In the crucible of Ukraine’s grinding war against Russia, a quiet revolution in aerial warfare doctrine is taking shape — one that could reshape how Western air forces think about cost, lethality, and sustainability in prolonged conflicts. At the center of this transformation is Sweden’s Saab, the defense giant behind the JAS 39 Gripen fighter jet, which is now integrating cheap, laser-guided rockets originally designed for helicopters and light aircraft into its sophisticated combat platform. The move signals a broader industry reckoning: in an era of attrition warfare, the most expensive munition is not always the most effective one.
According to Business Insider, Saab announced plans to integrate the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) onto the Gripen, a relatively low-cost laser-guided rocket made by BAE Systems. The APKWS transforms standard unguided 2.75-inch Hydra 70 rockets into precision-guided munitions at a fraction of the cost of traditional air-to-ground missiles. Each APKWS round costs roughly $30,000 — a stark contrast to the $200,000 or more price tag attached to missiles like the AGM-65 Maverick or the even pricier Storm Shadow cruise missile.
Lessons From Ukraine’s Battlefields Are Driving Western Weapons Strategy
The decision to mate a budget munition with a frontline fighter jet did not emerge in a vacuum. It is a direct consequence of the war in Ukraine, where both sides have been forced to innovate under the pressure of dwindling stockpiles and skyrocketing demand for precision-guided weapons. Ukraine’s experience has demonstrated that expensive, exquisite munitions — while devastatingly effective — are consumed at rates that Western defense industrial bases simply cannot sustain. The conflict has burned through weapons inventories at a pace not seen since World War II, forcing military planners across NATO to fundamentally rethink their approach to munitions procurement and employment.
The APKWS has already proven itself in Ukraine’s theater of operations. Ukrainian forces have employed the rocket from various platforms, including ground-based launchers and lighter aircraft, to strike Russian armored vehicles, fortified positions, and troop concentrations. Its guidance kit, which snaps onto existing unguided rockets, uses a semi-active laser seeker to home in on targets illuminated by a laser designator. The result is near-missile-level accuracy from a weapon that costs a fraction of what traditional guided munitions demand. For a country fighting a war of national survival on a constrained budget, the APKWS has been a revelation.
Why Saab’s Gripen Is Uniquely Suited for the Cost-Conscious Combat Era
The Gripen itself has long been marketed as the affordable alternative to heavyweights like the F-35 Lightning II and the Eurofighter Typhoon. Saab has consistently emphasized the aircraft’s low operating costs, its ability to operate from short and austere runways — including public roads — and its relatively modest acquisition price. A single Gripen E, the latest variant, costs approximately $85 million, compared to well over $100 million for an F-35A. More importantly, the Gripen’s cost per flight hour is significantly lower than its competitors, a factor that becomes critically important in sustained combat operations where sortie rates must remain high over months or even years.
By integrating the APKWS, Saab is doubling down on this philosophy of affordable lethality. The Gripen can already carry a wide array of NATO-standard weapons, including the Meteor beyond-visual-range air-to-air missile and various marks of precision-guided bombs. Adding the APKWS to its arsenal gives pilots a proportional response option — the ability to engage lighter targets such as trucks, infantry positions, radar installations, and unarmored vehicles without expending a six-figure missile on a five-figure target. This concept of “cost-per-kill” efficiency has become a central preoccupation for defense ministries across Europe as they prepare for the possibility of a large-scale, protracted conflict with Russia.
The Economics of Attrition: Matching the Munition to the Target
The strategic logic is straightforward but profound. In a high-intensity conflict, air forces will need to fly thousands of sorties and engage tens of thousands of targets. If every engagement requires a $250,000 missile, the math quickly becomes unsustainable — even for wealthy NATO nations. The APKWS offers a way to stretch munitions budgets dramatically. A Gripen loaded with APKWS rockets could theoretically engage multiple targets on a single sortie at a total munitions cost lower than that of a single precision-guided bomb. This is not about replacing expensive weapons; it is about creating a tiered arsenal where the right weapon is matched to the right target at the right cost.
