle to afford sufficient live and synthetic flight hours to enable pilots to build and maintain the levels of skill required in a Russia–NATO threat context across the full range of missions possible for modern multi-role fighter aircraft.

• Even where air forces can provide sufficient high-quality training flying, both live and synthetic, to generate pilot mission competencies at the required level across the full multi-role mission set, this is not enough to ensure effectiveness without adequate stockpiles of suitable munitions. In particular, the munitions required to be effective against Russian ground-based air defences and Russian combat aircraft in an air-to-air role are very expensive and would be required in much greater quantities than currently owned by most European air forces in any serious clash with Russia.

• Therefore, to afford a meaningful stockpile of suppression and destruction of enemy air defences, long-range precision strike or long-range air-to-air missiles, most European nations would need to either greatly increase defence spending allocated to combat air, or cut other areas of capability, to afford to specialise in building out munitions stocks required for one or more specific mission sets.

• The political and geographical location of different countries, as well as the type of combat aircraft currently operated or on order, will affect the potential mission areas in which any given country could credibly and relatively quickly build up seriously high-intensity readiness.

• Countries can only take risk against some mission areas in order to specialise in being really good at others if this approach is pursued in close coordination with trusted allies who are doing the same in a complementary way, to ensure that, as European air forces, all the required mission areas are well covered.

• However, the current approach of most states attempting to field small multirole fighter fleets that has preserved apparent sovereign freedom of choice in the relatively permissive or semi-permissive operations since the end of the Cold War may not be practical as a deterrent to Russia. Meeting the cost of ensuring that pilots are sufficiently well trained to survive and be effective against the high-end ground-based and airborne threats that they would face, and that they have adequate stockpiles of suitable munitions, decoys and other enablers, is likely to only be possible for most European air forces if they focus such efforts on a few mission sets each. The only viable alternative would seem to be a huge increase in funding to fill in the gaps across the board.

Introduction

Traditional assumptions about the direct threat Russian forces could pose to NATO countries in the coming years need to be urgently revised following the failure of the Ukrainian summer offensive in 2023 and Russia’s unfortunately successful pivot to a long war strategy throughout 2024. After a low point in early 2023, Russian industry has significantly increased production output of weapons and ammunition of almost all kinds. This trend is likely to accelerate, as the Russian parliament approved a 68% increase in defence spending in the state plans for the 2024/25 financial year compared with 2023/24. The increase will take Russian military spending to over 6% of GDP and cement a structural economic bias towards long-term conflict, as well as the industrial output to support such a posture. Depleted European stocks of heavy equipment and ammunition – due to donations to Ukraine not having been replaced promptly in many cases – are exacerbating the worsening battlefield situation in Ukraine and the risks posed by the reconstitution of Russian conventional military capabilities.

Dependence on the US

For decades, conventional deterrence in Europe of any potential Russian threat to NATO has been essentially assured by the overwhelming power of the US military. Unfortunately, the growth of Chinese capabilities is forcing the US to reallocate ever more of its military capacity to the Indo-Pacific at the expense of other theatres. Many in the Pentagon assess that the period of greatest risk of the Chinese military attempting to blockade or invade Taiwan (sometimes known as the “Davidson Window”) is 2026–28. In the event of a dangerous stand-off or a military conflict in the Indo-Pacific during the coming decade, it is likely that a high proportion of American fifth-generation fighters, electronic attack aircraft, long-range stand-off weapons, air and missile defence systems, and tankers deployed in European Command and Central Command would be transferred to Indo-Pacific Command. This would greatly reduce NATO combat power in Europe. The demands of such a conflict would also limit US capacity to provide rapid large-scale resupply of long-range munitions and spare parts to European militaries in the event of a concurrent Russian attack on NATO territory.

Those who argue that the military threat from either China in the Indo-Pacific or from Russia in Europe should be prioritised as the more likely miss a fundamental point. China has a strong interest in supporting Russia to ensure it remains a serious military threat in Europe, as that will split NATO attention and resources. More importantly, in the event of a serious stand-off or actual conflict with China that leaves US forces largely fixed in the Indo-Pacific in the mid-to-late 2020s, Russia will have a strong incentive to take a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to break NATO by testing Article 5 while the US is unable to reinforce NATO effectively. Another factor that must be considered is the risk that President Donald Trump follows through with his repeated threats to either officially or de facto remove US defence guarantees to other NATO nations if transatlantic relations sour during his second term.

To prevent a future war with Russia, NATO’s European member states must be capable of largely shouldering the task of deterring Russian military aggression. Historically, states do not start premeditated wars that they perceive as likely to be long, costly and with an uncertain outcome; the opportunistic and cynical nature of aggression under President Vladimir Putin suggests Russia is no exception. However, once at war, Russia has repeatedly shown an unmatched capacity to absorb catastrophic casualties and setbacks without backing down. Deterrence, therefore, requires a demonstrable capability to rapidly defeat any opportunistic aggression by Russia, thus denying the Kremlin any perceived opportunity for an “easy win” that could discredit Article 5 and NATO’s collective defence.

The Vital Role of Air Superiority

Air superiority is a necessity if European states are to rapidly demonstrate the capability to quickly repulse Russian conventional aggression. Without air superiority, NATO’s European powers lack the recruitment capacity, munitions manufacturing capacity and defence funding to field the scale and quality of high-readiness ground forces and land-based firepower needed to rapidly and definitively repulse a determined Russian attack. Land power is vital, of course, and heavy manoeuvre forces – such as those being built up by Poland, Finland and Germany – are essential to deterrence. However, such forces are still dependent on the ISTAR overwatch and massive firepower that air superiority enables for sustainable effectiveness against larger, battle-hardened Russian forces which possess far more ground-based firepower. This is especially the case for forward-deployed forces since, as the potential aggressor, Russia can mass forces at a point and time of its choosing, whereas NATO has committed to defending “every inch of Alliance territory”. Thus, to avoid being left seriously vulnerable when or if US rapid reinforcement is unlikely, European air forces must be able to achieve and exploit air superiority in a contested area. This requires the capacity to locate, suppress and then destroy the Russian surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems that currently would make air superiority over contested Alliance territory impossible to achieve without a major US suppression and destruction of enemy air defences (SEAD/DEAD) campaign, while also keeping the fighters and long-range missile-carrying bombers of the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) at bay.

