Within three years, the familiar belief that a well funded air force can reliably break an opponent’s will has begun to look fragile. In February 2022, most military staffs expected Russia’s larger and nominally more modern air force to dominate Ukraine in short order. The balance of platforms and munitions appeared one sided. Yet the war that unfolded became an extended demonstration of how a medium power, flying aging Soviet aircraft but operating disciplined, mobile ground based air defenses, can keep a stronger adversary out of its airspace for years. Russian aviation achieved only episodic and local gains, often at prohibitive cost, and never converted these gains into decisive strategic effects.
In June 2025, the picture appeared reversed. Israel launched a twelve day air and missile campaign against Iran, flying hundreds of sorties over ranges of 1,500 to 2,000 kilometers, striking deep into a heavily defended state. In less than two weeks it destroyed or disabled large parts of Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure, killed senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders and nuclear scientists, and claimed operational air superiority over key regions within days of the opening strikes. Public reporting suggests that more than 900 targets were hit, over 30 senior security officials and multiple nuclear scientists were killed, and Iranian long range strike capabilities were badly degraded.
On paper, Russia began its war with numerical mass, geographical proximity and a significant qualitative edge over Ukraine’s small and ageing air force. Israel began its campaign with the disadvantage of distance, the need for protracted strategic warning, and a politically constrained coalition environment that placed limits on escalation. Yet it is Israel that has demonstrated what a contemporary offensive air superiority campaign can look like when doctrine, intelligence and covert action are aligned, and Ukraine that has shown how a determined defender, working from inside its own borders, can deny the sky to a stronger attacker.
These two cases pose an uncomfortable question for governments and planners. In an environment saturated with precision guided weapons, drones, cruise and ballistic missiles, and dense ground based air defenses, who can still assume that they will achieve command of the air, and on what terms. For states that know they will never control the sky outright, what are the practical methods for ensuring that nobody else does either.
A useful way to translate these campaigns into policy is to strip away cinematic imagery and focus on what actually produced effects. In both wars, doctrine, organization, intelligence preparation, special operations, training and day to day patterns of force employment mattered at least as much as high profile platforms. Technology widened Israel’s margin for error, but it did not rescue Russia from its own habits. Ukraine’s survival depended more on how it used refurbished Soviet surface to air missile systems and how quickly it adapted its command practices than on any single new Western system.
The conclusion is not reassuring for those who prefer tidy hierarchies of capability. Air superiority has become harder to win, but easier to spoil. That shift alters the logic of planning in Europe, the Middle East and the Indo Pacific, where war plans still tend to assume that the side with the more modern jets and the better pilots will decide what happens on the ground.
What these wars say about air superiority in the twenty first century
For much of the late twentieth century, the dominant Western and Israeli model of airpower rested on large, centrally planned strike packages. These would first suppress and then dismantle enemy air defenses, after which strike aircraft could “service” target lists in depth with little interference. This model depended on survivable but vulnerable airborne command and control, dedicated electronic attack aircraft and pods, suppression of enemy air defenses through anti radiation missiles and jamming, and precision guided munitions delivered from medium or high altitude along predictable axes of approach. The United States and Israel refined this template against integrated air defense systems in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere that were technically sophisticated but brittle in practice, with fixed radars, centralized command and limited resilience once their key nodes were struck.
The wars in Ukraine and between Israel and Iran show how many of the assumptions underpinning that model have frayed. Several trends stand out and together amount to a different air environment.
First, mobile ground based air defenses backed by modern sensors and networking can survive against a technologically superior air force if they disperse early, move often, limit emissions and accept a more decentralized, mission oriented command structure. Ukrainian Buk and S 300 batteries that learned to operate as small, semi autonomous “pop up” threats, cycling their engagement radars on and off for brief periods and relocating after each salvo, denied Russia the chance to turn initial suppression into destruction. Operating doctrine shifted away from fixed radar sectors and scripted engagement envelopes toward flexible “shoot and scoot” patterns that exploited terrain, urban clutter and temporary radar silence.
