NATO must repair the holes in its defense

Poland began strengthening its air defenses long before a stray missile landed on its territory on Tuesday, but a large shield for the skies above NATO's eastern rim remains far from being realized following decades of post-Cold War neglect.

While the incident in Poland is likely a technical error that can happen in any conflict, it underscores the urgent need for NATO to repair holes in its defenses because even such errors can lead to dangerous escalation, according to Reuters.

"It was only a matter of time when such an accident would happen," an air defense expert from a NATO member, who wished to remain anonymous, told the British agency. "It could also have been a stray Russian missile flying in the wrong direction due to technical or human error."

While more advanced Western anti-aircraft missiles are designed to self-destruct if they miss their target, older Soviet missiles have no such mechanism, one military source said.

"If they miss the target, they just fly until they burn fuel and then fall," he said, adding that older missiles have a greater possibility of error.

Ground-based air defense systems like Raytheon's RTX.N patriot are designed to intercept missiles.

However, after the Cold War, many NATO members sealed off a number of anti-aircraft units due to the assessment that, henceforth, they would only have to deal with a limited number of missile threats coming from states such as Iran.

This perception changed drastically with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, after which NATO allies began to hastily increase their stockpiles of ammunition and address air defense deficiencies.

Germany had 36 patriot units when it was a NATO country on the front lines during the Cold War, and even then it relied on the support of NATO members. Today, the German forces have only 12 patriot units, two of which are deployed in Slovakia.

"It used to be a real belt of air defense systems, and that's what people have in mind when they talk about protecting NATO's eastern perimeter," a military expert told Reuters. "However, we are far from such a scenario".

Recognizing the need to repair the holes, more than ten NATO members, led by Germany, in October launched an initiative to jointly procure air defense systems for several layers of threats, considering, among others, Israel's Erou 3ISRAI.UL system, Patriot and Germany's IRIS-T .

The initiative comes as Ukraine, under heavy Russian attacks, is in desperate need of more air defense units, potentially exacerbating existing shortfalls in Western countries handing over some of their systems to Kiev.

Poland, which together with the three Baltic states represents NATO's new eastern border, has for years invested in strengthening its air defense capabilities, which still rely heavily on Soviet systems such as OSA and Kub.

"In the next decade, we are talking about Poland having a top-notch and very large air defense system," Marek Swierzinski from the Politika Insight organization told Reuters.

Implementation of these systems is slow and may take years to become fully operational.

In recent months, Poland received additional support from Washington, but these systems, like the Patriots, are not reactive and do not have sufficient range to cover up any lapse in protection on the eastern perimeter, Swierzinski said.

However, even additional air defense systems cannot guarantee that another stray missile like the one on Tuesday will be intercepted.

"It's a paradox: regardless of how much money you invest in an air defense system, you'll never make something that's 100 percent impenetrable, so there's always the possibility of this kind of situation happening," claims Swierzinski.