It’s our airpower, the next generation of it, and our ability to project it that will be the decisive factor in whether or not we truly deter our peer [adversaries] of the 21st century.

 The Honorable Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of Defence, 19 March 2025

A government’s principal role is to provide for common defence, yet Western democracies are perilously close to failing in this basic responsibility, having not fully acknowledged the extent to which the world has changed around them. The global geopolitical environment is always shifting; multi-generational war, encompassing diverse attack vectors and domains, is the contemporary way of conflict. Western governments have not yet fully realized the challenges ahead and the changes required to defend their states.

This new form of warfare has activated many new attack vectors and domains not fully recognized as battlefields by Western governments. For example, recent instances of widespread drone activity have brought main NATO airbases to a halt. The West is experiencing attacks in ways that history does not recognize as challenging state sovereignty, and this fundamentally challenges our security. However, by embracing new ways of thinking about conflict, the West can still prevail. The “Dominance Disrupted” panel will focus on how conflict has changed in the air domain, with a specific focus on air superiority, and what can be done to secure the air domain for the Alliance’s freedom of action.

For the past 80 years, the Western way of war has been characterized by first achieving air superiority over the battlefield to ensure freedom of action for the joint force. However, on January 27, 2024, the era of American air supremacy was negated when three US Army soldiers were killed in Jordan via a one-way unmanned aerial system (UAS) that struck their barracks—killing them while they slept. A larger scale demonstration of this phenomenon is the proliferation and effective use of one-way attack (OWA) UAS, first-person view (FPV) equipped drones, and other low-end airborne weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine. The implementation of these weapons has profoundly shifted what is required to accomplish the air superiority mission. Furthermore, competitors to Western nations have fielded fifth-generation fighters and are actively developing sixth-generation fighters such as the Chinese J-31, J-36, and JH-XX, and the Russian Su-57, which recently secured its first foreign military sale to Algeria.

No longer do superior fighters, missiles, and elite air battle managers alone ensure air superiority. Air superiority no longer means downing enemy fighters and suppressing enemy air defences to deliver air power for the joint force. While these mission sets are still vital, additional capabilities are required to defend against the proliferation of cheap and effective weapons on the low end, and the deployment of fifth- and sixth-generation fighter capability by competitor nations on the high end. NATO’s air superiority is being squeezed at both ends, and a fundamental paradigm shift is required to continue to ensure freedom of manoeuvre and action for the joint force.

On the low end, the proliferation of readily available, cost-effective technologies such as loitering munitions and OWA drones has lowered the barrier to entry onto the modern battlefield and challenges NATO air superiority as we knew it. NATO nations have invested in higher-end technologies with expensive fighters carrying expensive missiles to accomplish the air superiority mission. When the threat was limited to other fighters, bombers, and similar aircraft, this methodology was logical. To be certain, these threats do and will continue to exist and must be defended against. However, the addition of cheap airborne threats to the battlespace has made it very difficult for NATO nations to defend its own assets and airspace.

Certainly, a million-dollar AMRAAM will successfully engage a small UAS, glide bomb, loitering munition, or similar threats, but when the threat costs only thousands of dollars, the cost imposition to the AMRAAM shooter is significant. “NATO nations cannot count on high-end capabilities alone to win the fight, as the proliferation of low-cost threats makes engagement with high-end weapon systems unsustainable,” according to General Hecker in a recent op-ed, “Air Superiority: A Renewed Vision,” published in the AEther Journal of Strategic Airpower & Spacepower.

Furthermore, a drone’s minimal logistics footprint makes it very difficult to predict their launching points. Able to be carried in a suitcase, a drone could easily take flight from the trunk of a car without a long, paved runway. Since it is never intended to be recovered, no landing site is required. Couple this with very low-altitude flight and potentially zero control datalinks to exploit, and the door is open to a much more complex timeline to F2T2EA (Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage, Assess) these types of threats. Air defenders must consider alternative paradigms to effectively counter these threats. This fundamental shift in the threat landscape demands creative thinking to ensure effective defence against low-end threats.

In contrast, on the high-end, NATO air superiority is challenged by rapid modernization from peer competitors as they field fifth- and sixth-generation fighter fleets, advanced weapons, and space platforms at an astonishing rate. Simultaneously, NATO nations and partners are developing their own next-gen fighters: TAI TF Kaan, F-35, Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), Future Combat Air System (FCAS), and the F-47 families of systems represent separate development programs that will usher in a new era of air superiority capability.

Some of these programs will include the use of Autonomous Collaborative Platforms (ACP), which introduce emerging AI capabilities which may one day grant lethal authority to autonomous systems. NATO lacks a coherent concept for how it might employ ACP. As NATO challenges legacy paradigms about how the West accomplishes air superiority at the high end, the enemy is moving forward rapidly and not looking backward at what was. NATO must follow suit and regain the lead in leveraging modern technologies to ensure air superiority on the high end of the spectrum.

Achieving air superiority is not a foregone conclusion, and General Hecker tells us in his op-ed that “the current situation in Ukraine is a constant reminder of the terrible cost of a stalemate in the air.” NATO nations and its like-minded partners around the globe must reexamine the paradigms that have seen them through the past 70 years of air dominance and implement new thinking, procurement, weapons, doctrine, strategy, and tactics. This new paradigm must account for changes on both the low-cost (low end) and high-cost (high end) of the spectrum to continue supplying air superiority—the prerequisite and necessary condition for our Alliance’s deterrence strategy.