Joint air defense shouldn't mean every service contributes air defense missiles to the problem. We have a conceptual bottleneck if we persist in that one-dimensional thinking.
Yes, there's a Patriot missile bottleneck in air defenses.
As Russian forces have ramped up attacks on Ukrainian energy and civilian infrastructure in recent weeks, calls for defense systems have grown increasingly desperate, leading Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba to tell Western leaders, in a late-March interview with Politico: “Give us the damn Patriots.”
But air defense isn't a one-dimensional problem.
Long-range Ukrainian surface-to-surface missiles that destroy Russian missile launchers or aircraft on the ground eliminate the need for many Patriots that don't have to shoot down weapons never launched at Ukraine.
Fighter planes that shoot down enemy planes that launch missiles or glide bombs stop many future strikes.
Anything that slows the volume, rate, and effectiveness of enemy aerial attacks is air defense.
By all means, we need production for capacity for a lot of defense items, including air defense missiles. But don't try to keep up with an accelerating conveyor belt of incoming Russian aerial strikes by focusing only on the supply of defensive missiles.
UPDATE: This is what I'm talking about!
Glide bombs have flight control surfaces and are known as standoff weapons, meaning that Russian warplanes can release them at a distance beyond the range of Ukraine's air-defense systems. Shooting down the planes before they release the weapon or striking them on the ground are really the only ways to defeat the threat. Destroying the bombs before they get in the air is an option as well.
Ukraine launched a big drone strike on an air base used for glide bomb strikes on Ukraine.
UPDATE: And not that our military doesn't fully understand this:
“We need to ensure that offensive fires would defeat their capabilities on the ground, so that we're not trying to shoot things out of the air, but rather shooting them before they get into launch,” Coffman said.
But I sure read a lot about solving the problem simply by adding more missiles.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
NOTE: I'm adding updates on the Last Hamas War in this post.
