Ukraine's most cost-effective counter-drone weapon is a 1976 German 35mm cannon costing thousands per kill, not billion-dollar air-defense systems. Gulf procurement strategies optimized for state-on-state air war are structurally mismatched against the drone swarm threat now defining modern conflict.
Roughly 44 undersea infrastructure incidents occurred between January 2024 and July 2025, including Baltic cables and Red Sea cuts that severed 25% of Asia-Europe data traffic. NATO lacks a coherent deterrence framework for gray-zone sabotage below the threshold of armed attack, leaving critical chokepoints exposed.
Berlin committed historic defense spending increases post-2022 but faces industrial bottlenecks, bureaucratic delays, and allied skepticism about delivery timelines. A remilitarizing Germany that can't spend fast enough risks undermining the eastern flank deterrence architecture it's meant to anchor.