Currently, few European air forces have the stockpiles of specialised weapons needed, nor dedicate the focused aircrew training time required, to field high-end SEAD/DEAD capabilities. As a result, NATO’s practical SEAD/DEAD capabilities against Russia in a direct conflict are heavily dependent on the US Air Force and the US Navy’s Carrier Air Wings. While SEAD/DEAD is perhaps the most glaring area of Europe’s dependence, there are other critical mission sets – such as airborne electronic warfare (EW) and penetrating ISTAR – that are also almost exclusively provided by the US. The primary reason for this is that most other NATO air forces spread their limited budgets thinly by trying to maintain and modernise a range of different multi-role fighters, helicopter fleets and relatively small quantities of enablers such as aerial refuelling tankers. Even for those states that successfully cover these “basics”, there is precious little money and usually too few personnel to allocate to comparatively specialised capabilities such as electronic attack (EA) or penetrating ISTAR.

Greater Specialisation Needed

To change this situation quickly, European air forces should explore specialisation along national lines within the Alliance – accepting risk against some mission sets/capabilities in order to free up the required funding, personnel and enabling capabilities that will allow other mission sets to be enacted more credibly. This paper aims to explain why such specialisation is necessary and to suggest areas where collective, coordinated mission specialisation could enable a rapid improvement in the combat capability of European NATO air forces, thus helping to deter future Russian aggression. The paper does this by examining two primary areas, divided over two chapters: Chapter I looks at fast jet pilot training and currency requirements for high-intensity conflict scenarios; and Chapter II examines the requirements and costs for suitable munitions across key mission sets. The paper concludes with some recommendations, including several examples of potential specialisation choices that might be made, given: (i) the resource and force structure outlook for certain states’ air forces; and (ii) the differing political conditions often attached to the use of kinetic force for some Allied nations.

The paper draws heavily on interviews with instructor pilots and unit leaders conducted during research visits by the author to frontline fighter units across multiple NATO air forces throughout 2023 and 2024, often including backseat observation during numerous live training sorties. This research included frontline visits with the RAF, the French Air Force, the US Air Force, the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Italian Air Force, the German Air Force, the Royal Netherlands Air Force, the Swedish Air Force and the Finnish Air Force. The paper was also informed by observations and interviews with senior leaders and instructors accrued during multinational training and exercises at the NATO Tactical Leadership Programme in Albacete, Spain, and at NATO Air Command in Ramstein, Germany. It also builds directly on similar research conducted throughout 2022, which examined the gaps in NATO air force capabilities exposed by the return of overt Russian military aggression to the European security landscape.

I. Pilot Proficiency

Creating and maintaining a truly combat-ready force of multi-role fast jet aircrew is one of the most difficult and expensive tasks that Western militaries regularly undertake. A frequent misperception among non-specialists is that the difficult challenge is training pilots to fly fast jets. It is true that it takes anywhere from three to seven years and millions of pounds/dollars to train a pilot to fly a succession of faster, heavier and more complex aircraft to the standard required to join a frontline fast jet squadron, but this is actually only the beginning of the process.

When aircrew complete their conversion onto a type of fast jet, they are qualified to fly the aircraft in question – such as an F-16, Typhoon or F-35 – and will have been taught how to operate the sensors, subsystems and weapons, as well as learning basic tactics, in the operational conversion unit, before graduating to the frontline. At this stage of their careers they will already have attained several hundred flying hours and around 80–100 hours of live and simulated flying on the frontline type onto which they are converting. According to recent figures released by the UK’s minister of state for the armed forces, the cost of training a British pilot to this stage is approximately £5.4 million. Despite this, in the fast jet world such pilots are still generally not considered to be ready to go into combat: additional mission-specific tactical and procedural training and testing by the instructor pilots on their frontline squadron are needed before they can be certified as “combat-ready” for simple mission sets.

In the RAF, as with many other Western air forces, the first mission that most junior pilots are qualified to fly when they are certified as combat ready is quick reaction alert (QRA). QRA is essentially basic air defence and peacetime air policing, where pairs of armed fighters are maintained at a few minutes’ notice, 24/7, to scramble to intercept, identify, assist or even (if necessary) shoot down unidentified or unresponsive civilian or military aircraft inside or close to national airspace. The mission carries huge responsibility and requires pilots to be on duty for 24 hours at a time, ready to scramble without knowing, initially, the situation they will face. However, in terms of tactical complexity it is relatively simple, since in most QRA scenarios there is no ground-based threat and the assumption is that even if the aircraft is from a hostile state such as Russia, the encounter will not involve weapons release – although, of course, the aircraft are armed, and the risk is always there. Despite the relative simplicity of QRA sorties, the workload and the demands placed on pilots during them can be intense. As such, newly combat-ready pilots with perhaps 100 hours of fast jet flying time and a year on a frontline squadron will remain junior “wingmen” – meaning that in the air they follow and provide support/backup for a more experienced formation leader.

Different air forces have different approaches to how quickly pilots can progress through various qualifications and which mission sets are prioritised. For example, in the RAF or the US Air Force, new pilots are typically combat ready within six to eight months of joining a frontline squadron, and usually progress to their two-ship lead qualifications in the second year. Exceptional pilots might be judged ready to undertake the qualification to lead the basic formation for more advanced tactics, which is four fighters – known as a four-ship – by the end of their first three-year frontline tour. Most others will achieve their four-ship lead qualification midway through their second frontline tour of three years. Particularly tactically competent pilots might then be judged suitable as candidates to attempt the extremely demanding RAF Qualified Weapons Instructor or American Fighter Weapons Instructor courses after a single frontline tour (although two tours is preferred due to the pass rate on the course generally being higher for candidates who have more experience). By contrast, progress is slower in the Swedish Air Force or the Finnish Air Force, where a dispersed operating model and requirement to fly missions regularly against peer (Russian) air threats at low altitudes in bad weather and at night as standard equates to higher complexity. Pilots are likely to be combat ready around a year after joining the frontline, but are generally not considered for two-ship lead upgrade until at least three years on squadron; four-ship lead qualifications usually come after a minimum of about six years. Swedish or Finnish pilots will have typically served about 10 years on a frontline squadron before some are considered suitable candidates for weapons instructor/mission commander training.

