The Interceptor Age

In April, in this space, we wrote that defense is learning faster than offense. The proof just arrived. So did the bill.

On the night of July 2, Russia threw one of the largest combined strike packages of the entire war at Kyiv — roughly 500 drones and more than 70 missiles in a single night. Eighteen people died. Apartment blocks, a hotel, an ambulance station. Ukrainian officials called it a “night of horror,” and it was. But buried inside the horror is a detail that would have been unthinkable three years ago: the overwhelming majority of those drones never reached a target. A week earlier, Ukrainian air defense downed 95 of 101 inbound Russian drones and recorded just six hits. That is not luck. That is architecture.

For three years the economics of the drone war ran in one direction. The attacker spent $10,000 on a Shahed; the defender spent a million dollars — or a $50 million airframe’s flight hours — to stop it. Cheap offense, ruinous defense. That was the whole strategic logic of the drone age, the reason a mid-tier power could hold a superpower’s infrastructure hostage. This summer, the math flipped. Ukraine unveiled an interceptor drone that kills a $10,000 Shahed for $2,000. Its Bullet interceptor now carries a chemical accelerator to run down Russia’s 500-km/h Geran-4 — a drone built specifically to outrun the last generation of interceptors, obsolete before it finished deploying. Ukraine has dug 822 kilometers of anti-drone road tunnels. There is footage circulating of a Ukrainian unit literally running down a Shahed in the open. The Pentagon, reportedly, is watching that video very closely.

The strategic ledger tells the same story. The Institute for the Study of War assesses that Russia’s spring-summer offensive has failed to achieve operationally significant gains — in plain language, Russia’s assault tempo stopped buying ground. Meanwhile Ukraine’s own offensive drone campaign passed 800,000 verified targets struck in 2026 alone, its Sea Baby naval drones now open their side compartments mid-mission to launch FPV strike drones of their own, and Russian refineries that survived two years of deep strikes are burning their way into a summer fuel crisis. The offense we described in April is proceeding on schedule. What’s new — what’s genuinely new — is the defense.

And the interceptor age is not only Ukrainian. Israel is now testing Iron Beam in concert with Iron Dome, pairing missiles with laser pulses — the cost-per-shot of a laser engagement collapsing toward the price of electricity. Thales just neutralized 80 drones in a single energy-weapon trial. China’s Silent Hunter laser system is reportedly already fielded in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. Japan signed on to jointly develop and produce military drones with Ukraine — a pacifist-constitution technology power buying into the world’s hardest-earned curriculum. The country that has absorbed more drone fire than any nation in history is no longer just surviving the syllabus. It is exporting it.

Here is the uncomfortable part: the interceptor age is unevenly distributed, and the gap maps almost perfectly onto who has been forced to learn.

This week the IISS documented 144 suspected drone incursions across a dozen NATO states and Ireland since 2024 — airports closed in Germany, Spain, and Denmark; Vilnius shut by a drone warning as recently as May; sensitive defense installations penetrated. The report’s most striking claim: many of these drones were likely launched from Russia’s shadow fleet — rusting, sanctions-dodging tankers loitering off European coasts, converted into drone carriers. NATO’s standing answer is to scramble fighter jets, at €85,000 per two-jet intercept before a single missile is fired. That is the exact losing math the front line abandoned a year ago — a million-dollar response to a ten-thousand-dollar provocation, now playing out over the capitals of the wealthiest alliance on Earth. Latvia is pushing mobile intercept units to its border. Brussels is drafting a continent-wide “drone wall.” The hardware exists. The urgency, so far, is on paper.

In the Gulf, the ceasefire that ended the spring’s war with Iran keeps wobbling — drones against a commercial vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, drones toward Bahrain, a fuel tank and radar array hit at Kuwait’s international airport. And in Sudan, where the RSF’s drones killed more than sixty civilians in al-Obeid in a matter of weeks, there are no interceptors at all. That is the other end of the distribution: where drones meet no defense, they don’t contest the sky. They simply rule it.

In April we called Ukraine the laboratory. The laboratory has now published its results: the drone’s reign of cheap, one-directional terror is not a law of nature. It is an engineering problem, and it is being solved — at $2,000 a shot, at the speed of a chemical accelerator, at the price of electricity. Defense is winning where war forced it to learn.

Everywhere else is still deciding whether the lesson applies to them. It does. The drones are not waiting for the budget cycle.