Air and Missile Defense, Precision Strike, and the Indo-Pacific: Lessons from Ukraine and the Gulf

At the Sir Richard Williams seminar held on 23 April 2o26 focused on the fight tonight challenge, Justin Bronk delivered a presentation that cut through a great deal of the conceptual noise currently cluttering Western defense debates.

His subject was the evolving balance between integrated air and missile defense (IAMD) and precision strike, examined across three theaters: Ukraine, the recent Gulf conflict (Operation Epic Fury), and the Indo-Pacific. What emerged was not a tidy set of prescriptions but something more valuable, a framework for understanding what is actually working, what is not, and what the cost curves are telling us about the choices Western air forces must now confront.

Ukraine: The Evolutionary Contest in the Air Domain

Bronk began with Ukraine, and with an observation that cut against the prevailing gloom. Things are, for once, looking somewhat better. Ukrainian mobilization reforms are working: the Ukrainian force has grown slightly each month since January, which had not been the case for an extended period. On the Russian side, the force has held at steady state only by reverting to coercing conscripts into contract service, putting Russian losses back on what Bronk characterized as an unsustainable trajectory. Neither of these facts resolved the war, but they represent a genuine shift in the operational situation.

On the IAMD side, the low point for Ukraine came in mid to late January of this year. Bronk was direct about this. He described being in country during a period of persistent freezing fog and limited power, when Patriot interceptor stocks had run out and many counter-UAS systems proved to have inadequate all-weather capability. Interception rates against both UAVs and cruise missiles dropped sharply, and ballistic missile penetration followed. The human and industrial consequences were severe.

What turned this around was a new shipment of PAC-3 interceptors, a small number relative to what Gulf states subsequently expended in Operation Epic Fury, and the arrival of better weather.

The evolutionary contest between Russian one-way attack UAVs and Ukrainian defensive adaptation is one of the most instructive ongoing dynamics in the conflict. Russia’s Geran-2 and Geran-3 systems have had to be continuously upgraded in response to Ukrainian counter-UAS effectiveness, helicopters, turboprop gunships, and even improvised solutions have forced the Russians to slow production cycles while adding electronic warning sensors, FPV cameras, mesh networking, and evasive flight profiles. The result is a costlier, more complex system being produced in approximately the same quantities as before. As Bronk framed it, this is a back-and-forth evolutionary game, and it remains non-decisive.∗

The F-16’s role in UAV interception deserves particular attention. Bronk was unambiguous: yes, F-16s can intercept significant numbers of one-way attack UAVs. No, that should not be the primary course of action. The platform is too expensive and difficult to sustain for that mission set, and the tactical demands are genuinely specialized, formation awareness, gunnery against small maneuvering targets, dedicated counter-UAV weapons employment. One Ukrainian F-16 loss came from intercepting one target, banking, and flying into a second that had not been acquired. This is not a generic multi-role task.

Bronk suggested that European nations without large high-end fast jet fleets consider specializing in this mission with advanced turboprop aircraft, the PC-9 being a practical candidate given its speed margin, wing load capacity, and two-seat configuration. That may be a harder conversation in some capitals than it sounds, but the logic is sound.

The Myth of Cheap Mass

One of Bronk’s most pointed analytical contributions was his challenge to the term “cheap mass.” The framing has become pervasive in Western defense discourse, the idea that large numbers of individually inexpensive systems can substitute for or complement high-end precision munitions. Bronk’s counter was not ideological. It was arithmetical.

Ukrainian strike planning against meaningful targets may require between 250 and 400 one-way attack UAVs to reliably get effects on target. At $30,000 to $50,000 per platform, that is a significant expenditure and the effects delivered by the warheads that get through, typically in the three to six pound range, are minimal against anything except highly flammable targets. Oil refineries burn. Factories do not. Hardened military infrastructure does not. Against the kind of target sets that matter in an Indo-Pacific scenario, hardened, defended, often coastal, cheap mass UAVs are not substitutes for high-end precision munitions. They are, at best, decoys and enablers to improve the probability of kill for those high-end weapons.