These total training times should be understood in a context where the traditional minimum NATO standard required for fast jet aircrew in terms of annual flying hours is 180, of which 40 can be in a full mission simulator. However, different air forces’ pilots accrue different flying hour totals depending on financial position, simulator capabilities and cultural attitudes; and 120–40 live flying hours a year is now fairly common across Europe. With costs per flying hour for most fast jets sitting in the range of tens of thousands of pounds/dollars, it is not hard to see why training proficient combat-ready fast jet aircrew is extremely expensive.

Physical Demands on Pilots

The extent of pilot training hours can seem strange to the non-specialist, given the sophistication of modern fly-by-wire flight controls and consequently how comparatively easy modern fighter aircraft are to fly from a “stick and rudder” point of view. It becomes more logical, however, once it is understood that a fast jet cockpit is a physically demanding environment to work in, and quite how many things fast jet pilots must be able to do simultaneously in order to perform their missions safely and effectively. Pilots work strapped into rocket-powered ejection seats under a canopy (which acts as a “greenhouse” in hot weather) in seating positions that often rapidly become uncomfortable during longer sorties; pilots also have to wear many layers of uncomfortable protective equipment, which can rapidly cause their bodies to overheat.

During flight, pilots are subjected to constant noise and vibration, as well as rapid pressure changes due to varying altitude, and they must deal with the rapid onset of often sustained g-forces whenever the aircraft is being manoeuvred at high speeds. The g-forces in particular place huge strain on the body, especially during basic fighter manoeuvres (BFM) – otherwise known as dogfighting – or when “cranking”, which involves turning hard and sometimes diving to evade incoming missile threats. Under high-g forces of 7–9 g, internal organs are displaced by several inches, and pilots must constantly strain their core and leg muscles and force themselves to pressure-breathe to keep enough blood in their head to avoid loss of vision and consciousness. Staying conscious under high-g is hard work and physically painful for passengers, or in a centrifuge for training, but fast jet pilots must continue to work through it. This means monitoring their radar and EW systems, and maintaining situational awareness through the sensors in the cockpit, constantly mentally assessing their own and adversaries’ weapons ranges and kill probability as each aircraft manoeuvres, and craning their necks to look behind and above to keep visual tally on the enemy and other members of their own formation. All the while, they must make split-second tactical decisions, and constantly communicate with other members of the formation and air battle managers on the ground or in allied AWACS aircraft to maintain deconfliction and tactical effectiveness. For those not regularly acclimatised to such extreme conditions, the overwhelming physical sensations and information overload are also often accompanied by rapid spatial disorientation and severe airsickness. This is one of the reasons why pilots – especially in the first few years of their frontline careers – need to fly at least two to three hours per week to stay physically acclimatised, and be able to work efficiently and constantly learn additional skills despite the intense physical and mental demands of the fast jet cockpit environment.

Increasing Mission Complexity

When dealing with mission sets beyond BFM and QRA, things become increasingly complex. For example, relatively basic beyond visual range (BVR) tactics involve four-ship formations operating together as a group. This allows them to efficiently allocate radar scan areas and settings to search for (and target) multiple incoming enemy aircraft across a large vertical and horizontal area. It also allows mutual defensive support, and presents opponents with multiple concurrent missile threats as the distance between opposing formations narrows, which hopefully keeps them flying defensively and thus unable to gain a positional or energy advantage. However, employing such tactics requires experienced pilots who can lead a formation of four aircraft, keep track of what all of them are doing in real time, and coordinate them while manoeuvring hard and managing their own radar, weapons and deconfliction. Such four-ship lead pilots must also be familiar enough with such tactics to plan, brief and debrief each mission thoroughly so that all involved learn lessons from it. This involves providing detailed critical feedback and corrective guidance on every manoeuvre, every missile shot, and every decision taken by friendly and enemy aircraft in a flight – which for complex missions can take many hours. The tactical complexity, weapon and fuel management, deconfliction and communication requirements placed on pilots increases even further for missions such as those that might be required against Russian forces, which would involve not only a hostile air element but also ground-based SAM threats and/or ground targets.

The only way that even carefully selected human beings can reach the level of capability required to be effective operators of fast jets in a complex combat environment is by gradually building up currency in myriad component skill sets involved in operating such aircraft, to the point that each task requires very little conscious mental effort or capacity. At each stage where sufficient familiarity has been reached in one set of skills, mental capacity is freed up, enabling pilots to learn to perform additional mission-specific tasks and ultimately also to undertake tactical leadership functions in the air. However, this means that mission currency is critical. If pilots are not able to fly multiple times per week – both for real and in the simulator – they will rapidly start to lose familiarity with key procedures and skill sets for certain missions. The less that pilots fly, the less mental capacity they have for tactical decision-making when flying, because they are no longer able to do the huge number of more basic tasks smoothly without conscious thought while under heavy physical stress. Consequently, the more mission sets that a given fighter force is liable to perform and thus compelled to train for, the more flying hours it will need to be funded for, so that its pilots can gain and then maintain the requisite skills and ability to perform those mission sets under pressure, while managing all the other tasks that must be constantly undertaken in the air.

Current Trade-Offs

Many NATO air forces fly multi-role fighter aircraft, but currently do not fund sufficient core flying training hours for their aircrew to allow them to maintain high-level proficiency beyond the most common mission sets – meaning that they do not necessarily have truly multi-role capability at any given point in time. During the past 20 years, this has not necessarily been a major problem. Most multi-role fighter pilots who were deployed to perform complex close air support (CAS) and/or battlefield interdiction tasks during counterinsurgency or overseas intervention operations had the luxury of a “work up” training period prior to their deployment. Because campaigns such as Iraq (from 2003) and Afghanistan (from 2006) were enduring operations, fighter units were deployed on rotation from across many air forces, and before each rotation into theatre, pilots would generally undertake anything from several weeks to several months of intensive and focused pre-deployment training to make sure that their CAS skills and other interoperability requirements – such as multi-type tanker qualifications – were fully current. In the current context, however, the skills needed to be effective and survivable when operating as part of NATO’s Regional Defence Plans, including complex mission planning and mutually supportive multinational four-ship tactics in offensive counter-air (OCA), SEAD/DEAD and contested CAS, need to be ready in a crisis, without long work-up times.

Consequently, where funding for core flying training hours is a major constraint, it may be more effective for air forces to purchase light fighter types such as the Gripen or the newest variants of F-16, which lack some of the top-end capabilities of more expensive types such as the F-35, Typhoon or Rafale. Fighters that are cheap and efficient to maintain and operate can be flown much more for a given flying training budget and so can often enable pilots from cash-constrained air forces to achieve higher levels of mission proficiency and thus capability – at least in non-penetrating mission sets such as defensive counter-air (DCA) – than if they were flying more expensive jets that they could not train with very often.

