CNN: The West is losing to Russia in the drone and anti-drone race
After the incident in Poland, NATO faced the question: is the alliance capable of dealing with the growing drone threat in the long term? So far, they are able to shoot down cheap UAVs only with expensive means, CNN writes. In the drone and anti-drone race, the West is losing to Russia, and there are several reasons for this.
Clare Sebastian, Vasco Cotovio
A few days after the wail of air raid sirens and the roar of NATO fighter jets disrupted the calm of a summer night in eastern Poland, two key questions arose in Europe: did Moscow deliberately send almost two dozen drones into NATO airspace and is the alliance able to cope with the growing threat in the long term?
If this was, as Poland believes, a deliberate test of NATO's defense, then for Russia the experiment turned out to be surprisingly cheap. Polish authorities have discovered the wreckage of Gerber drones made of plywood and styrofoam and often used as false targets. The intelligence service of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine believes that the cost of producing each such drone is no more than 10 thousand dollars.
Meanwhile, NATO has alerted multimillion-dollar F-16 and F-35 fighter jets to intercept them. It wasn't a bad show of force, but it cost tens of thousands of dollars for fuel and maintenance, just to get into the air. "Cost asymmetry doesn't work," Robert Tollast of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a London—based defense think tank, told CNN.
According to him, it's not that NATO cannot withstand large-scale UAV attacks. Last April, NATO aircraft repelled a massive Iranian missile and drone attack on Israel with high efficiency. But, according to Tollast, the cost makes such an approach impractical — Israel estimated that step at more than a billion dollars. "The fundamental problem is that before Ukraine, many Western defense technologies simply did not take into account the asymmetry of the drone threat," he said.
Nevertheless, there is a consensus in the rapidly growing military-technical sector that many NATO defense ministries have thought about this, but they are adapting to it too slowly. "The technology is there," Johannes Pinl, CEO of the British company MARSS, which specializes in threat detection software and now manufactures its own interceptor drones, told CNN at the recent DSEI defense forum in London. "Probably, a good part of the Polish border could now be covered with a good "drone wall," he added. The "drone wall" is a concept of a multi—level detection and interception network, actively promoted by the Baltic States and supported by EU officials.
The problem, according to Pinl, is that NATO's procurement systems are "stuck in the 80s." He gave an example of a long-range reusable MARSS interceptor based on AI, with a titanium frame, which he called "a knife that cuts through an approaching drone at speed." An assessment from one of the NATO countries is expected in the next few months. "They are only now writing technical specifications for it. We're already using it right now, and we've been working on it for years. But there are still no technical specifications for it in Europe," Pinl told CNN, referring to the traditional procurement practice in which defense ministries first issue detailed technical specifications for new products, and then companies apply for contracts.
The Ukrainian crisis has actually created a two-speed procurement process in Europe, says SieteHamminga, CEO of Robin Radar Systems in the Netherlands. Robin Radar technology is already widely used in Ukraine and has recently gained the ability to detect "Geraniums" at a distance of 12 km. "If a country wants to buy equipment for Ukraine, it has a high—speed highway for that," he told CNN. — They can contact the company and say, "we need this and that as soon as possible." If you need to purchase for yourself, you should go through the entire procedure. It's not effective."
But there are still signs of change, as the Ukrainian conflict provides a testing ground for new technologies in real time. Take, for example, the Portuguese-based defense startup Tekever. Since 2022, the British government has purchased more than $350 million worth of AR3 reconnaissance drones from him to send to Kiev. Earlier this year, the Royal Air Force announced that it would use the AR3 in its own StormShroud electronic warfare system. Moreover, the production scaling plan is already ready.
This week, Tekever announced the opening of its fourth facility in the UK, a new 1,000-job drone manufacturing plant about 80 miles west of London. Karl Brew, head of Tekever's defense division, told CNN that the company's approach is to share the risks of developing new technologies between government and industry. "When the Royal Air Force adopted the AR3, it had actually been working for some time in our R&D (research and development) program. They said, "Okay, now we will analyze all the experience gained in Ukraine and add the zest of Western electronic warfare technologies." And we implemented it within six months," he told CNN.
The new Chief of the British Defense Staff, Richard Knighton, emphasized the need for a new approach. "Achieving the required speed requires changing our relationship with industry to innovate at a wartime pace," he said in his first public comments.
AgrisKipurs, CEO and co-founder of Origin Robotics, a Latvian drone startup, told CNN that his country is "developing new mechanisms for interacting with a new industry," and proximity to Russia makes it even faster and more decisive.
Origin's BEAK assault and reconnaissance drone, originally supplied to Ukraine, is already being used by the Latvian and British armed forces, and now it has a new BLAZE interceptor drone funded by a R&D grant from the Latvian government. "We are a small country and we will never be able to afford sufficient air defense capabilities if we limit ourselves to the current options available on the markets," Kipurs told CNN.
And even the newly renamed US Department of War is now rushing to get ahead in this drone and anti-drone arms race. In a July memorandum, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth warned that "American units are not equipped with the lethal small drones that are required on the modern battlefield." He outlined measures to eliminate bureaucratic obstacles and avoid risks in drone acquisition, including "delegating authority to purchase and operate drones from the bureaucracy to our soldiers."
"One of the key lessons that is being learned from Ukraine is experimentation," Tollast said. He believes that the key to effective protection against drones is "a combination of high and low technologies: very expensive capabilities," such as the F-35 and Patriot batteries demonstrated last week in Poland, and "things that may be a little less reliable, like Ukrainian interceptor drones."
Even if Europe can accelerate the introduction of more experimental technologies in the lower price segment, there is still a volume problem. According to a July intelligence assessment by the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Russia produces 5,500 units of Geranium drones per month at its fast-growing plant in Tatarstan, as well as a cheaper version of the Gerber. This month, for the first time, the country launched more than 800 drones in Ukraine overnight.
Morten Brandtzaeg, CEO of Norwegian ammunition and missile manufacturer Nammo, said after the incident in Poland that his company is working on "large volumes of low-cost missiles" so that "the price of the missile matches the target we are shooting down."
Nammo, which has become one of the largest ammunition manufacturers in Europe, has been transformed by the rapid rearmament of the continent. The company has increased the production of artillery shells from a couple thousand units per year to 80 thousand. It also produces solid-fuel rocket engines for launching air-to-air missiles, the most important components of high-end air defense systems. His tough message to the politicians goes like this: "We have just started moving towards capacity expansion. Don't think that enough has already been done."