Second, cheap uncrewed systems and stand off weapons compress the problem of distance. What once required large numbers of strike aircraft supported by tankers and escort packages can now be initiated by long range cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and prepositioned drones. Israel was able to strike Iranian air defenses, communications and missile infrastructure not only from outside Iranian airspace, but from inside Iranian territory through clandestinely prepositioned explodable drones and short range missiles. These assets created kill chains that began within Iran’s own air defense rings and bypassed large parts of its radar coverage and engagement logic, confusing operators who were trained to search for threats approaching from known directions and at known altitudes.
Third, air superiority has become a multi domain competition in which cyber operations, electronic warfare, special forces and intelligence fusion are often decisive. In both campaigns, the side that combined human sources, signals intelligence, space based and airborne imagery, and open source analysis into timely targeting information was able to shape the air environment. The difference lies in speed and coherence. Israel kept its intelligence cycle ahead of events, feeding real time coordinates of radars, launchers, command vehicles and key individuals into its strike planning in hours or even minutes. Russia, by contrast, struggled with stale target lists and slow battle damage assessment, so that many of its “strikes” fell on vacated positions or decoys.
Fourth, the concept of “air superiority” itself has become more fragile and contingent. Russia was able to operate relatively freely in parts of Ukrainian airspace for brief periods, especially during the first days of the invasion and later at very low altitude near front lines, but it rarely sustained uncontested presence long enough or at sufficient scale to rupture Ukrainian logistics or defensive cohesion. In practice, much of the conflict resembles mutual air denial over most of the country, with both sides relying heavily on artillery, multiple launch rocket systems, cruise and ballistic missiles and uncrewed systems rather than manned aircraft. Local air “windows” open and close, often unpredictably, depending on who has managed to reposition mobile air defenses, jam communications or destroy key sensors in a given sector.
The result is not that airpower has lost relevance. It is that the value of airpower now depends more heavily on whether states can align doctrine, organization and investment with this more complex environment. Israel did so over two decades. Russia did not. Ukraine, confronted with an existential threat, adapted in real time and leveraged external intelligence and materiel support to keep its defenders in being.
Why Israel broke Iranian air defenses
Israel’s campaign against Iran in June 2025 was not a cold start improvisation. It was the culmination of roughly two decades of deliberate preparation for a long range strike against hardened and defended nuclear infrastructure and the missile units that protected it. That preparation is visible in doctrine, force structure, training, covert activity and diplomacy.
Israeli national security thinking has long treated early air dominance as a condition of survival. With narrow strategic depth, vulnerable civilian concentrations and hostile actors on several borders, planners built an air force designed to gain the initiative quickly, strike preemptively when political conditions allowed, and keep enemy air and missile threats as far from Israeli cities as possible. This orientation can be traced back to earlier conflicts, but in the last fifteen years it was sharpened around the Iranian nuclear and missile challenge. Israeli debates over “the long arm” of the Israel Defense Forces translated into sustained investment in range, suppression capabilities and precision.
Three elements of that preparation shaped the outcome over Iran.
First, Israel invested in a small, high quality fleet optimized for offensive counter air and deep strike. The mix of long range F 15I and upgraded F 16I aircraft, equipped with domestic electronic warfare suites, secure communications, conformal fuel tanks and missionized avionics, and the F 35I “Adir” with its low observability and powerful sensors, created a force able to penetrate defended airspace at range while acting as a distributed sensor and targeting network. Airborne early warning and control aircraft, ground based radars and hardened command and control centers knitted this fleet together, allowing multi ship formations to share target data, threat information and jamming assignments in near real time. Precision munitions, including air launched cruise missiles, glide bombs and specialized penetrators, gave planners a menu of options against buried centrifuge halls, hardened silos, command bunkers and relocatable SAM systems.
Second, training, exercises and foreign cooperation concentrated explicitly on the problem of sophisticated surface to air missiles and long range integrated air defense systems. Israel quietly sought opportunities to gain exposure to S 300 and similar systems that Iran imported, including through training arrangements and intelligence exchanges with states that fielded these missiles. Live and synthetic training environments were built around dense, high end threats, with fighter crews practicing ingress and egress profiles under heavy simulated radar and missile pressure. Rehearsal of complex strike packages that combined fighter escorts, electronic attack, stand in and stand off weapons, and support aircraft became routine rather than exceptional. This meant that when the June 2025 campaign began, Israeli pilots were executing patterns they had rehearsed repeatedly rather than improvising under fire.
