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German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius speaks during a news conference after the European Group of Five defense ministers' meeting in Krakow, Poland, on Friday. japantimes.co.jp

A solar farm in Nakai, Kanagawa Prefecture, in March 2016. Japan gets about a tenth of its electricity from solar panels despite having nearly no domestic production of photovoltaics (PVs). japantimes.co.jp

Sonic the Hedgehog, Castlevania's Alucard and the weak yet lovable Slime from Dragon Quest are just some of Japan's iconic gaming franchises celebrating midlife anniversaries in 2026. japantimes.co.jp

A Ukrainian rises in the traditional world of sumo japantimes.co.jp

NATO is deploying a Turkish drone carrier to Russia's doorstep. US Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jackson Adkins businessinsider.com

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Europe’s five biggest military spenders—Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Poland—say they will jointly develop “low-cost air defense” weapons, a program branded LEAP (Low-Cost Effectors and Autonomous Platforms), after battlefield lessons from Ukraine, according to Bloomberg via The Japan Times. The ministers announced the initiative after meeting in Kraków with the EU’s top diplomat and NATO’s deputy secretary-general to discuss hybrid threats and industrial cooperation.

The pitch is simple: drones and mass-produced cruise missiles have turned the traditional air-defense equation into a budgetary horror story. Shooting down a cheap Shahed-type drone with an exquisite interceptor is a “win” only if your objective is to bankrupt yourself on schedule. LEAP is meant to push European procurement from boutique interceptors toward disposable effectors—more rounds, more launchers, more autonomous platforms, lower cost-per-kill.

What is actually new? Not the idea that quantity matters; air defense has always been about magazines and reloads. The novelty is the attempt to industrialize the economics: pairing cheaper interceptors with better sensing and targeting so that the expensive part becomes the sensor network and software rather than the missile itself. That implies sensor fusion, automated track management, and tighter integration between surveillance and shooters—areas where European defense procurement has historically excelled at producing PowerPoints and under-delivering hardware.

What is not new is the political reflex to answer a cost problem with a new acronym. LEAP arrives in a Europe already running multiple overlapping air-and-missile-defense efforts, each with its own national champions, export politics, and “strategic autonomy” rhetoric. The risk is that “low-cost” becomes a label attached to yet another prestige program that is neither low-cost nor on time.

Meanwhile NATO is improvising with what it has. Business Insider reports the alliance is deploying Turkey’s drone-capable amphibious assault ship TCG Anadolu to the Baltic Sea as part of “Eastern Sentry,” a surge of air-defense and surveillance assets after repeated Russian airspace violations near Poland and the Baltic region. The Anadolu—originally intended to operate F-35Bs before Turkey was expelled from the program over its purchase of Russia’s S-400 air-defense system—has been repurposed to carry Bayraktar TB-3 and Kızılelma drones.

Europe’s big spenders announce a multi-year industrial initiative for cheap interceptors, while NATO sends a drone carrier to Latvia to widen the sensor picture now. In theory, LEAP is about redundancy and mass. In practice, Europe’s procurement culture still rewards complexity, centralized planning, and vendor lock-in—the exact traits that make “cheap, plentiful, fast” so hard.

If LEAP succeeds, it will be because it treats air defense as an attrition business: accept losses, mass-produce replacements, and optimize for cost-per-kill rather than brochure performance. If it fails, it will fail in the usual way—by becoming a monument to European “coordination,” with the price tag of a luxury interceptor and the delivery schedule of a cathedral.