The Middle East conflicts of 2024-2026 have produced the most consequential operational data on integrated air and missile defense in a generation. The findings challenge foundational assumptions across procurement, doctrine, and industrial policy. Readers pressed for time should understand these eight points before anything else.

The production gap is the defining strategic problem. Western missile defense interceptor production is catastrophically misaligned with high-tempo wartime consumption. The twelve-day Israel-Iran war of June 2025 consumed approximately 150 THAAD interceptors — a quantity that will take between three and eight years to replace at current Lockheed Martin production rates of fewer than 20 per year. No amount of technological superiority compensates for empty magazines.

Interception alone cannot win a missile war. Even an 86 percent intercept rate — the figure Israel achieved during the twelve-day war — meant 36 ballistic missiles struck populated areas, killing 32 people and displacing over 13,000. As Iran adapted its tactics across successive salvos, its penetration rate doubled. Defense without offense is a losing strategy under sustained mass attack.

Offensive strike against launcher infrastructure is a core air defense mission. Israel’s offensive strikes against Iranian missile launchers and command facilities during Operations Rising Lion and Lion’s Roar were the single most effective contribution to missile defense — not the intercept systems themselves. For Norway, this validates the strategic logic of long-range precision strike investment alongside defensive systems.

Arrow 3 has become the most combat-validated upper-tier missile defense system in the world. With hundreds of operational intercepts across multiple conflict cycles, and an interceptor cost of approximately $2 million versus $12-15 million for THAAD, the Israeli-developed exoatmospheric interceptor has fundamentally reshaped the European export market. Germany’s $6.5 billion commitment has opened the door. Norway’s procurement decision should account for this cost differential and the combat record behind it.

The United States cannot guarantee simultaneous missile defense coverage across all theaters. With THAAD batteries committed to Israel and the UAE, stockpiles significantly depleted by two major conflicts within eight months, and Indo-Pacific requirements competing for the same assets, European NATO members including Norway cannot assume American high-end interceptors will be available on demand in a concurrent crisis on the northern flank.

The economic asymmetry between attack and defense systematically favors the attacker. A single engagement cycle in the twelve-day war cost between $2.7 billion and $4.3 billion in interceptors alone. Iran’s offensive missile production costs a fraction of the cost of the interceptors required to defeat it. Any sustainable missile defense strategy must prioritize production capacity and low-cost interceptor alternatives alongside high-end systems.

Norway’s ballistic missile defense procurement is overdue. The 2025-2036 Long-Term Defence Plan committed to acquiring a long-range ballistic missile defense system to protect at least one geographic area. Two major conflict cycles have validated the urgency of that decision and eliminated any analytical basis for further deferral. The Kola Peninsula missile threat is not hypothetical. The window for orderly procurement is closing.

The missile age has arrived for Europe, not just the Middle East. The ballistic missile design lessons Iran has accumulated across hundreds of operational launches — including the saturation tactics and maneuvering reentry vehicles that degraded Israeli intercept rates — are now available to Russia and North Korea through the technology-sharing axis that has characterized this conflict. What is being learned above Tel Aviv will eventually be applied elsewhere.

Prologue

From Theory to Empiricism

For decades, integrated air and missile defense existed largely as a theoretical construct. Systems were designed, procured, tested under controlled conditions, and evaluated through the prism of modeling and simulation. Combat data was scarce, filtered through the fog of limited engagements, and almost always contested. The few genuine operational test cases — Patriot’s troubled performance in the Gulf War, Israel’s Iron Dome in Gaza — were limited in scope, duration, and the sophistication of the threats they faced.

That era is over.

