A few days after the lamentation of air sirens and the roaring of NATO fighters eased a peaceful late night in eastern Poland, the key issue in Europe is not just whether Moscow intentionally sent two dozen drones into NATO airspace, but whether military responses reveal their long-term capabilities to deal with this growth threat.
If this is, as Poland believes, a deliberate test of NATO’s defense, then it was a very inexpensive experiment for Russia.
Polish authorities have recovered fragments of what they said are often used as decoys, with gerbera drones made from plywood and styrofoam. Ukraine’s defense information expects production will cost around $10,000 each.
Meanwhile, the NATO planes were multi-million dollar F-16 and F-35 fighter jets. It’s an effective force show, but it probably takes tens of thousands of dollars of fuel and maintenance just to get off the ground.
“Cost asymmetry doesn’t work,” Robert Tollest, a researcher at The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a London-based defense think tank, told CNN.
It’s not that NATO cannot fight massive drone attacks, he said. The NATO Jets were extremely effective in avoiding large Iranian missile and drone attacks against Israel last April. However, Tollest argued that the cost of such a defense that Israel estimated to be above $1 billion in that case makes this approach unsustainable.
“The fundamental problem is that many Western defense technologies did not consider this before Ukraine… asymmetrical threats to drones,” he said.
Still, the consensus in the fast-growing military technology sector is that many people are thinking it, but many NATO Defense Ministry is too late to adapt to it.
“There’s high tech,” said Johannespin, CEO of UK-based Marss, which specializes in threat detection software and spoke to CNN at the DSEI Defense Forum in London last week to create its own interceptor drones.
“Maybe most of the Polish boundary was now covered with nice drone walls,” he added. “Drone walls” are the concept of a layered network of detection and interception, an idea that has been widely promoted among the Baltic countries and supported by European Union officials on Wednesday.
According to PINL, the problem was that NATO’s procurement system was “still in the ’80s.” He features a titanium frame that he described as “a knife that essentially passes through a drone coming in at speed,” citing an example of a Marss medium-range AI-enabled interceptor designed to be reusable. Currently awaiting a national assessment of NATO, and is expected in the coming months.
“They are writing the specifications for this now. We are using it now. We have been in operation for years. We are not in Europe yet. We don’t have a specification for it,” PINL told CNN, referring to the traditional sourcing practices where the Ministry of Defense issued detailed technical specifications for the new product, and companies at the time bid for contracts.
The war in Ukraine effectively created a two-speed procurement process in Europe, said Siet Hamminga, CEO of Netherlands-based Robin Radar Systems. Robin Radar technology is already widely used in Ukraine and has recently been updated to detect Shaheds in a range of 12 kilometers (7.5 miles).
“If the country wants to buy equipment for Ukraine, they have a highway route to do so,” he told CNN. “They have an obligation to go to the office and say, ‘We need XYZ as soon as possible.’ If they want to buy it themselves, they have to go through the whole procedure. ”
Still, there are signs of change as the Ukrainian War provides a real-time testing ground for new technologies.
Take the defense technology startup Tekever set in Portugal. Since 2022, the UK government has purchased more than $350 million of its AR3 surveillance drones to send them to Ukraine. Earlier this year, the Royal Air Force in the UK (RAF) announced that it would adopt the AR3 for its new electronic warfare system, Stormshroud. And there are immediate plans to expand production.
This week, Tekever announced it will open its UK fourth site, the new 1,000-job drone factory, about 80 miles west of London. Karl Brew, head of defense at Tekever, told CNN that its approach is to divide the risks of developing new technologies between government and industry.
“When RAF used our AR3, it was actually working in our R&D (R&D?) program. And they brought it in within six months,” he told CNN.
Richard Knighton, the new chief of UK defense staff, highlights the need for a new approach. “Achieving the speed required requires changing relationships with the industry and innovating at a wartime pace,” he said in his first public comment last week.
Agris Kipurs, CEO and co-founder of Latvian drone startup Origin Robotics, said CNN is “developing new mechanisms for how we can collaborate with new industries.”
The Origin attack and surveillance drone beak, first supplied to Ukraine, has already been used by Latvian and British troops, and now there is a new intercepting drone, The Blaze, funded by an R&D grant from the Latvian government.
“We are a small country…we will never be able to provide sufficient air defense capabilities if we are limited to options currently on the market,” Kippurs told CNN.
And even the newly renamed US War Bureau is competing ahead of the arms race between drones and counter drones.
In a July memo, war chief Pete Hegses warned that “US units are not equipped with the deadly little drones needed for modern battlefields.” He decided on measures to remove red tape and risk aversion when it comes to drone acquisitions, such as “delegating authorities to procure and operate drones from bureaucracy to our fighter planes.”
“The only important lessons people are taking from Ukraine is experimentation,” Tolllast said. He believes that the key to effective drone defense is a “very expensive mix of high capabilities” like the F-35 and patriot batteries on display in Poland last week, and “something that might be a bit unreliable, like the Ukrainian drone interceptor.”
Even if Europe can speed up adoption of more experimental technology at the bottom edge, there are still volume issues.
Russia is currently pumping up 5,500 units per month of updated Shahed comparable Geran, as well as cheap Gerbera variant drones at Tatarstan’s fast-growing factory, according to July estimates from the Ukrainian Defence Intelligence Agency. This month, Russia launched more than 800 drones in Ukraine for the first time in one night.
Morten Bluntzaeg, CEO of Norwegian ammunition and missile producer Nanmo, told CNN the morning after the Russian drone invasion, his company is working on “higher amounts of low-cost missiles” to “match the missile prices with the targets that were fired.”
Nammo, currently one of Europe’s largest ammunition producers, is already changing due to the rapid re-contracts on the continent. Last year, they expanded production of artillery ammunition from thousands of shells a year prior to the full-scale invasion. It also produces solid rocket motors used to launch missiles in the air, an important component for high-end air defense systems.
His message to policy makers was, “We are at the beginning of the beginning of capacity building. Don’t think we’ve done enough.”