Russia’s own approach to the war has reinforced this lesson. Moscow has increasingly turned to cheap Iranian-designed Shahed drones, glide bombs converted from Soviet-era dumb munitions, and mass-produced guided rockets to sustain its offensive operations. While individually less capable than Western precision weapons, these systems are produced in sufficient quantity to maintain constant pressure on Ukrainian defenses. The West, long accustomed to qualitative superiority, is now grappling with the reality that quantity has a quality all its own — and that industrial capacity to produce affordable munitions at scale may matter more than technological sophistication in a long war.
BAE Systems’ APKWS: From Counterinsurgency Tool to Peer-Conflict Weapon
The APKWS was originally developed for the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, where attack helicopters and light aircraft needed a precision weapon smaller and cheaper than Hellfire missiles for engaging insurgent targets in close proximity to civilians. BAE Systems’ guidance kit proved remarkably effective, and the weapon was adopted by the U.S. Marine Corps, Navy, and Army, as well as numerous allied nations. Its transition from a counterinsurgency tool to a weapon being integrated onto a frontline NATO fighter jet represents a significant evolution in its intended role.
The integration work on the Gripen is expected to be completed by 2026, according to the reporting by Business Insider. This timeline aligns with broader European defense modernization efforts that have accelerated dramatically since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Sweden itself joined NATO in March 2024, ending more than two centuries of military non-alignment, and has since moved aggressively to integrate its formidable defense capabilities into the alliance’s collective defense posture. The Gripen, with its road-basing capability and now its expanded low-cost munitions options, fits neatly into NATO’s strategy for defending the alliance’s northern flank, particularly the Baltic states and Scandinavia.
Broader Implications for NATO’s Industrial and Operational Doctrine
The Gripen-APKWS combination also speaks to a broader shift in NATO’s operational doctrine. Alliance planners are increasingly focused on “distributed operations” — spreading forces across multiple dispersed locations to complicate enemy targeting. The Gripen’s ability to operate from highway strips and austere bases makes it ideal for this concept. Combined with cheap, effective munitions like the APKWS, a dispersed fleet of Gripens could conduct sustained close air support and interdiction missions without relying on vulnerable, centralized air bases that would be prime targets for Russian cruise and ballistic missiles in the opening hours of a conflict.
Other NATO nations are watching Saab’s integration effort closely. Countries that operate the Gripen — including Brazil, South Africa, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Thailand — could benefit from the expanded weapons capability. Additionally, the concept of integrating low-cost precision munitions onto advanced fighter platforms is likely to spread beyond the Gripen. The U.S. Air Force has already experimented with APKWS on the A-10 Thunderbolt II and other platforms, and there is growing interest in similar approaches for the F-16, which is being supplied to Ukraine and remains the most widely operated Western fighter jet in the world.
A New Calculus for Air Power in the 21st Century
Defense analysts have noted that the war in Ukraine is forcing a fundamental reassessment of Western assumptions about air power. For decades, the prevailing orthodoxy held that a small number of exquisitely capable aircraft armed with precision weapons could dominate any battlefield. That assumption was built on the experience of conflicts like the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 Kosovo campaign, and the interventions in Libya and Syria — all relatively short engagements against overmatched adversaries. Ukraine has shattered that paradigm. Against a near-peer opponent with sophisticated air defenses, electronic warfare capabilities, and the industrial capacity to absorb losses and keep fighting, the West needs mass as well as quality.
Saab’s decision to integrate the APKWS onto the Gripen is a pragmatic acknowledgment of this new reality. It reflects a growing consensus among European defense officials that preparing for a potential conflict with Russia requires not just advanced technology but also the industrial depth and operational flexibility to sustain combat operations over extended periods. The era of short, sharp wars fought with boutique arsenals may be over. In its place is emerging a doctrine that prizes affordability, scalability, and the unglamorous but essential ability to keep fighting when the expensive missiles run out. Sweden, with its long tradition of pragmatic defense planning and its newly minted NATO membership, is positioning itself at the forefront of this transformation — one cheap rocket at a time.
Sweden’s Gripen Fighter Jet Gets a Budget-Friendly Makeover for the Age of Attrition Warfare first appeared on Web and IT News.