The corollary is equally important: you still need your ARGOMs, your PRSMs, your standoff precision munitions. What cheap mass buys you is improved PK on the few high-end weapons you can get into the target area. For Australia and US Navy power projection forces operating at the end of extended logistics chains, the constraint on how many high-end weapons can reach a launch-acceptable region simultaneously may be more binding than stockpile size. Ghost Shark and similar XL-UUV programs are interesting precisely because they offer a potential means of inserting large numbers of cheap systems into contested sea space alongside air power, without burning through the high-end inventory.

Operation Epic Fury: Operational Accomplishment, Strategic Limits

Bronk’s assessment of the Gulf campaign was crisp. The U.S. executed an operationally accomplished strike campaign, thousands of Iranian targets engaged, significant degradation of the Iranian ballistic missile arsenal, and the destruction of what remained of the Iranian integrated air defense architecture.

But he was careful to calibrate the IAMD narrative: the Israelis had already systematically dismantled Iran’s air defense network in 2024 and 2025. What U.S. forces encountered in Epic Fury was a shell. Describing the campaign as a landmark counter-IADS achievement would overstate the difficulty of the problem set they faced.

More interesting was Bronk’s analysis of where the campaign ran into limits, not militarily, but coercively. The political objective of regime change, announced from the outset, may have been the campaign’s central strategic error. When you make a fight existential for your opponent, when the leaders on the other side understand that losing means being killed or overthrown, you foreclose negotiated off-ramps. You push your opponent into maximum resistance rather than toward a calculation about when to compromise. This is a lesson with deep resonance beyond Iran.

On the Iranian ballistic missile arsenal, Bronk identified a structural dilemma that deserves wider attention. Iran’s missiles are a finite, one-time-use asset. Every launch is an irreplaceable expenditure unless the production infrastructure is rebuilt. US and Israeli targeting of missile factories and fueling facilities made that rebuilding prospect uncertain. Iranian decision-makers therefore faced an impossible calculus: fire the arsenal and diminish your remaining deterrence, or conserve it and lose operational effect. This constraint — the non-replenishable strike arsenal — is a fundamental vulnerability that applies to any power relying primarily on ballistic missiles as a coercive instrument.

The coercive dimension of this cuts the other way as well. A strike capability, Bronk noted, is generally significantly more coercive before it is used than after. Once the missiles fly and fail to achieve their intended political effect, the threat loses credibility. This principle deserves to be internalized in Indo-Pacific planning, including thinking about how Chinese long-range strike threats against Australian targets would be received after the first few strikes land, relative to how they are perceived as coercive instruments before any conflict starts.

Stockpile Management: An Unresolved Problem

The section of Bronk’s presentation that generated the most immediate operational relevance for Australian planners was his discussion of munitions expenditure and stockpile management. Gulf nations fired over 2,000 PAC-3 interceptors during the campaign, at approximately $6 million per round on FMS pricing. SM-3 ballistic missile defense interceptors, relevant to defense against the Chinese ballistic capabilities that can range Australia, run approximately $43 million apiece for US forces. Firing two at each incoming threat — standard shoot-shoot-look protocol — is the equivalent of expending an F-35 per target. THAAD rounds are roughly $20 million each on the same math.

Bronk’s challenge to the audience was direct: can you afford to build and sustain a stockpile of these systems at the scale required for a credible defensive architecture, while simultaneously building and sustaining the offensive long-range strike capabilities that actually deter conflict? The answer, for most Western air forces except the United States, is no. Which raises the question of whether investment in passive defenses, hardening, dispersal, flush procedures, rapid generation from austere locations, should be carrying more of the defensive burden than expensive interceptors.

The Ukrainian example here is instructive. Airbases that have absorbed more than a hundred individual attacks against them are still generating operational sorties. The reason is not elaborate active defense . It is dispersal, concealment, rapid sortie generation, and the simple expedient of towing aircraft into the treeline when warning indicates inbound strikes. These techniques are not glamorous. They also cost a fraction of ballistic missile defense interceptors.

The unsolved problem Bronk identified is the relationship between national stockpile management authority and operational-level targeting decisions.

• Who, in a given country, has visibility on the national interceptor inventory during an active campaign?

