Thoughts about interaction between air assets and air defense assets is cursed with a high amount of wronged assumptions.
Space-based strategic ISR assets (and
in particularl radar based ones, to the contrary of the typical fascination of common scarce-knowledgeable people with
optical based ones, that usually
came into play, for target recognition and confirmation, only much after the former have detected the overall area of activity and eventual motion of enemy units) exist since a very long time and ,since theirs introduction, they have
represented a problem infinitely bigger for permanetly monitored fixed area with well known coordinates in particular
command centers , port facilities and even more airfields , against which the satellite orbit is purposedly programmed since its launch, than easily relocatable and ,even less, high mobile and dispersable ground units.
With the right knowledge of enemy constellation of space ISR satellites position and composition an advanced enemy can obtain effective "strategic surprise" even with mobilization of significative amount of equipment and personnel on the ground or through internal littoral body of water (obviously with blue water area the thing become much more complex), that has been repeatedly proved by Federation's Command with the mobilizazion ,concentration and activation of its forces in
actual operations in 2008, 2014 and also in 2015 ,in all those instances objective observation of NATO communications and command lines shown that they had became aware of the scale and area od the operation only after it had been fully completed.
In substance the limitis of space based ISR are fully exploitable by any player owning similar systems, at least if we talk of mobile forces; as said previously for fixed installements and in
particular command centers and airfileds that remain the most vujlnerable targets in XXI century wars, mostly for the exposure to stand off cruise missile attacks and, for airfields, the high concentration of very frail vehicles and weapon and fuel storage sites,
the unique real defense remain : new generation SHORADs, very high power EW systems, multispectral area masking elements and passive hardening and
for ALL of those elements NATO structures remain literally orders of magnitude more vulnerable that similar Federation's ones lacking often even only the semblance of even only ONE of those protection layers ! Now the point about "UAV swarms":
UAV with surveillance capabilities and capable to disseminate data collected to other nodes of the network are
not only terribly vulnerable, both to soft and hard suppression, but also anything except cheap and fast to produce , even only limiting the reasoning to UAVs with short theatre range with such capabilities (that in a conflict with an advanced opponent will be likely unable even only to take-off for the first time because them and theris base would be obliterated from the face of earth short after having being deployed in a theatre of operation, because remaining within the range of enemy tactical and sub-startegic range missiles.......unless protected by strong area defense previously named) we can observe that
even the US in over a decade and half has been capable to produce only few hundreds of them that would no last more than few hours in a conflict with an advanced opponent even if would be all employed in a small section of enemy IAD network.
The allowing technology for realize true unmanned "swarm attacks" (mostly related to realization of truly authonomous IA and to massive reduction ,both in terms of mass and cost, of the electronic and optronic constructive elements and last but not least the realization of a data sharing and collective command channel that wouldn't shatter in presence of today level of high power ground based EW systems)
are still very far in the future and taking into account today pace of development of air defense technology it will well behind the capabilities of the latter also when fully realized.
The real danger for future air defense structures lie instead in within-atmosphere maneuvrable hypersonic elements; but those problems, as well known, concerntoday much more our "western partners" ,lacking even soft and hard defense against even only subsonic PGMs , than Federation's designers
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