Ukraine’s air defense campaign represents the most intensive real-world stress test of integrated air defense in modern warfare. For four years, Ukrainian forces have defended cities, bases, and critical infrastructure against continuous waves of missiles and drones at a scale few modern militaries have experienced. Under constant pressure, they have adapted in real time, stretching limited stocks of interceptors, integrating new Western systems, and innovating cost-effective ways to defend against mass attacks.
This report examines how Ukraine built, adapted, and sustained its air defense system since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Drawing on operational experience, interviews with air defense personnel, and open-source data, it traces the evolution of Ukraine’s air defense from fragmented legacy systems to a layered, adaptive architecture operating under extreme resource constraints.
Rather than treating air defense as a collection of individual platforms, the report analyzes it as a living system shaped by throughput limits, interception economics, command-and-control resilience, and the ability to recover and reconfigure quickly. Ukraine’s experience offers rare insight into what air defense looks like in an industrial-scale war where the attacker can consistently generate more threats than the defender can afford to intercept.
Key themes and insights include:
— The shift from measuring air defense success by interception rates to managing system throughput and sustainability under wave-based attacks
— How Russia evolved from early attempts at air dominance to mass combined missile-drone strikes aimed at long-term attrition
— The role of layered defense, integrating legacy Soviet systems, Western SAMs, short-range guns, electronic warfare, interceptor drones, and civilian sensor networks
— The emergence of interceptor scarcity as an operational constraint, forcing strict prioritization and selective protection rather than uniform coverage
— Why resilience — recovery, dispersion, redundancy, and adaptation — matters as much as performance
The lessons in Holding Back the Sky are directly relevant for Ukraine’s partners and for any country preparing to defend against sustained, high-volume aerial threats. They offer practical, combat-tested insights for planners, policymakers, and industry leaders working to build air defenses that can endure, adapt, and protect.