Third, and most distinctive, Israel used covert and special operations to prepare the Iranian battlespace in ways that classical air defense doctrine does not fully anticipate. Public reporting after the war described Mossad and military special units infiltrating precision guided drones and short range missiles into hidden sites inside Iran, prepositioning them near critical radars, missile brigades, communications hubs and command facilities. These platforms, controlled by clandestine cells, were designed to attack from very short range, inside the engagement envelopes of Iranian long range surface to air missiles, where radar search patterns, identification procedures and engagement rules offered little protection. Iranian batteries that were configured to look outward toward threats crossing their outer rings found themselves struck from within by small, low signature systems launched from civilian looking locations.
The opening days of the campaign reportedly combined these internal strikes with long range air and missile attacks from outside Iranian airspace. Fixed and relocatable radars, integrated air defense sector operations centers, passive sensor sites and missile fields were hit repeatedly. Israeli fighters transited through neighboring airspace under cover of diplomatic understandings, temporary airspace closures and carefully managed deconfliction measures, reducing the time they spent in the densest Iranian threat rings and complicating Iranian tracking and identification. Within several days of the first night’s operations, the Israeli military declared regional aerial superiority over key parts of western and central Iran. Open sources and fragmentary Iranian reporting suggest that relatively few long range surface to air missiles were fired in response to the main waves of strikes, an indication that many of the systems that survived physically had been blinded, cut off from command or forced into passive survival postures.
Once this initial phase had torn holes in Iran’s integrated air defense network and disrupted its command architecture, follow on waves of attacks focused more systematically on nuclear facilities, centrifuge production plants, missile launchers, storage depots and operational command nodes. The same combination of manned aircraft, stand off missiles and prepositioned drones revisited previously suppressed sites until they were physically destroyed rather than simply silenced. Iranian attempts to restore radar coverage, bring reserve batteries forward, or relocate key launchers were repeatedly detected through electronic emissions, communications intercepts or human reporting and were struck in turn. What had begun as suppression evolved into a rolling destruction campaign against the most important elements of the network.
Iran’s air force, composed largely of legacy US types inherited from before 1979, Soviet era aircraft and a patchwork of local upgrades and imported platforms, never mounted a serious challenge to Israeli air operations. Sorties were constrained by maintenance and training limitations and by the high risk of entering an airspace shaped by superior Israeli sensors and beyond visual range missiles. Iran instead leaned heavily on its ballistic missile and large drone inventories, directing salvos at Israeli military bases, infrastructure and cities. Here too the balance favored Israel, though at significant cost. Its layered air and missile defenses, anchored by systems such as Arrow, David’s Sling and Iron Dome and supported by US and allied sensors and interceptors, absorbed most of Iran’s missile and drone salvos, albeit with real attrition in interceptor stocks, significant stress on command and control crews and non trivial damage from the limited number of leakers.
The picture that emerges is not one of technological “silver bullets” operating in isolation. It is an example of what happens when a state shapes doctrine, intelligence collection, special operations, industrial investment and diplomacy around a specific air superiority problem and sustains that focus for years.
Why Russia never owned the Ukrainian sky
On the other side of Eurasia, Russia entered the war in Ukraine in February 2022 with many apparent advantages. It possessed a larger fleet of modernized fighters and bombers, fielded advanced surface to air missile systems of its own, and had recent combat experience in Syria, where Russian aircraft operated with relative impunity against a weaker opponent under the cover of a well coordinated air defense bubble. Many analysts expected that Russia would quickly suppress Ukraine’s air defenses, gain meaningful control of the air, and then shift to heavy use of aircraft for battlefield interdiction, close air support and strategic strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure and leadership.
