The Gap Exposed¶
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine exposed, in real time, the central vulnerability of modern ground forces operating without effective air defences: they die quickly. The early destruction of Ukrainian air defence radars and command nodes, the degradation of Ukrainian Air Force assets to a residual capability, and the subsequent campaign of cruise missile and Shahed drone strikes against civilian and military infrastructure provided an operational manual — both positive and negative — for every defence ministry watching from Warsaw to Bucharest.
The positive lesson was that effective air defence forces Russia to mass its most capable strike assets, accept higher attrition, and shift to stand-off munitions that are expensive and difficult to produce at scale. Ukraine’s acquisition of Patriot batteries — and the demonstrated ability of PAC-3 MSE interceptors to defeat hypersonic missiles — confirmed that the system remains the gold standard for medium-to-high altitude defence. The negative lesson was starkly illustrated in the gaps: SHORAD systems were inadequate in quantity, MANPADS stocks were consumed faster than anticipated, and the integration between different national systems was often poor.
CEE NATO members drew their own conclusions, and procurement has accelerated accordingly.
Patriot: The High End¶
The Patriot PAC-3 system forms the centrepiece of high-end air defence on the eastern flank, and demand has substantially outpaced production capacity at Raytheon’s Tucson facility. Several CEE nations have contracts in place or are actively negotiating.
Poland’s Wisła programme, the most advanced in the region, covers eight Patriot fire units in PAC-3 MSE configuration. The first two batteries were delivered in 2022-2023. PAC-3 MSE (Missile Segment Enhancement) extends range and altitude performance compared to legacy PAC-3, and its hit-to-kill intercept mode is effective against ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and advanced aircraft.
Romania has contracted for seven Patriot batteries under a Foreign Military Sale, with deliveries extending into the late 2020s. The Romanian acquisition is strategically significant: it provides a Black Sea flank air defence capability that complements the Baltic-focused discussions that dominate most eastern flank analysis, and it covers the approaches through which any Russian campaign in Moldova or western Ukraine would generate strike threats.
The Czech Republic and other Visegrád partners have engaged in discussions about Patriot acquisition. The Czech government contracted for two Patriot batteries in 2023, reflecting the collapse of confidence in Russian non-aggression that the Ukraine war produced across former Warsaw Pact members regardless of their formal threat assessments.
SHORAD: The Critical Gap¶
If Patriot addresses the upper tier, the critical deficiency on the eastern flank is at the short-range layer. SHORAD — Short Range Air Defence — covers threats below Patriot’s engagement envelope: attack helicopters, low-altitude cruise missiles, loitering munitions, and the Shahed-type drones that Russia has deployed in industrial quantities. Ukraine’s experience demonstrated that a modern adversary can saturate high-end systems with cheap expendables while preserving ballistic missiles and cruise missiles for priority targets.
Poland’s Narew programme, centred on the CAMM (Common Anti-Air Modular Missile) family, is intended to fill this layer. The CAMM-ER (Extended Range) variant provides a 45-kilometre engagement envelope. Poland has contracted for an initial tranche of Narew batteries with production to be undertaken jointly with MBDA and Polish industry.
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have invested heavily in SHORAD and MANPADS stocks. The Baltic states were major contributors to Ukraine’s air defence supply chain in 2022-2023, and the transfers were made affordable by the anticipation of replacement procurement. All three have been upgrading to SHORAD systems with genuine all-weather capability, moving beyond MANPADS-only postures to radar-guided systems capable of defeating fast movers at altitudes where MANPADS are ineffective.
Germany’s deployment of Patriot systems to Slovakia and Lithuania following the invasion of Ukraine, and the placement of IRIS-T SLM batteries, represented the Bundeswehr’s most significant forward air defence contribution in decades. The IRIS-T SLM is particularly relevant to the SHORAD gap: it bridges the space between MANPADS and full Patriot, with a roughly 40-kilometre range and a track-while-scan radar that can engage multiple targets simultaneously.
F-35 Integration¶
A significant and underappreciated dimension of eastern flank air defence is the integration of fifth-generation aircraft into the sensor picture. The F-35’s AN/APG-81 AESA radar and Distributed Aperture System provide persistent, all-aspect sensor coverage that substantially enhances the situational awareness available to ground-based air defence networks through the Multifunction Advanced Data Link.
Poland’s 48 F-35As will, when fully operational, extend the sensor horizon of the ground-based IAMD architecture by hundreds of kilometres, cueing Patriot batteries to targets that ground-based radars cannot yet detect. This fusion architecture — aircraft as airborne sensor nodes feeding firing solutions to surface-based interceptors — represents the genuine state of the art in integrated air and missile defence, and Poland will be among the first non-founding F-35 operators to achieve it at meaningful scale.
NATO IAMD Architecture¶
The broader context is NATO’s Integrated Air and Missile Defence (IAMD) architecture, which seeks to network national systems under a common command-and-control framework. The Air Command and Control System (ACCS) provides the data links and command nodes; the challenge is interoperability between legacy systems purchased from different vendors across different decades, with different communication protocols and threat libraries.
The eastern flank nations have made significant progress in IAMD integration since 2022. The Baltic Air Policing mission — now expanded to four permanent rotations with enhanced Quick Reaction Alert capability — provides a persistent NATO air presence over the three Baltic states and a de facto air defence tripwire. The mission has been upgraded since 2022, with additional fighters deployed and operating times extended. It is not a substitute for ground-based IAMD, but it is a valuable complement.
Assessment¶
The eastern flank is moving from a position of significant air defence deficiency — particularly at the SHORAD layer — towards a credible multi-tier architecture. The timeline is constrained by production capacity at key manufacturers, particularly Raytheon for Patriot and MBDA for CAMM, both of which are operating under demand conditions not seen since the Cold War. The integration challenge — networking national systems into a coherent IAMD picture — is also substantial.
But the direction is unambiguous. For the first time since 1991, serious investment is flowing into the specific capabilities that the eastern flank requires to defend NATO airspace against the threat that actually exists. The question is whether the procurement timeline aligns with the threat timeline. Given the pace of Russian capability reconstitution, the answer must be: barely, and only if current spending levels are sustained.