Poland had started to bolster its air defenses long before a stray missile landed inside its border on Tuesday, but a robust shield for the skies along NATO’s eastern flank is still a long way off after decades of neglect following the Cold War.
The missile that hit Poland appears to have been fired by Ukraine’s air defenses rather than a Russian strike, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Wednesday.
However, while it might have been a technical error that can happen in any conflict, the incident underlines the urgent need for NATO to plug gaps in its defenses, as mistakes like that could lead to a dangerous escalation.
“It was only a question of time for such an accident to happen,” an air defense expert from a NATO country said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It could also have been a stray Russian missile flying the wrong way, due to a technical or human error.”
While more advanced Western air defense missiles are designed to destroy themselves if they miss their target, older Soviet missiles do not have such a mechanism, the military source said.
“If they miss their target, they simply fly on until they have burned up all fuel — and then plunge down,” he said, adding that the older missiles also had a higher error rate.
Ground-based air defense systems such as Raytheon’s Patriot are built to intercept incoming missiles.
However, after the Cold War, many NATO allies scaled down the number of air defense units to reflect the assessment that they would, from now on, only have to deal with a limited missile threat coming from countries such as Iran.
AIR DEFENSES INCREASE
This perception changed drastically with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which sent NATO allies scrambling to increase stocks of ammunition and tackle air defense system shortfalls.
Germany had 36 Patriot units when it was NATO’s frontline state during the Cold War, and even then it relied on support from NATO allies. Today, the German forces are down to 12 Patriot units, two of which are deployed to Slovakia.
“It used to be a real belt of air defense systems, and this is what people have in mind if they speak of protecting NATO’s eastern flank,” the military expert said. “But we are far away from such a scenario.”
Realizing the need to plug the gap, more than a dozen NATO allies led by Germany last month kicked off an initiative to jointly procure air defense systems for several layers of threats, eyeing Israel’s Arrow 3, Patriot and the German IRIS-T among other systems.
The initiative comes as Ukraine, under heavy Russian attacks, desperately needs more air defense units, potentially exacerbating existing shortfalls in Western nations that are handing Kyiv some of their systems.
Poland, which with the three Baltic states builds NATO’s new eastern frontier, has invested for years in bolstering its air defense capabilities which still partly rely on Soviet-era systems such as the 9K33 OSA and 2K12 Kub air defense missiles.
“In the next decade, we are talking about Poland having a really state-of-the-art and very large air defense system,” said Marek Swierczynski, a defense analyst at the Polish think tank Polityka Insight.
However, the implementation of these systems is slow, and they could still take years to become fully operational.
CANNOT COVER ALL BASES
Poland has received support from Washington in recent months, but these systems, such as Patriot fire units stationed in Rzeszow, are not reactive and far-reaching enough to monitor every single gap in protection on the eastern flank, Swierczynski said.
However, even more air defense systems could not guarantee that another stray missile like the one on Tuesday is intercepted.
“This is the paradox: No matter how much money you spend on such an air defense system, you will never build something that is 100 percent impenetrable, so to speak, so there is always the possibility of such a situation arising,” Swierczynski said.
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