Similarly, it is a false economy for countries that operate more expensive heavy or stealth fighter types to try to save money by not funding enough flying hours to hit the NATO requirement. Doing so means that aircrew may struggle to be genuinely capable across the multiple high-threat mission sets that those aircraft were designed to be capable of performing in high-threat scenarios. This is especially problematic in air forces such as the RAF that heavily task their fast jet fleets with conducting relatively small-scale operational and exercise deployments all over the world. If operational flying hours – many of which are spent in long transits or on combat air patrol (CAP) with little training value – are substituted for core flying hours, then key skills and currencies for high-intensity mission sets will quickly begin to atrophy across the force.

Where it is not possible to fund additional core flying training hours to allow pilots to genuinely gain and retain high levels of currency across multiple complex mission sets beyond “basic” QRA, permissive CAS and air-to-air proficiencies, the logical alternative is to reduce the number of mission sets that aircrew train to fulfil. This can be done either by assigning individual squadrons specific mission sets on which to focus a greater proportion of their training time and hold primary liability for; or, at a national level, by deprioritising certain mission areas (to which other Allies are better suited) in order to concentrate training resources on making sure that some mission sets are deliverable to a very high standard as a specialised national contribution within NATO.

Although specialisation in medium and small air forces would reduce overall sovereign “choice” in which mission sets to tackle in any given campaign (and has been avoided by most air forces during the post-Cold War decades as a result), the alternative multi-role approach entails a loss of high-end skills. This was generally judged to be acceptable when most operations were expected to be relatively permissive counterinsurgency and intervention campaigns in which massive US military support led the way. However, the costs of trying to maintain a full spectrum of multi-role proficiencies with limited core training hours and regular deployments is much more problematic when facing the threat systems that Russian forces deploy, and is likely to lead to serious losses in an actual conflict. Where nations have retained either a primary focus on deterring Russia or where a mission set has been maintained that inherently focuses on high-threat scenarios such as SEAD, unit-level specialisation already exists.

The Swedish Model

In Sweden, for example, despite relatively healthy live flying hours of around 120–60 hours per year, each of the country’s three fighter wings has a different multi-role training focus. Every Swedish fighter pilot flying the Gripen C/D first learns to be combat ready in the BVR air-to-air tactics that would be used in the event of a major war with Russia, and all maintain both BVR and BFM tactical proficiency throughout their careers. Then, depending on which fighter wing they are stationed at, pilots will spend most of the remainder of their flying hours training for a specific secondary mission set. F 21 Wing at Luleå specialises in CAS, while F 17 Wing at Ronneby specialises in anti-surface warfare (ASuW) and maritime tactical reconnaissance in cooperation with the Swedish Navy; F 7 Wing at Såtenäs, meanwhile, specialises in producing instructor pilots responsible for converting new pilots onto the Gripen C/D, and also maintains ASuW proficiency. This approach means that even with flying hour totals that are lower than some other NATO air forces, and given somewhat limited use of simulator resources for tactical training, the Swedish Air Force in aggregate is still able to generate and sustain high levels of pilot proficiency across all its core mission sets. At the national level, the Swedish Air Force has – unlike all other European air forces – maintained a very credible ASuW capability. However, currently, Sweden has little in the way of credible SEAD/DEAD or penetrating ISTAR capabilities. It is a prime example of the benefits in terms of credible high-intensity capabilities that can be maintained by medium-sized air forces that choose to specialise in mission sets both at the unit level and the national level.

Other European Approaches to Specialisation

There are other European examples, such as the almost exclusive training focus on the SEAD mission by the Tornado ECR crews within the Luftwaffe’s Taktisches Luftwaffengeschwader 51 and the Italian Air Force’s 155° Gruppo. These units will soon be converted – to the Eurofighter EK variant in Germany and the F-35A in the case of the Italian Air Force – but should retain their focus on the SEAD mission when fully re-equipped. While the Tornado ECR is outdated as a platform, the mission training focus of the units which fly it means that the relevant aircrew possess rare skills among NATO peers, as they are able to specialise in understanding Russian threat systems and the integration tactics required to perform SEAD against them in a supportive role within composite air operations (COMAOs). Even with comparatively high numbers of available flying training hours, the US Air Force in Europe takes a similar approach. Each of the F-16 units based in the theatre maintains multi-role proficiencies, but has a specialist area of expertise to which they devote a greater proportion of their flying training time, and for which they are specifically equipped. For the 52nd Fighter Wing at Spangdahlem that specialist mission set is SEAD, while for the 31st Fighter Wing at Aviano it is CAS. When called to operations at short notice, both units consistently perform better in these two roles than other units that maintain a less focused multi-role training syllabus.

Expanding the Specialist Approach

There is a strong case for other NATO countries in Europe to explore a similar approach, through specialisation at either the fighter wing/squadron level or the national level. Modern air combat between states is highly punishing for “spirited amateurs”. The lethality of modern threat systems and the tactical complexity involved in executing effective COMAOs against Russian ground-based and aerial threats mean that genuine combat readiness and credibility require intensive training for key mission sets such as SEAD/DEAD and OCA. Consequently, NATO aircrew will have to either fly significantly more training hours (both live and synthetic), or better focus the hours they have by specialising in fewer mission sets.

As will be explained in the next chapter, the case for specialisation is strengthened when one examines munitions requirements for the various mission sets involved in establishing air superiority against Russian forces. After all, even the best trained pilot is of little utility in a high-end conflict if their air force does not have access to a ready stockpile of suitable munitions for the mission sets for which they are to be employed.

II. Munitions

Like many other aspects of Western military capability, the munitions stocks held by most NATO air forces have been significantly distorted by the specific requirements of decades of expeditionary counterinsurgency and stabilisation operations. These were typically long campaigns against irregular forces that lacked any serious surface-to-air threat or air force, and where ground force numbers were limited by political considerations, making them heavily reliant on CAS to enable them to defend themselves while spread thinly over large areas. Consequently, during the 2000s and early 2010s, most NATO air forces pursued munitions strategies that prioritised the acquisition of bombs and short-range missiles with high accuracy and limited explosive power (to minimise collateral damage), which were also affordable enough to use on a sustained basis during long campaigns.