Between April 2024 and February 2026, the Middle East has generated more high-quality operational data on ballistic missile attack and integrated air defense than the previous four decades combined. Iran has fired well over a thousand ballistic missiles and multiples of that in drones at Israeli territory. The most advanced air and missile defense architecture in the world — combining Israeli Arrow 3, Arrow 2, David’s Sling, and Iron Dome with U.S. THAAD batteries and Aegis-equipped destroyers — has been stress-tested not once but across multiple sustained exchanges. The June 2025 twelve-day war was the largest ballistic missile barrage ever directed at a functioning modern state. The joint U.S.-Israeli operations beginning on February 28, 2026, have opened another chapter in that same conflict.
This article is not about today’s headlines. It is about what those headlines mean for the next twenty years of air defense planning, procurement, and industrial strategy — for Israel, for the United States, and most directly for European nations including Norway that are watching this conflict and asking themselves a question they can no longer defer: what does our country need to survive a missile war?

I. The Combat Record: What Has Actually Been Demonstrated

Any serious analysis must begin not with opinion but with the operational record. What do we actually know, from verified combat data, about how modern integrated missile defense performs against a determined, capable adversary?
The record is simultaneously impressive and sobering.

During the June 2025 twelve-day war, Iran launched 574 ballistic missiles and 1,084 drones at Israel. The United States and Israel intercepted 273 of those missiles, with the U.S. contributing over 150 THAAD interceptors and 80 SM-3 interceptors — approximately 70 percent of all interceptors used during the entire conflict. Israel’s defense maintained an overall intercept rate of approximately 86 percent against ballistic missiles, a figure that sounds impressive until you confront what the remaining 14 percent meant: at least 36 missiles made it through the defense array and hit populated areas, killing 32 people, wounding over 3,000, and leaving more than 13,000 Israelis displaced from 2,305 damaged homes across 240 buildings, including two universities and a hospital.

The 86 percent figure also conceals a dangerous trend. Analysts noted that Iran doubled its strike effectiveness from approximately 8 percent to 16 percent by refining its tactics — shifting to saturation attacks with varied trajectories, maneuvering reentry vehicles, and decoys. The defense held in aggregate, but Iran was learning in real time, adapting its approach with each successive salvo. Had the conflict continued for another week at the same tempo, the trajectory of declining intercept rates would have become a more acute operational problem.

The cost dimension adds another layer of strategic significance. Using only verified interceptors from open-source video evidence, the cost of the defense was at minimum $644 million. Raising the THAAD figure to the 150 interceptors reported by multiple sources brings the total to over $2 billion. Adding SM-3 interceptors brings the total cost of the defense to between $2.7 billion and $4.3 billion — for twelve days of combat.

This is the baseline reality against which every subsequent air defense procurement decision must be evaluated. A twelve-day war cost between $2 billion and $4 billion in interceptors alone. The offensive side — Iran’s missile barrage — cost a fraction of that. The economic asymmetry between attack and defense is not new in military history, but in ballistic missile warfare it is now quantified with unusual precision.

II. The Industrial Reckoning: The Production Gap That Cannot Be Papered Over

The most consequential revelation of the 2024-2026 Middle East missile exchanges is not tactical. It is industrial.

The significant expenditure of air and missile defense interceptors over the course of the twelve-day conflict highlighted both the scarcity and the importance of these critical military capabilities, raising serious concerns about the inventory of THAAD interceptors in particular and the need to invest in additional capacity.
The numbers are stark. THAAD interceptors are produced at fewer than 20 per year by Lockheed Martin. The twelve-day war consumed approximately 150 of them. The United States used up approximately 14 percent of all its THAAD interceptors — a quantity that would take between three and eight years to replenish at current production rates. The Pentagon has taken some steps to address this: DOD reprogrammed over $700 million into THAAD procurement from Israel Security Supplemental Act funds, and the FY2026 budget request programmed funding for 25 interceptors in the base budget plus an additional 12 using reconciliation funds. But even this accelerated procurement still falls short of replacing even the most optimistic assessments of THAAD expenditures from the twelve-day war.
The SM-3 situation is no better. The SM-3 procurement plan is extremely lean: since FY24 the United States has procured only 12 SM-3 IIAs per year, with a cresting delivery wave of 71 interceptors in 2025 and 66 in 2026 before declining again. The twelve-day war expenditure of 80 SM-3 interceptors exceeded the largest annual delivery of SM-3 IIAs the U.S. was scheduled to receive. Furthermore, the decision to end production of the SM-3 IB variant in favor of the SM-3 IIA, while reflecting legitimate capability requirements for the Indo-Pacific theater, has sacrificed production volume for capability — and SM-3 IB unit costs have risen from around $9 million per missile in FY2021 to nearly $24 million per missile for FY2024 supplemental orders, reflecting the cost growth that results from production line uncertainty.
The trajectory is clear. The United States entered the February 2026 operations with a THAAD inventory already significantly below pre-twelve-day-war levels. The gap between interceptor consumption rates in high-intensity conflict and the production capacity of Western defense industry is not a planning assumption. It is now a documented operational reality, confirmed in combat over multiple engagements, and it has fundamental implications for every nation that relies on U.S. extended deterrence or that is considering high-end missile defense procurement.

