By Robert Brüll, CEO at FibreCoat
NATO allies are pressing ahead with a so-called ‘drone wall’ along Europe’s eastern flank. The plan, announced after months of rising tension, and culminating in Russian ‘hybrid attacks’ on Denmark and Germany, as well as Latvia, Norway, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and Estonia, would see a chain of drones, radars, and jammers guarding the borders from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It would be digital defence against Russian threats.
It sounds bold, even visionary: a truly twenty-first century defence system. But unless such a wall is built to be adaptable, and in fact looks less like a wall than a dome, it risks being outdated in a matter of months. Drone warfare, now central to conflict, is evolving more quickly than any other front in modern combat. Just days ago, Copenhagen’s main airport was forced to shut down after rogue drones breached its airspace. The result was grounded flights and stranded passengers. That disruption was just a glimpse of how a single unmanned craft can paralyse a city.
It’s strange to think that drones were seen primarily as toys not that long ago. The latest drones are something very different. They can fly without GPS, slipping past jammers. They can run on AI alone and use highly computerised vision to lock onto targets. They can swarm in packs to overwhelm air defences. When I was in Ukraine just last month, I saw drones carrying AK-47s, flying around without human help, hunting Russian soldiers. It was like something out of science-fiction. And to finish this picture off, many drones are disposable, costing less than a single anti-drone missile. A ‘wall’ of sensors and interceptors without the ability to update themselves will not be able to resist these threats. I say this as someone whose company creates systems capable of counteracting high-energy pulse microwaves and EMP attacks against drones, as well as other countermeasures.
What makes this situation more complicated is that much of the technology used in and for drones does not come from NATO countries. A vast share of the commercial drones now in European skies are built with Chinese hardware and software. NATO forces are therefore dependent on supply chains that do not answer to our allies. That reliance is already a weakness, and could become more of one as time passes. It’s in part why the White House has started to review export controls, some decades old, restricting the sale of advanced American unmanned systems to its allies. There is a widespread sense, in short, that drone technology is developing at a rapid rate, that no war can realistically be fought effectively without them, and the wrong people have much too much control over the NATO drone supply chain.
One solution for the European NATO members would be to make sure that some of the billions guaranteed by the 5 per cent of GDP pledge gets to the fastest, most innovative companies building the future of aerial warfare. This is what happens in Ukraine: young engineers are empowered to build drone technology, and designs are tested, broken, refined in line with feedback from the frontline, and flown again within weeks. The result is a stream of cheap, lethal, and ever-evolving drones that keep pace with Russian countermeasures. Yet in Europe, defence money still flows to legacy contractors building long-cycle platforms. That has to change.
A truly resilient Europe will not just have a state-of-the-art drone fleet of its own – a system of drones that can work together to make a defensive screen. It will have something more like a dome, made up of drones flying in patrols, linked by sensors, able to detect, track, and intercept threats. The reason it has to be a dome is because a ‘wall’ would only work against direct drone attacks, and that’s not the reality of drone warfare in 2025. Drones can pop up anywhere, at any time, hidden on trucks or underwater, or even being dropped from space. The goal of building a ‘drone wall’ really betrays a 20th century understanding of warfare that’s no longer applicable to our situation. What we need is a shield over Europe, protecting critical infrastructure in the first instance, and then expanding. It can’t be designed according to yesterday’s principles of defence innovation and procurement, or it will have no chance against tomorrow’s drones. Start-ups and engineers must be empowered to lead in drone innovation and build this drone dome quickly. What we don’t want is a Maginot line in the sky: costly, able to give some peace of mind, impressive in theory – but useless in practice when the real test comes.
There are many lessons to draw from the conflict in Ukraine. One is that technology can make a much smaller force punch well above its weight. Another is that the best innovators are young, energetic, and ambitious risk–takers, and they should be let off the leash. But a third – one that friends in Ukraine have explicitly told me – is that it’s only thanks to the conditions and tradition of openness and freedom that every Westerner takes for granted that innovators can do what they do best and build the future. That kind of culture is what, at least in theory, NATO wants to defend. It’s by taking advantage of that culture that we can develop a drone drome sophisticated enough to protect European airspace today, tomorrow, and ten years from now.
Robert Brüll, CEO at FibreCoat. FibreCoat creates ultra-resistant materials used for dummy tanks and decoy ships, spacecraft, chaff for fighter jets, and more. The company supplies NATO and allied forces across Europe.
(Image: Shutterstock)