Unfortunately, these are generally not the kind of weapons that are needed to roll back Russia’s ground-based air defences and conduct OCA and DCA at large scale in a high-intensity defensive NATO context. Ordering and increasing stockpiles of more suitable munitions is, therefore, essential and urgent – but this will inevitably be expensive, making it an additional argument for national specialisation.

Current European Air-Launched Munitions Types

In recent times, the RAF, for example, has standardised air-to-ground armament for fast jets around the Paveway IV dual-mode laser and GPS/INS-guided bomb and the Brimstone anti-armour/low collateral missile. This consolidation around only a few munition types enabled these sophisticated weapons to be procured at significant scale from high-efficiency production lines that operated continuously (but at relatively low output volumes) over the past decade. The development of long-range stand-off weapons during much of the post-Cold War period, meanwhile, was limited to obsolescence-mitigation upgrades for the Storm Shadow cruise missile that was developed in the mid-1990s, and procurement volumes were low. Likewise, procurement volumes of the advanced ramjet-powered European Meteor missile for BVR air-to-air combat and the US-made AIM-120C/D AMRAAM (advanced medium-range air-to-air missile) were very low by Cold War standards, since there was perceived to be a very limited air-to-air threat. Cluster bombs and the WE.177 air-delivered tactical nuclear bomb were retired in the 1990s, and the ALARM anti-radiation missile for SEAD was retired from service, without replacement, in 2013.

The consolidation of the RAF air-to-surface arsenal was arguably a justifiable response to the operational pressures of Iraq, Afghanistan and latterly Libya and Operation Shader. However, the consequence today is that the RAF has no air-delivered weapons suitable for SEAD/DEAD and only a limited remaining inventory of Storm Shadow cruise missiles capable of deep strikes against fixed targets such as bunkers. In contrast to almost any other country with operational F-35 squadrons, the UK’s F-35B fleet is currently only equipped with free-fall Paveway IVs for strikes against ground targets – an almost comically inadequate weapon for any seriously contested airspace, let alone for use inside a Russian integrated air defence system (IADS).

During the same period as the RAF developments outlined above, France developed its own range of AASM “Hammer” (Armement Air-Sol Modulaire, or Modular Air-to-Ground Armament) bombs to provide the primary air-to-ground armament for its Mirage 2000D and Rafale fleets. The AASM can be used with 250-lb, 500-lb, 1,000-lb and 2,000-lb explosive sections and incorporates laser and GPS guidance, with the additional option of imaging seeker heads for automatic terminal guidance against fixed targets. The AASM can also be fitted with a rocket booster section and pop-out glide wings to significantly extend its stand-off range in contested areas, especially when employed from low altitudes with a pop-up manoeuvre. Consequently, the AASM series is significantly more usable in contested airspace than most NATO bomb families or short-range missile types, thanks to greater stand-off range and terminal accuracy in GPS-denied environments. They have already proven useful in Ukraine when fired from the Ukraine Air Force’s Mig-29 and Su-27 fighters in pop-up lofting profiles after a low-level ingress to minimise risks from Russian SAM systems. Excellent integration with the air-to-ground radar and other systems on the Rafale means that this munition would be significantly more effective still in either French or Greek service. However, the trade-off is a higher unit cost than other utility weapons such as the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) or Paveway II/IV families that form the primary air-to-surface armament across European NATO air forces. The AASM is also still not particularly suited for use as a dedicated SEAD/DEAD munition, since it lacks the range to engage long-range Russian systems inside a layered IADS, and is not designed to engage highly mobile targets.

Most other European air forces rely on US-made JDAM GPS-guided and Paveway series laser and GPS-guided bombs for their air-to-surface weaponry. More recently, a significant number, including the Royal Netherlands Air Force, the Swedish Air Force and the Italian Air Force, have also acquired the 250-lb GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) to provide a low-cost stand-off capability. However, as a glide bomb, the SDB is slow and highly susceptible to being intercepted by ground-based air defence systems, and it is also reliant on GPS, which means that its terminal accuracy can be degraded by Russian EW systems and it also cannot hit moving targets.

One weapon that is significantly more suitable for a high-intensity conflict in a NATO context is the AGM-88E Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile (AARGM). Italy has acquired the AARGM for its ageing Tornado ECR SEAD fleet, and the missile has been ordered by Germany for its upcoming Eurofighter EK derivative that will replace the ECR in Luftwaffe service. It offers significantly greater range and terminal accuracy than the older AGM-88B HARM (High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile), and also functions as a highly effective airborne electromagnetic intelligence (ELINT) sensor when carried. However, the weapon’s fairly large radar cross-section makes it unlikely to have significantly greater survivability against Russian long-range SAMs and their accompanying short-range air defence (SHORAD) systems than the older AGM-88 HARM family that has been regularly intercepted in Ukraine for around 18 months. Thus, while the baseline AARGM – when used by Tornado ECR or future Eurofighter EK – can provide a very useful suppressive effect that can bolster the effectiveness of a broader COMAO (much like the HARM in previous decades), it is not an ideal primary weapon for destroying SAM threats directly. The Tornado ECR itself is rapidly reaching the end of its operational life and was never designed to face modern layered Russian air defences. The AGM-88E is not currently used by other non-US NATO air forces and, since it does not fit inside the weapons bays of the F-35, it has not been integrated with that aircraft.

Munitions Requirements for SEAD/DEAD Campaigns

The unfortunate truth is that almost all NATO air forces other than the US’s currently lack stockpiles of munitions suitable for a serious SEAD/DEAD campaign. Such weapons need to combine several properties if they are to be effective. First, the weapon must have sufficient stand-off range to be launched from beyond the range at which a hostile IADS can reliably engage the launch aircraft. That stand-off range will obviously vary depending on the penetrating capabilities of the launch aircraft itself, since stealth aircraft can get closer to a given threat than conventional equivalents, for a given level of risk. Second, the weapon must be able to navigate automatically to the rough position of a target SAM or radar system with the aid of an anti-radiation seeker or a GPS-denial-resistant navigation suite that uses coordinates obtained in close to real time, either from the launch aircraft or from other assets that can pass data to the weapon before launch or in-flight. Third, the weapon must be able to actively detect, identify and conduct terminal homing against the target SAM system or radar even once the latter has ceased emitting radar energy and is moving to avoid the incoming missile. Finally, it must be able to reliably penetrate the self-defence capabilities of Russian SAM and SHORAD systems such as the SA-15 Tor and the SA-22 Pantsir; either by being cheap enough to use in large numbers – simultaneously and on a sustainable basis – or by being manoeuvrable, stealthy or fast enough in terminal phases of flight to be hard to shoot down. These requirements are very different from the characteristics of the utility weapons that most NATO air forces are equipped with after decades of counterinsurgency focus, and there are only a few currently available options that can meet them.