The cost asymmetry is compounding this problem. Iran produces ballistic missiles — the Kheibar Shekan, the Fattah series, the Emad — at rates that dramatically outpace the production of THAAD or SM-3 interceptors, at a fraction of the per-unit cost. A Shahab-class ballistic missile costs on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars. A THAAD interceptor costs $12-15 million. The ratio is not 2-to-1 or even 5-to-1. It is closer to 30-to-1 or more. An adversary that fires 500 missiles spends perhaps $200-300 million on offense. The defender that intercepts them at an 86 percent rate spends several billion on defense. This economic logic does not favor the defender in a war of attrition, and it does not improve merely because a particular engagement is “successful.”

III. The Arrow 3 Phenomenon: Combat Validation and the New Export Landscape

Against this backdrop of THAAD and SM-3 scarcity, the performance of Israel’s Arrow system family has reshaped the global air defense market in ways that will be felt for a decade.
Arrow 3, the exoatmospheric interceptor developed jointly by Israel Aerospace Industries and Boeing, has now conducted hundreds of operational intercepts across the 2024-2025 conflict cycle and into the renewed operations of February 2026. Its engagement record against Houthi ballistic missiles from Yemen, the April 2024 Iranian barrage, and the twelve-day war has established it as the most extensively combat-tested upper-tier ballistic missile defense system in existence — considerably more so than THAAD, which had limited operational intercepts before the twelve-day war brought it into sustained high-tempo combat.

The cost differential between the two systems is economically transformative. An Arrow 3 interceptor is estimated to cost approximately $2 million, compared with $12-15 million for a THAAD interceptor. Industry observers have questioned whether American manufacturers can close this gap. The implications for stockpiling calculus are enormous. A nation with a $500 million ballistic missile defense budget can procure roughly 250 Arrow 3 interceptors. The same budget buys approximately 33 THAAD interceptors. For a medium-sized European nation facing a sustained missile threat, the magazine depth that Arrow 3 enables is qualitatively different from what THAAD permits.
The export pipeline reflects this reality. Germany’s commitment to Arrow 3 — now totaling over $6.5 billion across two contracts, with the first battery activated at Holzdorf Air Base in December 2025 — represents the foundational export case. IAI and the Israeli Ministry of Defense are simultaneously in negotiations with several European countries and others regarding Arrow 3 exports, with a senior source involved in the discussions describing global demand as enormous and expecting new deals to mature in 2026 and 2027.

The Arrow 4 program adds another dimension. Israel Aerospace Industries CEO Boaz Levy confirmed in February 2026 that Arrow 4 is approaching operational service, linking the program’s accelerated timeline directly to the ballistic missile exchanges with Iran in 2024 and 2025. Arrow 4 is specifically designed to counter advanced ballistic missile threats including maneuvering reentry vehicles — the class of threat that caused increasing damage as the twelve-day war progressed and Iranian tactical adaptation improved penetration rates. Germany has already signaled interest in Arrow 4 procurement once the system is available. The export roadmap extending from Arrow 3 through Arrow 4 and eventually Arrow 5 positions Israel as the primary supplier of upper-tier missile defense to European NATO members for the foreseeable future — a development of considerable importance to both Israeli industrial policy and European defense architecture.
One consequence of this export acceleration that deserves attention is the hardening of Israeli defense industrial infrastructure against the very threats it is designed to defeat. A key lesson drawn from Iranian missile and drone attacks on Israeli territory across multiple conflicts is that critical defense-industry infrastructure is highly vulnerable to missile strikes. Addressing this exposure requires heavy investment in protecting sensitive production sites and relocating portions of production underground — and a significant portion of the revenue IAI receives from the German Arrow contracts is expected to finance large-scale infrastructure projects costing hundreds of millions of dollars. The lesson that a defender’s missile production capacity is itself a high-value target is one that every European nation with ambitions to develop domestic defense industrial capacity should internalize.

