Following Poland’s report, invoking NATO Article 4, the Romanian military has published a their own report of Russian violation of airspace.

A Geran drone used by the Russian Federation in its attacks on Ukraine penetrated the Romanian airspace on Saturday, September 13th, at 6:05 p.m. and was intercepted by two F-16 fighter jets, which were conducting an air patrol mission in northern Dobruja. […] The German allies deployed to Mihail Kogălniceanu scrambled two Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft in support of the Romanian ones, which monitored the area until 9:30 p.m.

Threat Response Calculation:

• 2 F-16s × 3.5 hours × $27,000/hour = $189,000
• 2 Typhoons × 3.5 hours × $62,000/hour = $434,000
• Total NATO response cost = ~$600,000

Rough Cost Ratio

• NATO response: ~$600,000
• Geran drone: ~$30,000

NATO response cost roughly 20 times more than the drone itself.

Ouch.

We know Russia has adopted a doctrine to flood the Ukraine airspace, launching more one-way attack drones from September through December 2024 than in the preceding 23 months combined. Just one day on July 9 saw 728 Shahed-type drones used in a saturation attack.

This comes from the Russian industry producing more than 5,000 long-range drones each month, split between Shahed-type strike drones and decoy models (Gerbera – a flying cardboard box). It’s believed nearly 200 Geran-2 drones per day are made.

Notably, as a historian, this actually says to me that ex-KGB are executing on a 40-year old concept. The intelligence elites of yesteryear circling around Putin still are talking about America ruining their Soviet economy. They can’t think about current problems, a fundamental problem in dictatorships, so they are smarting about the huge military overspend that Gorbachev finally admitted was their failure.

Yuri Andropov, director of the KGB, created a secret department during the 1970s within the KGB devoted to economic analysis. What he eventually studied was CIA Director William Casey’s aggressive plan to undermine and destroy the Soviet Union through a combination of economic warfare and sabotage, hot and cold war, a punishing arms race, and sophisticated and heated psychological and political warfare.

The KGB veterans thus were on the front lines to see economic warfare as the sharp tip that brought down the USSR, and they’re hungry to flip the lessons against NATO. A staggering 20:1 cost ratio is a deliberate echo of the American economic pressures that bankrupted the Soviet military-industrial complex. Putin himself is a former KGB officer who lived through the Soviet collapse and understands precisely how forcing unsustainable military spending ratios can cripple an economy.

And it should be stated that swallowing such doctrine is what is rewarded by autocrats. The KGB veterans that Putin surrounds himself with have a playbook based on what they know worked against them. That’s their weakness. They can’t adapt or innovate beyond that framework because Putin would kill them the minute they exposed a truly independent thought.

So let’s dig into basic anti-fascist history and take this another possible path. Americans under normal circumstances would see a massive strategic opportunity for industry, where economic incentives are perfectly aligned with rapid expansion. The Romanian incident essentially handed the German government a half million dollar payment for a few hours of operations against a $30,000 target.

That’s math just begging for industrial innovation. But the Americans are MIA, and clearly can’t be trusted, drunkenly pouring billions down the drain on dumb military PR stunts like the Yemen and Iran “air power embarassment” of strategic bankruptcy (let alone pandering to “iPad on your face” guy selling defense lemons).

NATO has an immediate reality of three dozen countries facing a rapidly growing threat from cheap robot swarms. Layered defense systems are needed for both military and critical infrastructure markets. That’s basically another way of saying Russia just unlocked German industrial power with a potential $50 billion addressable high tech market over next decade.

Russia is taunting Germany to solve a manufacturing optimization problem, which is exactly what built the massive anti-Soviet automotive and machine tool dominance in the first place.

American engineering culture meanwhile is in steep decline, a corrupt political mess of anti-science bureaucracy pumping flashy, late, expensive, over-engineered PR as solutions nobody wants. Germany already has shown it’s perfectly positioned to pivot their quality control of “mass-producible minimum viable” engineering philosophy into independent and sustainable European commercial dominance of contested airspace. This is a made-in-EU moment.

Putin’s old man shouting at the birds grudge-fueled KGB-inspired economic warfare strategy, which he expected to weaken NATO, might end up creating the first truly independent European defense industrial base, powered by German engineering excellence. There’s real irony being funded by the paper robot threat Russia itself created.

Ukraine, Czechia, Romania and Poland have just made the innovation demand clear:

• Accelerate European defense autonomy (exactly what the old KGB fears)
• Seize ideal conditions for German industrial resurgence
• Fund the next generation of European military technology
• Eliminate American defense dominance (accept Hegseth for his malicious self-destruction)

Russia deserves exactly what happens when you give German engineers a clear problem, unlimited market demand, and necessary freedom from the stupidity of the American culture war clowns grinding themselves down even faster than foreign threats ever could.