That sequence never materialized. The Russian Aerospace Forces achieved only temporary, local gains in the first weeks of the invasion. They mounted important actions, such as the helicopter assault on Hostomel airport near Kyiv and early deep strikes on command posts and ammunition depots, but they did not convert initial suppression into lasting destruction of Ukraine’s ground based air defense network. Within days, surviving Ukrainian surface to air missile batteries began to reappear in the engagement picture. Within weeks, Russian fast jets had largely retreated to firing stand off weapons from Russian and Belarusian airspace or operating at very low altitude near the front lines, where they faced heavy losses from short range Ukrainian systems and man portable missiles.
Several structural factors explain this failure.
Russian doctrine and campaign planning did not treat air superiority as the central condition for success. The wider concept of operations relied on rapid ground advances along multiple axes, airborne assaults to seize key airfields and junctions, and psychological pressure on Kyiv, with massed artillery and rocket fire as the principal instruments of destruction. Air assets were expected to support this ground led plan rather than to execute a coherent, theater wide suppression of enemy air defenses campaign in the manner of US or Israeli practice. Once ground forces encountered unexpected resistance and logistical problems, air assets were diverted quickly to improvised close air support and ad hoc interdiction tasks while Ukrainian medium and long range surface to air missiles were still intact and mobile.
Training levels and institutional culture further limited what the Russian air force could do. Evidence from pre war exercises, flight hour data and observed tactics suggests that Russian pilots flew fewer hours than their NATO or Israeli counterparts and trained mainly in small scale, scripted scenarios. The force had limited experience in planning and executing large, complex strike packages that combined multiple aircraft types, suppression elements, jammers and support platforms. This helps explain why Russian attacks were often conducted by single aircraft or small homogeneous pairs and quartets, following similar routes and altitudes, instead of multi axis, multi role formations designed to saturate and confuse air defenses.
Russia also underinvested in some of the less visible enablers of sustained air superiority. Its fleet of airborne early warning and control aircraft was small, old and often unavailable. Modern airborne intelligence and surveillance platforms existed in limited numbers, and their performance over Ukraine appears to have fallen short of expectations. Stocks of modern precision guided munitions were insufficient for a prolonged, high intensity suppression campaign. As the war went on, Russian units leaned heavily on unguided bombs delivered from low altitude, legacy anti radiation missiles that Ukrainian crews learned to spoof or evade, and a limited selection of new glide bomb kits that increased stand off range but did little to solve the underlying targeting problem.
Intelligence and targeting processes compounded these weaknesses. Russian planners entered the war with detailed knowledge of Ukrainian fixed radar sites, command posts and air bases, much of it accumulated during years of peacetime intelligence collection. They struck many of these in the opening salvo. However, Ukrainian mobile systems had been dispersed in advance, in part because Western partners warned Kyiv that invasion was imminent. Numerous “targets” attacked in the first wave were empty revetments, abandoned depots or decoy emitters that had been vacated days, months or even years earlier. After the initial barrage, Russian targeting cycles often operated on a roughly twenty four hour rhythm, from detection through tasking and strike. That pace is simply too slow against mobile, emission controlled systems, particularly when those systems operate on pre planned relocation schedules designed to break predictable patterns.
Ukrainian choices and external support turned these Russian shortcomings into a strategic failure in the air domain. From 2014 onwards, Ukraine had invested quietly in refurbishing and modernizing its Soviet era S 300 and Buk systems, adding indigenous radars, digital communications and networking. Crews trained for dispersal, camouflage and emission control. When the war began, they executed pre planned “shoot and scoot” drills, abandoning fixed headquarters, moving after each engagement, and accepting more decentralized control. Western governments provided strategic warning before the invasion, then near continuous intelligence support and, over time, new systems that filled key gaps, from IRIS T and NASAMS to Patriot batteries and upgraded short range defenses. The result was a layered, heterogeneous air defense architecture that was hard to map, hard to suppress and hard to destroy.
Russian command and control structures struggled to cope with this dynamic opponent. Friendly fire incidents, electronic warfare measures that sometimes disrupted Russian units more than Ukrainian ones, and poor coordination between ground and air components all reduced the effectiveness of what should have been overwhelming long range firepower. At no point did Russia succeed in synchronizing intelligence collection, electronic attack, anti radiation fires, precision strikes and follow up missions in the way that Western doctrine treats as the minimum requirement for a serious suppression campaign.