IV. The Doctrine of Offensive-Defensive Integration

The Middle East conflict has validated a doctrinal principle that was previously more theoretical than operational: that effective integrated air and missile defense cannot be purely defensive. The most important contribution to Israel’s survival across the twelve-day war was not the intercept rate of Arrow 3 or THAAD. It was the degradation of Iran’s offensive launch capacity.
The stated objective of Operation Lion’s Roar — the Israeli component of the February 2026 joint strikes — is to destroy as many missiles and launchers as possible within a short time frame, with defense officials explicitly describing the priority of reducing the volume of projectiles fired toward Israel. Their assessment is that Iran will ultimately succeed in launching missiles, but that offensive action can substantially delay the organization of significant barrages.
This is not a new concept in air defense theory. Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses has been a fixture of modern air campaign doctrine for decades. What is new is its explicit application in the context of ballistic missile defense: if you cannot intercept all incoming missiles, the most cost-effective investment is destroying the missiles before they are launched.
The June 2025 twelve-day war provided the clearest demonstration of this logic. Israel’s offensive operations targeting Iranian missile launchers and command sites disrupted Iran’s ability to sustain attacks and reduced the volume and intensity of follow-on barrages — and no strike Iran organized during the war matched the scale of its pre-conflict True Promise II barrage, because offensive degradation of launch infrastructure reduced Iran’s ability to generate well-coordinated mass salvos.
For Norway and other Nordic nations, this doctrinal evolution has direct relevance. The 2025-2036 Long-Term Defence Plan’s investment in K239 Chunmoo long-range rocket artillery is sometimes characterized as a prioritization of offensive strike capability at the expense of defense. That framing misunderstands the integrated logic of modern missile defense. Long-range precision strike against launcher infrastructure is not an alternative to air defense. It is a prerequisite for making air defense sustainable. A NASAMS battery defending against 100 incoming missiles operates in an entirely different situation than one defending against 500. The offense that destroys 400 of those missiles on the ground before launch is performing an air defense function, and arguably a more economical one than the interceptor that kills them in flight.

V. The Structural Vulnerability: Alliance Commitments in a Multi-Theater World

The most strategically significant long-term implication of the Middle East missile conflict for Norway and European NATO is one that receives surprisingly little analytical attention: what the conflict reveals about the availability — or unavailability — of American air defense assets in a simultaneous multi-theater crisis.
The United States entered the twelve-day war with seven THAAD batteries globally. Two were committed to Israel. Two more were deployed to the UAE for Houthi threat protection. One was in South Korea. The geographic distribution of a finite and irreplaceable asset left the U.S. with minimal THAAD capacity available for any concurrent European contingency. The February 2026 operations have again committed these assets to the Middle East theater, against a backdrop in which interceptor stocks are lower than they were in June 2025.
During the periods in the twelve-day war where THAAD represented over 60 percent of interceptors used, Iran actually increased its successful hit rate by one to four percent — suggesting that the specific performance characteristics of THAAD, while formidable, do not simply substitute for Arrow in all engagement geometries. U.S. THAAD assets are not a frictionless backstop. They are system-specific assets with their own operational logic, and their consumption in the Middle East directly reduces what is available elsewhere.

