By Lucien Morell

JAKARTA, Indonesia: When a wave of cheap, largely unarmed decoy drones slipped into Polish airspace recently, the spectacle that followed was instructive and humiliating.

The devices — described by intelligence and reporting as crude “Gerbera” models made from plywood and expanded polystyrene (styrofoam) — were not sophisticated weapons. 

Yet NATO scrambled jets, fired interceptor missiles and expended a level of resources wildly disproportionate to the threat.

The result: three or four drones were shot down while the rest drifted to earth harmlessly. The message was not about Russian cunning; it was about Western fragility.

The arithmetic is devastating. Western interceptors are expensive. Modern air-to-air missiles and surface-to-air interceptors cost millions apiece: an AMRAAM can run in the low millions (around US 1 million per round in recent contracts), Patriots’ PAC-3 interceptors and similar systems often cost several million, while ship-launched SM-6 or SM-3 interceptors can be in the mid-single- to low-double-digit millions per missile. 

These figures are not academic: they are the price per shot. By contrast, the cheap decoys that provoked the scramble have been described as costing a few hundred to a few thousand dollars to build — in short, orders of magnitude cheaper than the weapons fired at them.

The result is a grotesque cost-inefficiency: burn a multimillion-dollar missile to protect airspace from a plywood toy.

That cost-inefficiency is not just embarrassing. It is strategically dangerous.

Every expensive interceptor expended against low-cost targets depletes stockpiles and strains production pipelines. Western air-defence production is limited: efforts to ramp up output are underway, but current annual production rates for many interceptors remain modest by wartime standards — measured in the low hundreds rather than thousands. 

Europe and the United States are scrambling to expand capacity (some programs aim to raise annual output to the 600–1,000 range over coming years), but this is precisely the sort of surge demand that can’t be met overnight. In short: expend expensive interceptors now, and you risk being short when a real, high-end volley arrives.

The Poland episode also exposed a deeper institutional sickness: Western militaries have grown fat on expensive, elaborate systems that are often brittle in practice.

The military-industrial ecosystem that produces those systems has lobbyists, political patrons and a vested interest in big, headline-grabbing buys. 

But a bloated procurement model that prioritizes complexity over resilience produces brittle defences which are spectacular on parade but fragile in the field.

When cheap mass tactics are used against costly point-defences, the economics favor the attacker. 

That is what we saw in Poland: a few hundred or a few thousand dollars’ worth of decoys forced NATO to expend missiles worth multiple millions.

And this is not the first farce of its kind. Consider the F-22 Raptor, the crown jewel of American airpower, a stealth fighter program that cost more than US 67 billion to develop and field.

Despite its advanced sensors and capabilities, the F-22’s only recorded “air-to-air kills” to date have been balloons, including the much-publicized case of a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon shot down off the U.S. East Coast in 2023. 

To down that slow-moving, non-maneuverable balloon, the U.S. military scrambled a Raptor and fired an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile valued at roughly US 400,000. The balloon itself was likely worth at most a few tens of thousands of dollars. 

In other words, a multi-billion-dollar platform designed to fight peer adversaries was used to destroy a weather balloon–like target at enormous cost and with enormous fanfare. If that is not a parody of cost-inefficiency, what is?

Political bravado from London, Paris and Berlin about “standing up to Russia” rings hollow in the face of this reality. It is one thing to make Atlantic-ward speeches about deterrence; it is another to demonstrate the logistics, production and doctrine that make deterrence credible. 

The decoy incident showed NATO operating on assumptions that are increasingly out of date: that advanced sensors plus a handful of expensive interceptors are a durable shield.

In modern conflict with swarm drones, cheap loitering munitions, and mass-produced decoys that assumption is bankrupt.

There are also real systemic costs. Each missile shot at a decoy is not just a financial loss; it is a depletion of inventory and a strain on an already fragile supply chain. 

Production lines for sophisticated interceptors require specialized materials, component lead times and industrial capacity that cannot be ramped up overnight. 

Western governments are now pouring money into orders and contracts to increase output, but those are medium-term fixes to a long-term problem.

In the short term, expensive interceptors will remain scarce while cheap mass tactics remain plentiful.

If there is a single lesson, it is this: the principal security threat to the West today is not only a foreign adversary, but the internal rot of a procurement model that rewards complexity, favors big contractors, and neglects cost-effective resilience. 

Real adaptation means investing in layered, affordable countermeasures: mass-produced interceptor drones, cheaper kinetic interceptors, electronic warfare, distributed sensors and tactics that blunt swarms without melting away missile inventories. 

Ukraine’s experience with low-cost interceptors and home-grown counter-drone systems is a useful example: cheaper, numerous interceptors can preserve expensive stocks and blunt mass attacks.

Mocking plywood decoys or floating balloons is easy. The harder task for NATO is to admit that its current model is unaffordable and unsustainable, and to rebuild air defence around resilience and economics rather than prestige contracts. 

Until that reckoning happens, the alliance will remain vulnerable to tactics that exploit cost asymmetries and politicians will keep delivering bluster while theatres of real insecurity quietly grow.

*Lucien Morell is a Southeast Asia based geopolitical observer and analyst.*