Candidate Munitions

The first weapon that could meet these needs is the significantly more capable and stealthier extended-range variant of the AARGM – the AARGM-ER. In Europe, the AARGM-ER has so far been ordered by Finland, Poland and the Netherlands for use with their F-35A fleets, with likely delivery timeframes commencing in the mid-to-late 2020s. A rough comparison of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) notices related to 265 missiles for the Netherlands (for $700 million) and 360 missiles for Poland (for $1.275 billion) suggests a unit cost of between $2.64 million and $3.54 million per missile. Training, mission planning tools and other non-recurring costs will also have been included in the DSCA figures, however, so the cost of each missile is probably closer to $2.53 million–$3 million. An even more advanced derivative of the AARGM-ER is also in development, called the Stand-in Attack Weapon, although initially this will be for US Air Force F-35As only.

The second option for a suitable SEAD/DEAD munition is the UK-developed SPEAR miniature cruise missile, a 250-lb-class turbojet-powered weapon designed for a stand-off range of more than 140 km and featuring a millimetric radar seeker to allow autonomous terminal homing against SAMs and other mobile targets within a target area. Up to eight will fit inside the weapons bays of a single F-35 and the weapon is designed specifically to work with that aircraft’s advanced threat detection, geolocation and targeting capabilities. SPEAR can also be carried on triple launchers by Typhoon, and could provide a useful stand-off SEAD/DEAD effector to support F-35s further forward in an IADS if the weapon were fully integrated and purchased in significant quantities. However, while SPEAR has been in development since 2010 for use with the F-35B, technical challenges and funding limitations have caused serious delays. These delays, coupled with the Ministry of Defence’s limited order size for production weapons, mean that the cost per weapon is high, and initial operational capability on the F-35B may not be achieved until 2028. The US Joint Programme Office has instead given integration priority within the F-35’s flight test and software upgrade schedule to other US and Allied weapons that have been ordered in greater numbers by more countries – such as the AARGM-ER and the Norwegian Joint Strike Missile.

The Joint Strike Missile, known as the AGM-184A Kraken in US service, represents another potentially useful option for SEAD/DEAD munitions. This subsonic air-launched cruise missile can be carried either externally or internally in the F-35A. According to US Department of Defense budget documents, the weapon features an imaging infra-red seeker for terminal guidance and has a combined GPS, inertial and terrain reference navigation system that allows it to be effective in “GPS-denied environments”, with stealth properties that confer survivability “against advanced threat systems”. However, like the much faster but probably shorter-ranged AARGM-ER, the Joint Strike Missile costs about $3 million per missile (using the US order of 268 missiles, for $848 million, as a guide).

Cost Implications and Trade-Offs

What should be clear at this stage is that dedicated SEAD/DEAD munitions that are capable of reliably penetrating the defences around key Russian SAM systems to start dismantling the ground-based IADS are very expensive, specialised weapons. There are also only a fairly small number of potentially suitable existing weapons that meet the requirements. It is encouraging to see Norway, the Netherlands, Poland and Finland investing in Joint Strike Missile and AARGM-ER at a reasonable scale. Italy has also brought the AARGM into service with the Tornado ECR to replace HARM, and with a planned order for AARGM-ER to equip its F-35As, these are causes for celebration. However, for all these countries, the quantities purchased so far would still run out fairly quickly in a major campaign, and delivery timeframes remain a concern. There is potential for the UK to significantly improve its own capabilities in this area with a large joint order of SPEAR and its stand-in EA variant, the SPEAR-EW. To continue – and ideally rapidly expand – these European SEAD/DEAD munitions purchasing efforts, it will probably be necessary for several of these states to forgo building up significant stockpile levels of other types of munitions. The unit costs of AARGM-ER, SPEAR or Joint Strike Missile are many times higher than those of the sort of direct attack munitions that all NATO air forces have become accustomed to fighting with since the end of the Cold War. It therefore stands to reason that countries that purchase serious stockpiles of SEAD/DEAD munitions will have far less money available for CAS, ASuW and air-to-air weapons.

The need to increase stockpiles and the opportunity costs of doing so for SEAD/DEAD munitions also hold true, at least to a certain degree, for air-to-air missiles. European NATO air forces have faced little serious prospect of large-scale air-to-air combat since 1991. Consequently, stockpiles of AIM-120 AMRAAM medium-range radar-guided missiles, the very long-range Meteor missile and short-range missiles such as the AIM-132 ASRAAM, AIM-9X and AIM-2000 IRIS-T are far smaller than stocks of comparable missile classes were during the Cold War, across most air forces. The provision of some of these missiles to Ukraine for use as ground-based air defence interceptors in NASAMS, IRIS-T surface launch standard and surface launched missile and other improvised SAM systems has further eroded stockpiles. However, in any conflict with Russia, units tasked with conducting DCA or OCA would need to expend significant numbers of such weapons over a sustained period. Pilots engaging Russian aircraft would be doing so within the constraints imposed by the ground-based IADS threat, probably requiring a high proportion of BVR engagements. When fighting Russian aircraft equipped with modern radars and long-range missiles such as the R-37M (AA-13), BVR tactics would be likely to rely on significant numbers of low probability-of-kill shots with AMRAAM and Meteor to force hostile pilots to “go defensive” early (thus gaining control of engagements). Such tactics would inherently involve expending multiple weapons per target destroyed in many situations.

DCA missions to intercept salvoes of cruise missiles and Shahed-136/Geran-2 one-way attack drones would also consume large volumes of short-range missiles. This was vividly demonstrated during the DCA missions flown successfully by Israeli, American, British and French fighter aircraft against the Iranian attack on Israel on 13 April 2024. Such DCA interceptions are nevertheless an essential component of any strategy to enable the UK – and NATO more broadly – to rapidly improve integrated air and missile defence coverage in Europe, alongside ground-based SAM systems. Consequently, fielding robust capability across the DCA or OCA mission sets during a conflict of any meaningful duration will require having not only aircrew with sufficient proficiency and currency for the tasks against realistic Russian threats, as well as suitable aircraft, but also a significantly greater inventory of air-to-air missiles than most European air forces currently possess. In the absence of significant increases in overall air force funding, procuring such missiles in sufficient quantities is likely to require most European nations to forgo purchasing other classes of munitions – in other words, de facto mission specialisation.