Norway’s national defense planning cannot assume that U.S. THAAD batteries will be available for redeployment to the High North in a future crisis, regardless of what allied agreements say in peacetime. The operational reality of an American military simultaneously engaged in the Middle East, managing tensions in the Indo-Pacific, and maintaining European deterrence is that hard choices will be made about asset prioritization. The Middle East will not be deprioritized. This is not an argument against NATO solidarity or U.S. commitments. It is an argument for capability sovereignty — the possession of national assets sufficient to provide meaningful protection without depending on allied reinforcement that may not arrive in time, or at all.

VI. The Industrial Base Problem and What It Means for European Buyers

The production crisis affecting THAAD and SM-3 interceptors is not simply an American problem. It is a problem for every nation considering U.S.-origin high-end missile defense systems, because the production bottleneck affects both direct U.S. military capability and the ability of those same manufacturers to fulfill export orders alongside domestic requirements.

The Arrow 3 model points toward a partial solution. As part of the December 2025 contract expansion with Germany, the Israeli and German defense ministries explicitly agreed to significantly increase the production rate of Arrow 3 interceptors and launchers. IAI’s production expansion — partially financed by German export revenues — creates economies of scale that benefit all Arrow 3 operators, including Israel itself. The model is symbiotic: German procurement finances Israeli production expansion, which makes Arrow 3 cheaper and faster to produce, which benefits both Germany and Israel and makes further exports more competitive.

Israeli defense exports reached an all-time record of approximately $14.8 billion in 2024, with 54 percent going to European customers responding to the Ukraine war’s revelation of modern battlefield requirements. That trajectory is unlikely to reverse. European defense ministries have concluded, from both Ukraine and the Middle East, that they need systems with demonstrated performance against real threats under real conditions. Israeli systems have now done so at a scale and duration that no other non-American defense industry can match.
For the European defense industrial base, this creates a strategic tension. Systems like IRIS-T SLM, SAMP/T NG, and the emerging German-led TLVS all occupy important segments of the air defense market and represent genuine European industrial capability. But none of them addresses the uppermost tier — exoatmospheric ballistic missile defense against theater ballistic missiles with ranges exceeding 1,000 kilometers. That tier is currently occupied exclusively by THAAD, Arrow 3, and sea-based SM-3. Of these, only Arrow 3 is available for export with full national operational control, at a cost that European nations can realistically stockpile, and with a combat record now measured in hundreds of operational intercepts.
This is the market reality that Norway’s procurement decision must navigate. NASAMS remains the right backbone for Norwegian medium-range air defense. It is proven, domestically relevant through Kongsberg’s co-development role, and its performance in Ukraine has established it as the world’s best system in its category for cruise missile and drone defense. But NASAMS was not designed to intercept Iskander or Kinzhal class ballistic missiles, and no upgrade changes that fundamental constraint. The upper tier — the capability Norway’s Long-Term Defence Plan has committed to acquiring — is a separate procurement in a market currently dominated by a single viable export option.

VII. The Emerging Architecture: Layers, Integration, and What Norway Actually Needs

The Middle East conflict has clarified something that was previously debated in the abstract: no single system provides adequate defense, layers are not optional, and integration between those layers is more important than the capability of any individual component.
Israel’s architecture — Arrow 3 for exoatmospheric intercepts, Arrow 2 for high-altitude endoatmospheric threats, David’s Sling for medium-range ballistic missiles and large cruise missiles, Iron Dome for short-range rockets — performed as designed across the 2024-2025 conflict cycle. The layering created multiple intercept opportunities for each threat, allowed lower-tier systems to engage threats that upper-tier systems had not yet engaged, and provided tactical flexibility in allocating the most capable interceptors to the most demanding threats. When supplemented by U.S. THAAD and Aegis assets, the integrated capability was substantially more effective than the sum of its parts.

