Can NATO innovate quickly enough to prevent Russia’s growing drone threat?

Days after the jammer of air cases sirens and the roar of the NATO hunters interrupted a peaceful night in the late summer in eastern Poland, the most important question in Europe is not only whether Moscow deliberately sent nearly two dozen drones to the NATO air space, but what the military reaction reveals about the long-term power of this growing power.

If, as Poland believes, this was a deliberate test of NATO’s defense, it was a remarkably cheap experiment for Russia.

Polish authorities recovered fragments of what it stood were Gerbera drones, made from plywood and styrofoam, and often used as Lokvogels. The defense information of Ukraine believes that they each cost around $ 10,000 to produce.

In the meantime, the NATO aircraft were to avert them to turn them away from millions of dollars F-16 and F-35 fighter jets. An effective show of violence“ But one that probably cost tens of thousands of dollars in fuel and maintenance to get off the ground.

“The cost asymmetry is not working,” Robert Tollast, a researcher at Defense Think Tank The Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) in London, told CNN.

It is not that NATO cannot prevent large-scale drone attacks, he said. NATO Jets were very effective in turning away a massive Iranian rocket and drone attack on Israel in April. But Tollast argued that the costs of such a defense, estimated by Israel, are more than a billion dollars in that case makes this approach untenable.

“The fundamental problem is that, before Ukraine, much Western defense technology simply did not consider this … Asymmetrical threat of drones,” he said.

And yet the consensus in the fast -growing military technology sector that many people have considered it is too slow to adapt to it.

“The technology is there,” said Johannes Pinl, CEO of Marss, a company that specializes in the UK that specializes in software for threat detection and now produces its own interceptor drones, which spoke with CNN on the Dsei Defense Forum in London last week.

“Probably a large part of the Polish border could have been covered with a nice drone wall,” he added. A “drone wall” is the concept of a layered network of detection and intercepting, an idea that is widely promoted among Baltic countries and supported on Wednesday by European Union officials.

The problem, against CNN, is that NATO purchasing systems “are still in the 80s”. He gave the example of Marss’ Medium-Range AI–Have interceptor, designed to be reusable, with a titanium frame that he described as “in fact a knife that cuts through the incoming drone at speed.” It is currently waiting for evaluation by a NATO country, expected in the coming months.

“They now only write specifications for this. We are now using it now, we are in operation for years. We are still not in Europe, we do not have the specifications for it,” Pinl told CNN, referring to traditional purchasing practice where Defense ministers give detailed technical specifications for new products and offer companies for contracts.

The war in Ukraine has effectively created a two -speed purchasing process in Europe“ Siete Hamminga, CEO of Robin Radar Systems in the Netherlands, says. Robin Radar’s technology is already used on a large scale in Ukraine and has recently been updated to detect Shaheds with a range of 12 kilometers (7.5 miles).

“If a country wants to buy equipment for Ukraine, they have a highway route to do this““He told CNN.” They have a mandate to go to a company and say, “We need XYZ as soon as possible.” If they want to buy that for themselves, they have to go through a whole procedure. That doesn’t help. “

And yet, with the Ukraine war that offers a real-time test area for new technology, there are signs of change.

Take Portuguese founded Defense Tech Startup Tekever. Since 2022, the British government has bought more than $ 350 million from the company’s AR3 monitoring drones to send to Ukraine. Earlier this year, the British Royal Air Force (RAF) announced that it would take over the AR3 for its new electronic war system“ Stormhroud. And there are immediate plans to scale up production.

This week Tekever announced that it opened a new 1,000–Job Drone Factory about 80 miles west of London, the fourth site in the UK. Karl Brew, head of the Defense unit of Tekever, said CNN that the approach of the company is to split the risk of developing new technology between the government and the industry.

“When the RAF hired our AR3, it actually worked in advance in our R&D program (research and development). And they brought it in within six months,” he said CNN.

The new chief of the British defense staff, Richard Knighton, has emphasized the need for a new approach. “Achieving the required speed requirements that we change our relationship with the industry to innovate in a war pile,” he said in his first public comments last week.

Agris Kippurs“ The CEO and co-founder of Latvian Drone Startup origin Robotics“ CNN told that his country developed new mechanisms to work with the new industry““The proximity of Russia that stimulates even greater urgency.

Origin’s attack and security drone, initially delivered to Ukraine, is already in use by the Latvian and British forces and it now has a new interceptor -drone, The Blaze, funded by an R&D subsidy from the Latvian Government.

“We are a small country … We will never be able to afford enough air defense capacity if we are limited to the options we currently have in the markets,” Kipurs told CNN.

And even the newly renamed US Department of War is now racing to walk on this drone and counter-drone-weapon race.

In a memo in July, war secretary“ Pete Hegseeth“ warned that “American units are not equipped with the deadly small drones that the modern battlefield requires.” He explained measures to remove bureaucracy and risk aversion when it comes to drone-acquisition“ Including “delegating authorities to purchase and exploit drones from the bureaucracy to our war fighters.”

“One of the most important lessons that people from Ukraine follow is“ Just experiment, “said Tollast. He believes that the key to effective drone defenses is a “high-layer mix of very expensive possibilities”, such as the F-35s and Patriot batteries that can be seen in Poland last week and “things that may be a little less reliable, such as Ukraine’s drone interceptors.”

Even if Europe can accelerate the acceptance of more experimental technology at the bottom, there is still the problem of volume.

According to an estimate of July, Russia is now pumping 5,500 units per month of his updated Shahed Equivalent, the Gerbera variant drone in its fast-growing factory in Tatarstan. This month, Russia fired more than 800 drones in Ukraine in one night for the first time.

Morten Brandtzaeg, CEO of Norwegian ammunition and rocket producer Nammo, told CNN the morning after the drone raid in Russia in Poland worked that his company worked on “higher volumes of cheap rockets” to “match the price of the rocket with the target that we are shooting”.

Nammo, now one of the greatest ammunition producers in Europe, has already been transformed by the rapid reinforcement of the continent. It has scaled up the production of artillery ammunition a year before the full invasion of just a few thousand grenades to around 80,000 last year. It also produces solid rocket engines that are used to launch air-air missiles, crucial components for high-quality anti-aircraft systems.

His message to policymakers is grim: “We are just at the start of the start of increasing capacity. Do not believe that we have done enough.”

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