Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone gave the number and then did the arithmetic out loud, which is the part that lands.

“Seven hundred takeoffs in two years,” NATO’s most senior military officer said at the Taranto Naval Base in southern Italy on Monday. “Do the math: almost one a day.”

That is how often NATO fighters have been launched on emergency intercepts of Russian aircraft, or of aircraft-like objects, approaching Alliance airspace. Somewhere in Europe, on most days for two years, a pair of armed fighters has gone from parked to airborne in minutes because something was coming that nobody could identify.

What a scramble actually involves

Quick Reaction Alert is the least glamorous and most relentless job in European military aviation. Two fighters sit armed and fuelled in a shed at the end of a runway. Two crews sit beside them in flying kit. They do this every hour of every day, in every NATO country with an air policing commitment, and almost all of it is waiting.

When the call comes from a Combined Air Operations Centre, the target is usually not hostile. It is a Russian maritime patrol or intelligence aircraft flying in international airspace with its transponder switched off, no flight plan filed and no radio contact with civil controllers. That combination is legal and profoundly unhelpful, because it makes the aircraft invisible to the systems that keep airliners apart.

So the interceptors go up, identify the aircraft visually, photograph it, escort it along the edge of Alliance airspace and hand it off to the next country’s fighters. Then they land, rearm and go back to waiting. Nothing is shot down. Nothing is resolved. It happens again the next day.

Dragone listed Russia and terrorist groups alongside the less photogenic threats: disinformation, hybrid attacks, and authoritarian states pushing at the international order. The 700 figure was his evidence that none of this is theoretical.

The number underneath the number

Seven hundred over two years averages out to roughly one a day, but averages hide the shape of the thing. The workload is not spread evenly across the map or across the calendar, and on the eastern flank it is climbing sharply. Comparing July 2025 with July 2026, combat sorties flown on that flank were reported to have risen by more than 250 percent, driven by Russian military aircraft approaching without flight plans and with transponders off.

Afterburner has covered the individual entries in that ledger all summer, and read together they explain the total. Polish fighters intercepted a Russian Il-20 over the Baltic in late August, then did it again days later near Ustka with the aircraft’s transponder switched off. NATO shot down a drone over Latvia in August. A drone crossed into Estonia at the start of September.

And not every launch is aimed at Russia at all. Hungary scrambled two Gripens after a stolen Cessna turned toward the Paks nuclear plant. Poland put an Mi-24 into the air over the Belarus border and found a flock of birds. That is what the phrase “aircraft-like objects” is doing in Dragone’s sentence, and it is not padding. A radar return that might be a drone has to be treated as one until somebody looks at it.

NATO 3.0, and a lesson about muscles

Dragone used Taranto to sketch what he calls NATO 3.0: an alliance rebalanced so that European members carry more weight alongside the United States, returning to collective defence while facing pressure from the east, the south and the Arctic at once.

His framing for how to survive that is worth more than the usual communiqué language. In July he laid it out on X.

His illustration: a glass is fragile and breaks under stress. A rock is resilient and survives unchanged. A muscle is antifragile, and grows stronger because of the stress. He argued that strategic superiority will belong not to whoever fields the most advanced weapons, but to whoever can learn, decide, produce, innovate and recover faster.

Applied to air policing, that is a slightly uncomfortable idea. Seven hundred scrambles is a punishing amount of stress to place on a small number of squadrons, airframes and crews. Whether two years of it has built muscle or simply worn things out is the question the number does not answer.

Admiral Cavo Dragone speaking at Taranto, where he gave the 700 figure. In Italian.

Sources: Kyiv Post; Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone via the NATO Military Committee; LIGA.net; Afterburner reporting.