What to buy?<\/p>\n
The war in Ukraine as well as the US-Israeli war with Iran have demonstrated that the future of warfare likely lies with drones, electronic warfare, and AI, rather than simply artillery and missiles. <\/p>\n
In the short run, traditional weaponry is certainly still needed. Ukraine asked for a licence to build US Patriot missile interceptors specifically because these are still the best defence against Russia\u2019s ballistic missiles.<\/p>\n
But if warfare becomes smaller, cheaper and more nimble, Western powers will need to adapt.<\/p>\n
It makes sense to use a Patriot interceptor to bring down a ballistic missile. But it clearly makes no economic sense to use a Patriot missile, which costs about $4 million, or a THAAD missile with a price tag of $12 million to $15 million, to shoot down an Iranian or Russian Shahed drone, which costs between $20,000 and $50,000.<\/p>\n
Many European militaries may still be stuck in an outdated mindset, however. The Kiel Institute recently warned that spending on new-paradigm weapons like drones accounted for just 12 per cent of total procurement spending in 2024-2025. <\/p>\n
While Poland, one of the European Union members most at risk from any future Russian aggression, has been increasingly focusing on cutting-edge military technology, Germany and Britain have seen their share fall over time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What to buy? The war in Ukraine as well as the US-Israeli war with Iran have demonstrated that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7967,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[47,8,156,182,646,4540,4541,7,3110,20,67,3369,136,3951,71,49],"class_list":["post-7966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-europe","tag-france","tag-iran","tag-italy","tag-leonardo","tag-mena","tag-middle-east-conflicts","tag-nato","tag-north-america","tag-russia","tag-russia-ukraine-war","tag-saab","tag-sweden","tag-thales","tag-ukraine","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}