Faced with a brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine, many Americans and Europeans are pushing for their governments to provide as much military support as possible to Kyiv. One idea that a number of prominent observers and commentators have seized on is the establishment of a no-fly zone—that is, using force (or the threat of force) to keep Russian aircraft out of some segment of the airspace above Ukraine, in order to prevent Russian air strikes on Ukrainian military forces and civilians in the area. Creating such a zone would involve a combination of day-to-day intelligence collection, observations from the ground, rotating aerial patrols with large numbers of planes and pilots—and, crucially, the threat to physically prevent adversary aircraft from entering the designated airspace.
Proposals for a no-fly zone are inspired by the concept’s application by U.S. and NATO forces in Iraq after the Persian Gulf War, in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, and in Libya during its civil war in 2011. Notably, those cases did not involve imposing an exclusion zone on a major power; instead, they featured a mighty great power, the United States, dictating demands to weak local adversaries that were in no position to contest them. There are no examples of something called a “no-fly zone” being imposed on a major power outside the context of battles for air superiority in regular warfare.