GPS Dependence

Alongside the need to rapidly expand dedicated SEAD/DEAD, stand-off precision strike and air-to-air munitions stocks, another problem facing NATO air forces is the heavy reliance on GPS guidance for many counterinsurgency-era weapons systems. Russian forces have routinely used a wide range of tactical-, operational- and strategic-level GPS denial and/or spoofing systems during the war against Ukraine, as well as periodically demonstrating the ability to disrupt GPS at significant distances during NATO exercises and via disruption of civilian GPS services in the Baltic region. Perhaps even more worrying for NATO forces is that Russian forces have demonstrated the capability to rapidly adapt their EW tactics and waveforms to seriously degrade the accuracy of Western ground-launched and air-launched GPS-guided munitions. Generally, weapons such as the GMLRS rocket, GBU-62 JDAM and Excalibur GPS-guided artillery shell proved highly effective for the first month or two after they were supplied to Ukrainian forces, but once Russian EW operators started to dial in their effects, the performance of these systems began to rapidly degrade, to the point that in some cases they are now less precise than unguided equivalents.

It is worth noting that the versions of weapons supplied to Ukraine may not be the most up to date in the NATO arsenal, due to security concerns around Russian capture of the most sensitive guidance kits, and so performance in Ukraine should not be taken as entirely indicative of a given weapon’s performance in NATO service. However, for the initial period of any clash with Russian forces, GPS guidance for existing weapons should not be assumed to be 100% reliable, and accuracy is likely to degrade fairly quickly after the initial few weeks of a conflict. Even where a high level of jamming resistance has been successfully designed into a weapon, it will still need to be rapidly upgraded once in service, or else risk losing effectiveness within months.

The net result is a need to invest in a greater number of weapons, ideally across a wider variety of types than a basic analysis of target numbers to stockpiles would suggest, since effectiveness will be degraded by GPS spoofing/denial and other EW techniques, as well as Russian SHORAD coverage. In addition, air forces will need to invest in improving the rate at which they upgrade weapon guidance/seeker programming and aircraft mission data to keep pace with the increasingly rapid pace of adversary EW adaptation.

It should be noted, however, that if a successful SEAD/DEAD campaign can be mounted despite the likely denial or serious degradation of GPS in the first phases of a clash, airpower assets may be able to reduce the EW threat to munitions and sensors over time. This is because a NATO air campaign, in the wake of initial SEAD/DEAD successes, would probably include dedicated efforts to rapidly locate and destroy high-end Russian EW systems. Many of these EW systems must emit significant amounts of energy to have effects at longer ranges, and so can be detected and triangulated relatively easily, especially by the F-35 with its combination of sensor fusion, passive ELINT collection capabilities and geolocation capabilities. Destroying or suppressing major EW systems deployed by forward Russian forces would then allow effective use of GPS guidance against remaining Russian ground forces, at least in localised areas and/or for specific periods of time.

Nevertheless, it appears to be an unavoidable conclusion that regenerating the wartime capacity of the non-US air forces in NATO in a defensive context against Russia in the short to medium term will require states to make hard prioritisation decisions on munitions stockpile investments. The counterinsurgency-era solution of a consolidated mix of precision-guided bombs and short-range missiles optimised for efficient low-volume production and low collateral damage cannot deliver what is needed for SEAD/DEAD, DCA, OCA or deep strike. The relatively high cost of the weapons required for these mission sets means that achieving adequate stockpiles to guarantee reasonable combat endurance and effectiveness will come at a major opportunity cost for most small/medium-sized air forces – unless they also receive significant increases in funding. Given limited industrial production capacity and consequent lengthy delays to desired delivery timescales for many advanced munition types, national specialisation choices on mission sets could also help to enable delivery schedule negotiations and optimisation within NATO for each munition class, replacing the current “first come, first served” approach.

Conclusions and Recommendations

It is vital that Russia be deterred from using a perceived window of opportunity to directly attack a NATO member’s territory if, in the coming years, the US is either militarily overstretched by a concurrent crisis in the Indo-Pacific, or appears to have politically disengaged from European defence commitments. Airpower is critical to rebuilding European NATO members’ ability to collectively repel and thereby deter opportunistic Russian aggression without large-scale reliance on US assets. Put bluntly: Russian leaders are very unlikely to take the risk of direct conflict if they believe that European NATO members can roll back Russia’s IADS through a SEAD/DEAD campaign and establish air superiority over any contested territory. It is difficult to see how non-US NATO members could achieve a similar level of conventional force overmatch in the medium term via any approach other than doubling down on airpower, given the many demographic, industrial and timeframe constraints on attempts to rapidly expand and reform land forces and navies. By contrast, the air assets required to conduct a successful SEAD/DEAD campaign and push back the VKS already largely exist in Europe, with the notable exception of sufficient specialised munitions stocks.

However, it will take significant investment and focus to realise the latent potential of Europe’s air forces in a high-intensity context. In this context, a number of recommendations can be made.

Key Recommendations

• There must be a wider recognition among air forces and ministries of defence that developing and maintaining aircrew proficiency and currency in many of the more complex mission sets – such as OCA, DCA and SEAD/DEAD – require a lot of both live and synthetic flying training time dedicated to those tasks. This means that maintaining multi-role proficiencies to the levels required will require either greater resources for core flying training, or greater mission specialisation and focus during training compared with the approach employed during the past few decades. While simulator time helps with the high-intensity side of aircrew proficiency generation and currency, there are only so many hours in the working week, especially if a small force is constantly deployed on real-world operations.

• Given the high cost of flying hours for modern fast jets, it makes sense for countries that are unable to afford major increases in overall flying hours to concentrate a greater proportion of available flying training hours on the core tasks that they might credibly be allocated by NATO in a war. Such an approach might take the form of either a reduced mission liabilities set for squadrons or air forces as a whole; or a significant reduction in the tempo of overseas deployments and low-end exercise activities to allow the force to focus its valuable time on training for core mission sets.

