Operation Epic Fury demonstrated a fundamental vulnerability in Western air-defense strategy: the unsustainable costs of maintaining high-end kinetic defenses against low-cost mass-production. Moreover, it has formalized the emergence of an “Axis of Attrition”, a tripartite alliance leveraging Iranian expendable munitions, Chinese antistealth radar, and Russian industrial apparatus, with a costly impact on the logistical resilience of NATO’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD). By flooding the airspace with “cheap” weapons, the Axis is turning Western technological superiority against itself, forcing an unsustainable economic exchange where million-dollar interceptors are expended against thousand-dollar threats.
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