A successful drone creates only a temporary operational window. Drawing on Russian and Ukrainian uncrewed systems, this TSB Insight explains the four clocks that determine whether a military can turn evidence into a fielded response before the advantage expires.

Leonidas matters less as a technological spectacle than as a possible answer to a harder military problem: how to defend against cheap aerial mass without exhausting expensive interceptors and shallow magazines. This insight examines the system not as a marketing claim, but as a strategic proposition — one that could affect force protection, procurement priorities and the economics of modern air defence if its promise survives the harder tests of integration, scale and operational reality.