• Given the costs involved in purchasing relevant quantities of the specialised and expensive munitions needed for high-intensity conflict against Russian forces, there will be opportunity costs elsewhere in the inventory. Medium-sized air forces, therefore, should focus their efforts on specific mission sets rather than aim to purchase a full range of munitions types in totally inadequate quantities.

• Where such specialisation decisions are to be made, however, they must be made in close coordination with other Allies and in accordance with an honest assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of each country.

Technical and Geopolitical Considerations for Implementation

There are a number of assessments that ought to contribute to decisions on increasing the mission specialisation of a given air force, one of the most obvious being the inherent capabilities and drawbacks of its existing aircraft. For example, it makes little sense for a country that exclusively flies the F-35 to focus on DCA, since the aircraft is specifically designed for operations inside contested airspace, incurring a considerable cost and complexity premium to be able to do so. Essentially, the F-35 is a relatively inefficient asset for conducting QRA scrambles or holding DCA CAP stations to guard against hostile aircraft or missiles, at least compared with aircraft designed for those tasks, such as Typhoon or Gripen. Equally, for nations that operate exclusively 4th- or 4.5th-generation fighter fleets, a choice to focus on SEAD/DEAD and OCA would be comparatively inefficient, since, compared with the F-35, their assets inherently require a much greater degree of enablement and suppressive weapons use at scale to be survivable in a high-threat environment.

There are also political and geographical factors that might naturally lead certain NATO countries to choose to specialise in certain mission sets rather than others. For example, political conventions and constraints on the use of lethal force in Germany, alongside its geographic position at the heart of Europe, make it logical to suggest that the Luftwaffe focus primarily on DCA, and potentially supportive SEAD from stand-off, but not DEAD, OCA or deep strike. Experience from multiple conflicts since the end of the Cold War suggests that policy decisions in Berlin to authorise the Bundeswehr to take part in offensive strike operations as part of any NATO response to an attack by Russia would take significantly longer than in many other European capitals. In stark contrast, flying DCA CAPs and holding extended numbers of QRA assets at readiness in multiple locations would probably be authorised almost immediately. Given that the Luftwaffe already has a large and growing fleet of Eurofighter Typhoons, a decision to focus its capability-development efforts on acquiring large quantities of air-to-air munitions and realistic training and exercising for DCA at larger scale would make a great deal of sense. This might well come at the expense of integration and acquisition funding for other strike and stand-off weapons, and of training time for tasks such as interdiction and CAS. However, such a trade-off would be a price worth paying if it enabled Germany to demonstrate commitment to seriously enhancing its practical DCA and QRA capabilities in a NATO context. Such a demonstration by Germany could also provide risk mitigation, allowing Allies such as the Netherlands or Belgium – which have smaller fleets of F-35s – to take more risk on DCA and QRA training, readiness and weapons stocks, thus allowing them to focus on SEAD/DEAD and OCA. Clearly, geographical location relative to other Allied nations and proximity to various potential threat vectors will also influence the options that different countries feel that they have (or do not have) for taking on certain tasks or accepting risks against others.

The Nordic Air Forces grouping is perhaps the best current example of the potential benefits available via cooperative specialisation. Norway and Finland – frontline states with both maritime and land borders with Russia – will soon operate fighter fleets solely comprising F-35As. Denmark will also shortly exchange its F-16s for F-35As, albeit at a significantly smaller scale. Sweden, by contrast, has a more protected land position, and operates a larger number of Gripen C/D (and soon new Gripen E) fighters. Following decades of close cooperation on a more ad hoc basis, these four air forces have recently committed to the Nordic air forces grouping, which includes a combined air operations centre. The joint planning visibility and regular exercises together allow each of the four nations to plan its own capability and training focus around a very significant level of trust in what the other three will provide in the event of a war. Sweden not only has more fighter aircraft than any of the other three Nordic states, but the Swedish Air Force can also afford to fly them more, as the Gripen is very economical to operate. Under the new concept, there is the opportunity for the Swedish Air Force to specialise in training and equipping its squadrons for DCA, ASuW and contested CAS. It can accept risk against penetrating OCA and SEAD/DEAD capabilities in the knowledge that Norwegian (and soon Finnish and Danish) F-35s will fight alongside it in any conflict against Russia, and will be well trained and equipped to cover those mission sets. The reverse is also true: Norway, Finland and Denmark can focus more of their F-35 weapons acquisition and training time on making the most of that platform’s inherent offensive potential, in the knowledge that they have a significant degree of defensive and anti-ship cover in the form of Swedish fighters that will operate with them in any conflict. As a result, the Nordic model promises to deliver collective combat capabilities that are significantly more potent than the four countries could achieve separately.

Trust, Burden Sharing and Credibility

For any air forces looking to the model of cooperative specialisation, with all the benefits that it promises, the key point to remember is that such cooperation relies on trust. Trust must be built up through consistent practical demonstrations of both military capability and political commitment. Burden sharing only works if both parties take on burdensome responsibilities and prove that they can carry them out. However, if medium and smaller European NATO air forces take the Russian threat seriously and are committed to building up warfare readiness and capacity quickly to ensure it is deterred, then cooperative mission specialisation appears to offer the most efficient route to doing so within the resource constraints and force structures available.

This may be seen as a step too far for the traditionally largest and arguably most capable European air forces – in particular the RAF and the Armée de l’Air et de l’Espace – which are culturally and doctrinally wedded to maintaining broad-spectrum forces. But the fact remains that, even for the UK and France, trying to maintain a broad-spectrum force on inadequate budgets with heavy deployment schedules for real world tasks over the past decades has led to varying degrees of hollowness across high-intensity mission readiness and a stark lack of suitable munitions stocks for defending NATO against Russian aggression. Unless funding is significantly increased and discretionary activity cut down to enable a greater focus on core NATO missions, greater mission specialisation may be needed here too – albeit with more choices available, thanks to the larger existing force structure of these two air forces than in the case of most other Allies. In the harsh light shone on Western forces, industrial capacity and political decision-making by Russia’s war on Ukraine, hollow forces appear far more obvious and far less credible to allies and adversaries alike.

Justin Bronk is the Senior Research Fellow for Airpower and Technology in the Military Sciences team at RUSI, and Editor of RUSI Defence Systems. Justin has particular expertise on the modern combat air environment, Russian and Chinese ground-based air defences and fast jet capabilities, the air war during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, uncrewed combat aerial vehicles and novel weapons technology.