European air defenses are woefully inadequate to protect rear area assets from aerial attack. If Russia is having problems with their strong investment in ground-based air defense, how bad would air attacks be for European states?
In a serious near-peer conflict, Western countries can't count on their homelands remaining safe while their militaries fight overseas, a top NATO commander told Business Insider. ...
NATO's problem now is that cheap long-range drones, missiles, sabotage, and mass air attacks mean the rear is no longer just theoretically vulnerable. Instead, it could be routinely contested, and the West may not have enough defenses to adequately protect everything, requiring tough choices.
Europeans especially need to take ground-based air defense seriously again.
Remember the effort in World War II?
Around 3,000 pilots fought in the Battle of Britain, but thousands of other people helped defend Britain in the summer of 1940. They were the Royal Air Force (RAF) ground crews who the pilots depended on in order to get in the air and engage the enemy, the staff in the Sector Station operations rooms who ‘scrambled’ the fighters into action, and the teams operating defences on the ground.
Thousands of other people? That's off at least an order of magnitude from information on the site that stated that! The Observer Corps alone had 30,000 members at the outbreak of World War II.
Mind you, America needs to do much better, too. But we have oceans and friendly countries near us (except for more exposed Alaska, Florida, Puerto Rico, and Guam).
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
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NOTE: Photo from the "Remember" link.
