While we don’t have a lot of details, we do have enough knowledge to ask the natural question: How good did the Ukrainian air defenses need to be to achieve this result? Let’s focus on the first case, where the defender shoots down the incoming missile. We could think of each incoming missile as a coin flip, where the coin might be biased – i.e., not 50/50. To have 95% confidence of defeating such a raid, the per-inbound effectiveness of the Ukrainian air defenses would have had to have been greater than 99.7%. However, seeing the trend in effectiveness of western-designed air defenses against incoming missiles should make all of us – including our adversaries – reevaluate what we consider the ‘art of the possible’ when it comes to air defense.

Source: Washington Post May 18, 2023 11:46 UTC