For Norway, the architectural implication is that the ballistic missile defense procurement mandated by the Long-Term Defence Plan is not a standalone system — it is the uppermost tier of an architecture that must be conceived as a coherent whole. NASAMS provides medium-range coverage. The forthcoming ballistic missile defense system provides the upper tier. The question is what fills the gap between them — specifically, the medium-to-long range ballistic missile threat that is too fast for NASAMS and too close-range for an exoatmospheric interceptor. David’s Sling, Israel’s solution to this exact problem, merits serious Norwegian analytical attention. Finland selected it in 2023; its Stunner interceptor costs approximately $1 million per round — roughly 75 percent less than PAC-3 MSE — while addressing the same threat class as Patriot.

The drone and loitering munition threat also demands architectural attention that the Middle East conflict has highlighted in new ways. Iran deployed over 1,000 drones against Israel during the twelve-day war. Defeating drone swarms at scale is expensive when using kinetic interceptors, and the saturation mathematics are unfavorable. Israel’s operational debut of electromagnetic spectrum defenses against drone swarms during the twelve-day war — the first public disclosure of an IDF unit specifically dedicated to this mission — represents a direction European air defense planners should be following closely. Directed energy, whether high-energy laser or high-power microwave, offers cost-per-engagement economics that are categorically different from kinetic interceptors. Israel’s Iron Beam program, while not yet operational, reflects a correct reading of where the economics of drone defense are heading.

VIII. The Geopolitical Reconfiguration and Its Defense Consequences

Beyond the immediate military and industrial questions, the Middle East conflict is reconfiguring the geopolitical landscape in ways that carry lasting consequences for European security and Norwegian defense planning.
The joint U.S.-Israeli military operations against Iran represent a qualitative escalation in Western willingness to employ offensive military force against state actors in the Middle East. Whether this leads to regime change in Tehran, a negotiated resolution, or a protracted regional conflict will shape the security environment for years. Each outcome carries distinct implications for global missile proliferation and air defense demand.

If the Iranian regime collapses or is decisively weakened, the primary source of ballistic missile technology transfer to Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other proxies is disrupted. But Iranian missile technology has already propagated extensively. The Houthi missile and drone campaign against Red Sea shipping demonstrates that Iranian technical knowledge has reached non-state actors in ways that cannot be recalled. The proliferation problem does not end with the regime that created it.

If the conflict produces a protracted standoff with Iran surviving in weakened form, the same missile production race that characterized 2024-2026 continues — potentially with reduced American appetite for sustained engagement once the political and financial costs of current operations become clear. A weakened but surviving Iran may actually be the most dangerous long-term scenario for regional air defense, as it preserves the motivation and institutional knowledge for ballistic missile development while potentially eliminating the political constraints that previously limited the most dangerous technology transfers.

The Russia dimension cannot be overlooked from a Norwegian perspective. Russia has been Iran’s primary supplier of air defense technology and has received Iranian drones and missiles in exchange for use in Ukraine. The broader arms race against Iran includes Russia, China, and North Korea as contributors to Iran’s weapons development. The ballistic missile design lessons accumulated across hundreds of Iranian operational launches — including the saturation tactics and maneuvering reentry vehicles that degraded Israeli intercept rates — are available to every actor in the Russia-Iran-North Korea technology-sharing axis. Norway’s threat environment on the Kola Peninsula is not isolated from what is being learned above Tel Aviv.
The Strait of Hormuz closure risk adds an energy security dimension directly relevant to Norwegian interests. Norway is Europe’s largest natural gas supplier, and any prolonged disruption to Gulf energy flows increases European dependence on Norwegian production. The strategic and economic value of Norwegian energy infrastructure — already a recognized high-value target for potential adversary strike planning — increases in proportion to Gulf supply disruption. The case for protecting Norwegian territory against ballistic missile strike has a direct and non-trivial connection to the energy security architecture of Western Europe as a whole.

IX. The Norwegian Decision: What Happens Next

Norway’s 2025-2036 Long-Term Defence Plan committed to acquiring a long-range ballistic missile defense system capable of protecting at least one geographic area against tactical ballistic missiles. That decision was made before the twelve-day war. It was confirmed analytically in the months following. It must now be executed against the full weight of what the February 2026 operations have added to the record.
The procurement decision has three practical dimensions the Middle East conflict has sharpened considerably.

