WIESBADEN, Germany - Across Europe and beyond, defending the skies is no longer a fixed requirement. It is a fast-evolving, multi-domain mission shaped by accelerating threats, advancing technologies, and an urgent demand for speed, adaptability and interoperability. For the U.S. Army and NATO, maintaining air defense superiority over the next five to 10 years will depend not only on the systems we deploy today, but on how we integrate and evolve them into tomorrow’s edge.
The LANDEURO panel: Defending the Skies — Today’s Capabilities, Tomorrow’s Edge offered a focused discussion on how NATO and its Allies must adapt to meet the future of air defense.
“We’ve got to identify how we develop the capabilities we need, especially along the forward edge of the battlefield,” said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Curtis King, commanding general of the 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command.
He emphasized the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in reducing the time between initial contact and effective response. Faster decision-making, he noted, will be critical to staying ahead.
Modern air defense is no longer just about intercepting missiles or aircraft, according to King. Today, it requires tracking hypersonic weapons, countering drones at scale and maintaining continuous situational awareness across complex, contested environments. Adversaries are investing in technologies that challenge traditional defense layers; using long-range fires, jamming, unmanned systems and cyber tools to overwhelm or bypass legacy systems. To outpace these threats, NATO and the U.S. Army must adapt faster than the threat itself.
Members of the panel emphasized that this future demands more than just better hardware. It calls for a connected network of sensors and shooters across domains and borders. Real-time targeting data must move seamlessly across systems and allies, even under electronic or kinetic attack. NATO’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense policy, aligned with U.S. Army modernization priorities, supports this exact vision; a networked force where every allied unit can sense, decide and act faster than the adversary.
A key message from the panel was that innovation is central to this transformation. The Army’s modernization efforts include directed energy systems, autonomous sensors, and resilient communications architectures. U.S. Army initiatives like Project Flytrap are already advancing these efforts, pushing innovation into the hands of units on the ground.
“We need a strategy built around cheap and scalable shots. Every kill must be cost-effective,” said Dr. Alexey Boiarskyi, panelist and special advisor to the Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine. “We also have to make deliberate choices about what decisions remain human and what we outsource to AI.”
Boiarskyi stressed that future defense won’t rely on a single system or silver bullet. Success will come from aligning today’s readiness with tomorrow’s technology, fielding tools that evolve alongside the threat and ensuring they operate in sync with our allies.
For the U.S. Army and NATO, the future of air defense is already taking shape; not just through what we build, but how we build it together.
See the panel video here
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