The outcome is a durable stalemate in the air. Russia retains the ability to launch cruise and ballistic missiles, employ glide bombs from outside the reach of many Ukrainian systems and conduct limited sorties under heavy risk. Ukraine retains enough mobile, networked air defenses to prevent Russia from using its aircraft as it did in Syria and to impose steady attrition on Russian air and missile operations. Neither side enjoys stable, theater wide air superiority. For planners who assumed that a state with Russia’s order of battle could automatically dominate the sky against a smaller neighbor, this should be a sobering result.
Cross cutting lessons from two very different wars
Comparing a small, technologically sophisticated state striking at range against a regional rival with a great power blundering into its neighbor is inherently imperfect. The political aims, legal contexts and alliance structures differ. Yet the two cases illuminate common levers that policy makers can adjust.
Doctrine and political intent sit at the top of that list. Israel treated the destruction or paralysis of Iranian air defenses and command systems as the first and non negotiable objective of its operation. Everything else, including the attack on nuclear facilities, depended on that outcome. Planning, procurement and training cycles were built around this premise. Russia treated airpower as one instrument among many in a combined campaign whose design underestimated the resilience and adaptability of the defender. Its air force never enjoyed the operational primacy, or the institutional standing, to insist that Ukrainian air defenses had to be broken before other tasks consumed its effort.
Intelligence and surprise form the second lever. Israeli intelligence services and air planners appear to have maintained near continuous coverage of critical Iranian sites and commanders, fusing human sources, communications intercepts, cyber intrusions and imagery into an up to date target set that could support rapid retasking. Covert networks inside Iran made it possible to attack from within as well as from without, collapsing the geographical distinction between “front” and “rear”. Russia, by contrast, excelled at mapping static infrastructure but was weak at anticipating how a mobile, well warned opponent would actually fight. Its target lists were stale, its battle damage assessment limited, and its understanding of Ukrainian adaptation poor. Ukraine, meanwhile, benefited from early strategic warning and continuous allied intelligence support, which made its pre war dispersal and wartime mobility more effective.
Force employment is the third lever. Israel used heterogeneous strike packages that combined fighters in different roles, stand off and stand in weapons, electronic warfare aircraft and support platforms. It synchronized covert sabotage, cyber operations and overt strikes so that Iranian defenses were attacked from unexpected vectors at the same time as they were subject to pressure from the air. Russia fell back on simpler patterns: single aircraft or small homogeneous groups, separation of suppression and destruction missions, episodic use of airborne jammers, and a tendency to become more cautious after early losses. Ukraine, on the defensive side, moved in the opposite direction, pushing its Buk and S 300 batteries into more dispersed, agile configurations that traded centralized control for survivability and coverage.
Training and human capital cut across everything else. Israeli fighter crews train intensively for complex missions that involve degraded communications, rapidly changing target lists and the need for initiative within a clear operational framework. Ukrainian air defense crews showed similar initiative once the war began, adapting to new threats such as Iranian supplied Shahed drones, Russian cruise missiles and glide bombs under extreme pressure. Russian pilots and air defense operators, by contrast, often appeared competent at narrow, scripted tasks but poorly prepared for dynamic, large scale operations against an opponent that shot back intelligently.
Technology is the final lever, and in some ways the least decisive on its own. Israel’s advanced platforms, munitions and electronic warfare capabilities clearly broadened its options and reduced its losses. Ukraine’s ability to integrate new Western systems with Soviet legacy equipment, and to use them effectively against varied threats, has been vital. Russia’s apparent qualitative edge in aircraft over Ukraine did not translate into control of the air, partly because supporting systems such as airborne early warning, secure data links, target acquisition pods, precision weapons and modern sensors were lacking, limited in number or poorly integrated. Technology mattered most where it was embedded in doctrine, organization and training that could exploit its strengths and mitigate its weaknesses.
From these levers follow a series of policy choices. They differ for states that expect to project airpower offensively and those that primarily need to deny it.
Policy choices for states planning offensive air campaigns
States that expect to fight far from home, or to rely heavily on airpower as a pillar of deterrence, should treat the Russian experience as a negative template. The lessons from Israel’s campaign over Iran are demanding but clear.
