Originally Posted by
bono
... These guys have been caught with their pants down and some very embarrassing holes in their national defense preparedness have been exposed by this errant aircraft. You could not make this stuff up if you wanted to.
Bono, don't read too much in to this. If there is no assessed threat then there is no reason to maintain a high air defence alert state. In the UK for instance, with the end of the Cold War, much of the air defence system was dismantled and the number of aircraft on alert was reduced.
Even at the height of the Cold War the US did not keep all its SAM sites on 24 hour alert.
While countries in that region may not all be buddy buddy they do not necessarily feel the need for 24 hour coverage. Where you may well be correct it that they don't want their actual readiness states, or periods of operation, to be published.