• At what risk tolerance are operational planners authorized to proceed when that inventory is being drawn down?

These are questions most Western air forces have not answered with sufficient precision, and the Gulf campaign with its extraordinary expenditure rates makes answering them urgent.

What Australia Should Prioritize

When asked directly what concerned him most if Australia faced a conflict scenario in ten months’ time, Bronk’s answer was characteristically honest and somewhat contrarian. He was, he said, less worried about Australia than Australians might expect him to be. From a Chinese planning perspective, projecting force down toward Australia means operating at the far end of an extended logistics chain, through submarine-patrolled waters, against a force that is tactically proficient, equipped with modern high-end systems, and operating from a sovereign base. That is not an attractive proposition.

The more probable Chinese coercive option, in Bronk’s assessment, would be firing conventionally armed intermediate-range ballistic missiles into the waters near a major city, creating political shock without triggering a full military response.

His actual concern was munitions. If Australia commits to alliance obligations in a Taiwan scenario pressing forward in the southern flank to prevent China from simply ignoring the southern theater forward-deployed Australian forces run short of precision munitions quickly. That gap, in his view, is where Australian investment most needs to be focused.

His assessment of the Royal Australian Air Force was striking: for the people and budget invested, the RAAF deploys more practical firepower against high-end threats than the RAF does at roughly double the budget and triple the personnel. This was not flattery. It was a direct critique of how UK defense investment has been allocated, and by extension, a reminder that organizational efficiency and targeting firepower are not the same thing as dollar expenditure.

The Strategic Logic of Offense and Defense

Bronk’s closing argument was one that bears repeating in any capital currently debating the balance between IAMD investment and long-range strike development. IAMD investment is only valuable insofar as it buys time for offensive options to deny your opponent their immediate theory of victory.

China will not start an operation against Taiwan expecting a two to three year attritional struggle. They will start it because they have convinced themselves it can succeed, and that Australia and Japan can be intimidated into staying out. That calculation is more likely to be modified by visible Australian long-range strike capability by the capacity to threaten Chinese theories of victory than by impressive air defense architecture.

This is not an argument against IAMD investment. It is an argument for understanding what IAMD is for. Defense buys time. Offense denies the adversary’s plan. You cannot defend all the cities. You cannot cover all the coastlines. What you can do is make the cost of the offensive campaign prohibitive which requires that you have the strike capability to execute that threat credibly.

The kill web framework I have been developing with Ed Timperlake is relevant here. The question is not whether you can defend each node. The question is whether your distributed force can continue to generate combat power and threaten the adversary’s operational plan even as individual assets are degraded. That requires hardening, dispersal, and redundancy on the defensive side and credible, ranged offensive capability on the other. Bronk’s analysis from three active theaters of competition points to the same conclusion: the force that survives to generate sorties and deliver precision effects shapes the operational calculus. Everything else is a supporting investment.

Justin Bronk’s remarks at the Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar provided significant insight into lessons being demonstrated in real world operations. The harder question is whether the acquisition decisions, the doctrine, and the command structures are moving fast enough to absorb them.

∗ The Geran-2, Russia’s domestically produced version of Iran’s Shahed-136, is a low-cost, long-range loitering munition used extensively against Ukrainian infrastructure. Powered by a pusher-propeller piston engine, it cruises at 150–190 km/h with a range of 1,000–2,000 km, carrying a 30–50 kg warhead now upgraded with tungsten shrapnel for improved anti-personnel effects. Russia replaced the original Iranian avionics with GLONASS navigation, Russian flight-control units, and hardened jamming-resistant electronics, while scaling production at the Alabuga SEZ into the thousands of units; by late 2025, variants had also gained 4G connectivity and alleged Starlink-based terminal guidance. The Geran-3 is a jet-powered evolution of the same family, using a small turbojet to reach 300–370 km/h and closing gaps that Ukrainian air defenses had exploited against the slower Geran-2 swarms, with the KometaM-12 CRPA antenna system added to defeat the spoofing and jamming that had degraded earlier waves with both variants now deployed together in mixed strike packages launched from new forward bases near the Ukrainian border.