First, the destruction or lasting paralysis of enemy air defenses must be treated as a campaign in its own right rather than a preparatory phase that can be rushed or truncated. This implies accepting that suppression and destruction of enemy air defenses will consume significant political capital, industrial resources and training bandwidth. It requires a coherent theory of how to sequence cyber operations, clandestine action, long range missile salvos, air strikes and follow up attacks until key components of the air defense network are physically destroyed or rendered ineffective, not merely suppressed for a night. Planners should assume that modern defenders will move, deceive, reconstitute and draw upon external intelligence support. War games and live exercises should feature adversaries that behave at least as intelligently as Ukrainian crews did, not scripted targets that wait passively under the cross hairs.
Second, the often neglected enablers that make such a campaign feasible deserve priority. Airborne early warning and control platforms, modern intelligence and surveillance aircraft, robust and secure data links, space based sensing architectures and inventories of precision guided munitions tailored to different target sets are all essential. European air forces in particular have frequently cut these capabilities to pay for small fleets of high end fighters. The experience over Ukraine shows that fighters without persistent sensing, robust targeting and sufficient precision weapons are blunt tools against mobile air defenses and dispersed command networks.
Third, special operations forces and intelligence agencies need to be integrated into air campaign planning from the outset rather than consulted late as adjuncts. The most striking innovation in the Iran campaign was the use of prepositioned drones and missiles inside the defended state. Other countries, especially those with global intelligence footprints, can pursue similar options, but doing so will require legal, bureaucratic and cultural changes. Clandestine services and air planners need to work from a shared operational picture and agree on timing, deconfliction and objectives. They also need realistic counterintelligence assessments, since networks that are activated in war are exposed to detection and roll up. The value of covert strike options must be balanced against their likely one time use.
Fourth, command relationships must be structured so that air forces are not pulled away from air superiority and suppression tasks before their work is complete. In Russia’s case, the subordination of air units to ground dominated command structures and the systemic preference for artillery over airpower meant that aircraft were retasked for battlefield support while Ukrainian air defenses were still functioning. States that want to avoid this outcome must define authorities and prioritization rules in advance. Joint doctrine that recognizes air superiority as a theater level condition, rather than a service specific objective, can help insulate critical tasks from short term demands.
Fifth, training systems should be built around complex, contested scenarios rather than around idealized environments. Pilots, air battle managers and intelligence officers need to rehearse missions that assume dense enemy defenses, sophisticated electronic interference, degraded communications, rapid shifts in the threat picture and the loss of key platforms. Live exercises can be augmented by high quality synthetic environments but cannot be replaced by them entirely. Where possible, air forces should seek exposure to foreign air defense systems similar to those they may face, as Israel did through its long term interest in practicing against S 300 type batteries.
Finally, industrial stamina must be part of any serious air superiority concept. Campaigns against capable air defenses consume precision munitions, ISR flight hours, drone inventories and interceptor missiles at striking rates. The Israel–Iran war highlighted the strain even on a state whose missile defenses are heavily funded and backed by allies. European and Asian air forces that currently maintain modest stockpiles of advanced weapons should reassess whether their inventories match their war plans, particularly for conflicts in which resupply routes may be contested or politically constrained. War reserve munitions, surge production capacity and diversified supply chains will matter as much as the performance of any single platform.
Policy choices for states focused on air denial
Many states cannot hope to match a peer adversary’s air force in quality or numbers. Their best chance lies in doing what Ukraine did, and avoiding the vulnerabilities that Iran displayed.
The first priority is to build a truly mobile, layered air defense architecture rather than a largely static radar grid anchored by a few prestigious systems. Long and medium range surface to air missiles should be mounted on vehicles with integrated launchers and radars or paired with mobile passive sensors. Batteries must be trained and authorized to move frequently, to operate with minimal emissions and to make engagement decisions under mission command, without waiting for detailed instructions from a central command that may be jammed, targeted or deceived. Pre war exercises should rehearse dispersal to pre planned hide sites, camouflage in urban and rural terrain, and rapid relocation after firing.