The first is system selection. The choice between THAAD and Arrow 3 involves more than pure technical comparison. THAAD is the undisputed performance benchmark for terminal-phase ballistic missile defense. Arrow 3 offers a compelling cost and stockpiling advantage, exoatmospheric engagement capability that THAAD cannot match, and a combat record now more extensive than any other system in the category. The U.S. THAAD production deficit — which will be deeper after February 2026 than it was in January — raises legitimate questions about export delivery timelines for any non-U.S. THAAD buyer. Arrow 3’s production expansion, contractually agreed with Germany and financed through a structured multi-year program, represents a more predictable supply chain for a European buyer planning decades ahead.

The second is urgency. The Middle East conflict has removed any remaining analytical basis for deferring Norway’s ballistic missile defense decision. The threat environment on the Kola Peninsula has not diminished; Russian ballistic missile capabilities have been refined through operational experience in Ukraine and are available for potential use against NATO targets. The window for orderly procurement — before a crisis forces emergency acquisition at unfavorable terms and extended timelines — is finite. Every month of deliberation is a month of capability gap.

The third is integration. Norway’s ballistic missile defense system cannot be evaluated in isolation from NATO’s broader air defense architecture, from the Aegis Ashore installations in Romania and Poland, from the planned integration of Germany’s Arrow 3 into NATO’s IAMD command network, and from Norway’s own NASAMS baseline. The system Norway selects must contribute to NATO’s collective defense while providing meaningful national coverage — and it must be operated by Norwegian personnel with sufficient stockpile depth to be effective before American reinforcements arrive. If they arrive.

Conclusion: The Missile Age Has Arrived. The Question Is Whether Europe Is Ready.

The two and a half years from October 7, 2023 to February 2026 have been the most consequential period in the history of air and missile defense since the Cold War. What was previously a domain of capability claims and simulation results has been replaced by an empirical record of extraordinary richness and sometimes brutal clarity.

The lessons are not comfortable for Western defense establishments. The production capacity of even the most capable American defense contractors is grossly insufficient for high-tempo ballistic missile warfare. The cost economics of interception versus offense systematically favor the attacker. No defense architecture, however sophisticated, is hermetic under sustained mass attack. And the United States cannot simultaneously sustain intensive missile defense in the Middle East, maintain the Indo-Pacific posture its strategy demands, and guarantee the availability of high-end assets for European contingencies.

These are not arguments against investment in missile defense. They are arguments for a fundamentally different approach to that investment — one that prioritizes production capacity as urgently as technological capability, that develops the offensive-defensive integration Israel has demonstrated is essential, that builds genuine magazine depth rather than paper capability, and that pursues European industrial cooperation capable of reducing dependence on single-source supply chains.

For Norway, the argument is specific and direct. The Kola Peninsula is the most missile-dense concentration of Russian strategic and conventional strike capability in the world. The threats it poses — from Iskander tactical ballistic missiles to Kinzhal hypersonic systems — belong to the same categories of weapon whose real-world performance against modern air defense has just been extensively documented in the Middle East. Norway’s geography, its energy infrastructure, and its status as a NATO flank nation all make it a high-value target in any conflict with Russia.

The twelve-day war showed what a capable, motivated adversary with ballistic missiles can do to a country whose air defense, however excellent, was not built for the volume and tempo of the attack. Operations Lion’s Roar and Epic Fury are adding further chapters to that operational manual.

The Norwegian Long-Term Defence Plan recommended the right capability. The Middle East has validated the urgency. What remains is the will to execute before the next conflict makes the lesson impossible to ignore.

This analysis reflects open-source reporting, published defense procurement data, and the independent analytical judgment of norskluftvern.com. We do not represent official Norwegian government positions. Technical specifications and cost figures are estimates from publicly available sources. The situation in the Middle East remains active and evolving as of publication.

Our blog norskluftvern.com has covered Norwegian and Nordic air defense since 2017. Our full analysis archive is available in Norwegian and English at norskluftvern.com.

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