The second priority is integration of short range systems, including man portable missiles, anti aircraft guns and short range radar guided systems, into this mobile network. Ukrainian experience shows that when medium range detachments and MANPADS teams operate from a common situational picture, they can force enemy pilots and drone operators into punishing tradeoffs. Flying high to stay above shoulder fired missiles places aircraft in the envelope of larger systems. Flying low to avoid radar guided missiles exposes them to short range weapons and small arms. Creating this effect requires survivable communications networks, reliable identification procedures and a training culture that treats air defense as a combined arms mission rather than a set of isolated units.
Third, defenders must harden their systems against the kind of internal attacks that Israel used against Iran. This is more than a matter of adding more guards around bases. It means planning for drones, saboteurs or malware that may operate inside the nominal lethal envelope of a radar or missile battery, launched from civilian facilities, container trucks or compromised infrastructure. Local counter drone defenses, physical dispersion of critical components, strict control of digital interfaces and serious counterintelligence work need to be combined. Air defense sectors should be designed so that the loss of a single radar or launcher does not blind or paralyze the entire network.
Fourth, states should accept that perfect protection is unattainable and focus on resilience and recovery. Ukraine’s ability to repair damaged systems, cannibalize spares, deploy decoys and rotate units allowed it to sustain a meaningful defense despite steady attrition. Stockpiles of spare launchers, radars, generators, communications equipment and missiles, along with trained repair teams and decentralized maintenance facilities, are as important as headline numbers of operational batteries. Dispersed logistics, redundant power supplies and the capacity to move support units quickly under threat deserve as much attention as the procurement of advanced interceptors.
Fifth, deterrence messaging should adjust accordingly. Threats to “punish” an attacker with symmetrical strikes may not be credible for smaller or technologically outmatched states, and Iranian rhetoric about devastating retaliation did not match its defensive performance or the limited impact of its missile salvos on Israel’s freedom of action in Iranian skies. Ukraine by contrast did not claim it would shoot down every Russian aircraft, but it made clear, in words and practice, that Russian pilots would face sustained attrition and uncertainty if they ventured deep into Ukrainian airspace. Smaller states facing stronger air forces should emulate this model, emphasizing the cost in time, aircraft and munitions that an attacker will incur.
Finally, partnerships matter. Ukraine’s success in denying Russia the sky would not have been possible without constant external support, both in intelligence and in systems such as Patriot, IRIS T, NASAMS and other Western platforms. Regional defense compacts that provide access to shared radars, early warning aircraft and pooled interceptor stocks can significantly improve the odds of air denial. For Gulf states, Eastern European countries and others in contested regions, the crucial question is not only what they buy individually, but how their systems can be interoperable and networked in a crisis.
Strategic outlook beyond Iran and Ukraine
The experiences over Iran and Ukraine are not anomalies. They hint at the kind of air environment that could emerge in other high intensity conflicts.
In the Indo Pacific, a war over Taiwan would likely feature a major power attacker with large numbers of modern aircraft, missiles and uncrewed systems facing a defender with limited air assets but increasingly capable ground based defenses, backed by external support. The Russian failure to neutralize Ukrainian mobile surface to air missiles suggests that any operational concept which assumes rapid, uncontested establishment of air superiority over Taiwan or across the Western Pacific deserves skepticism. At the same time, Israel’s success against Iran shows how a smaller but technologically advanced attacker could mount long range precision raids against mainland targets if it can prepare the battlespace covertly and align intelligence, cyber operations and doctrine.
In the Gulf, states that have invested heavily in high end fighters but relatively little in mobile air defenses, resilient command networks and industrial depth may find that their current force structures are optimized more for prestige and peacetime signaling than for survivability. The June 2025 war exposed the vulnerability of Iran’s mixed, partly obsolete air defense architecture to a sophisticated, well prepared attack, but it also highlighted the strain that sustained missile and drone salvos placed on Israel’s own defenses, inventories and domestic resilience. Both sides discovered asymmetries between expectations and operational reality.
In Europe, NATO’s reassurance and deterrence concepts lean heavily on airpower. Yet several allies have allowed their ground based air defenses to atrophy since the end of the Cold War, relying on US capabilities and the assumption that any adversary air force would quickly be worn down. The Ukrainian case suggests that an adversary willing to disperse, dig in and exploit terrain can deny Western air forces the ability to operate at will, particularly near front lines, while imposing significant attrition on high value assets. It also shows how quickly stocks of long range precision munitions and surface to air interceptors can be depleted when they are used not just against rare, high value targets but against persistent drone and missile threats.
Across these regions, one theme recurs. Control of the air is no longer a binary condition that a strongly funded air force can treat as a given. It is a contested process that begins long before open conflict, runs through covert action, cyber penetration and arms racing, and continues throughout a war as both sides adapt. States that cling to binary planning assumptions risk both overconfidence and paralysis, swinging between ill founded optimism about rapid dominance and fatalism about “denied” environments in which airpower supposedly cannot function.
Another emerging pattern is cost asymmetry. It is often cheaper for an attacker to deploy a swarm of small drones or low cost cruise missiles than it is for a defender to intercept them with high end surface to air missiles designed originally for crewed aircraft. Similarly, refurbishing legacy air defense systems, investing in decoys and training crews to move, hide and repair may be more cost effective for a defender than buying a small fleet of modern fighters that will have difficulty surviving in heavily contested airspace. Policy makers need to confront these trade offs openly instead of allowing prestige platforms to dominate budgets for political reasons.
Finally, there is the question of escalation. Long range air and missile strikes on strategic targets, particularly nuclear related facilities and national command centers, carry serious risks of horizontal and vertical escalation. The Israel–Iran war ended through external mediation, but only after both sides had launched large numbers of missiles and drones across borders and struck each other’s leadership, with civilian infrastructure also damaged. Future conflicts involving larger nuclear powers, or multiple great powers, could be less contained. That reality strengthens the argument for doctrines that emphasize air denial, damage limitation and controlled punishment over ambitious plans for rapid strategic paralysis through decapitation strikes.
Conclusion: learning to live with contested skies
The wars over Iran and Ukraine reveal two sides of the same coin. On one side stands a state that aligned doctrine, intelligence collection, special operations, industrial planning and diplomacy around the goal of seizing control of the air against a specific opponent, and then demonstrated that this combination can still succeed. On the other side stands a state that relied on mass and the assumption that qualitative superiority in aircraft would translate automatically into dominance, and a defender that refused to cooperate with that assumption and reconfigured its defenses accordingly.
For offensive air powers, the lesson is that air superiority has to be earned through patient, integrated preparation and then fought for as a campaign, not treated as a supporting act that can be bolted onto a ground led plan. For defenders, the lesson is that denial is achievable even against stronger opponents, provided they invest in mobility, dispersion, resilience, realistic training and external partnerships rather than in static symbols of modernity.
Neither side in these wars could afford to ignore the role of intelligence and covert action, and neither can future planners. The most lethal blows to Iran’s air defenses came from weapons that appeared inside its territory, launched by networks built long before the first bombs fell. The most important contributions to Ukraine’s survival in the air domain came from warnings, targeting data and replacement systems that arrived from outside its borders. In both cases, information, preparation and adaptation moved faster than aircraft.
Looking ahead, planners in Europe, the Middle East and Asia will have to design forces and doctrines that assume long periods of contested airspace rather than brief transitions to uncontested dominance. Ground forces cannot bank on constant close air support in the manner familiar from recent Western campaigns. Civil defense systems must be built on the expectation of large scale missile and drone attacks that exploit gaps in coverage and exploit cost asymmetries. Alliances will need to integrate sensors, command networks and interceptor inventories more tightly if they wish to share the burden of air and missile defense and to avoid exploitable seams.
Air superiority has not disappeared as a meaningful objective. It has become more conditional, more expensive and more dependent on parts of the security apparatus that previously operated in the background, from cyber units and space operators to logistics planners and industrial policy makers. States that update their assumptions and adapt their policies to this reality will still be able to exploit the sky when it matters. Those that cling to older notions of automatic dominance may discover, as Russia did over Ukraine and Iran did under Israeli attack, that the air war they anticipated is not the one they actually face.
This analysis draws on open reporting and research from Reuters, the New York Post, the Guardian, the Times of India and a range of military and academic sources.
