Can NATO innovate fast enough to counter Russia’s growing drone threat?

By Clare Sebastian and Vasco Cotovio, CNN

(CNN) — Days after the wail of air-raid sirens and the roar of NATO fighter jets punctuated a peaceful late-summer night in eastern Poland, the key question in Europe is not only whether Moscow deliberately sent nearly two dozen drones into NATO airspace, but what the military response reveals about the alliance’s long-term ability to deal with this growing threat.

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

Polish authorities recovered fragments of what it said were Gerbera drones, made of plywood and Styrofoam, and often used as decoys. Ukraine’s defense intelligence believes they cost around $10,000 each to produce.

Meanwhile, the NATO planes scrambled to avert them were multimillion-dollar F-16 and F-35 fighter jets. An effective show of force, but one that probably cost tens of thousands of dollars in fuel and maintenance just to get off the ground.

“The cost asymmetry doesn’t work,” Robert Tollast, a researcher at London-based defense think tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), told CNN.

It’s not that NATO can’t counter large-scale drone attacks, he said. NATO jets were highly effective in averting a massive Iranian missile and drone attack on Israel last April. But Tollast argued the cost of such defense, estimated by Israel to be more than a billion dollars in that case, makes this approach unsustainable.

“The fundamental problem is that, before Ukraine, a lot of Western defense technology just didn’t consider this… asymmetric threat of drones,” he said.

And yet, the consensus in the burgeoning military tech sector is that plenty of people have considered it, but many NATO defense ministries are too slow to adapt to it.

“The tech is there,” said Johannes Pinl, CEO of MARSS, a UK-based company specializing in threat-detection software and now producing its own interceptor drones, speaking to CNN at the DSEI defense forum in London last week.

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

The problem, Pinl told CNN, is that NATO procurement systems are “still in the 80s.” He gave the example of MARSS’s medium-range AI–enabled interceptor, designed to be reusable, with a titanium frame that he described as “basically a knife cutting through the incoming drone at speed.” It is currently awaiting evaluation by a NATO country, expected in the next few months.

“They’re just writing specs now for this. We’re using it right now, we’re in operation for years and years. We still don’t in Europe, we don’t have the specs for it,” Pinl told CNN, referring to the traditional procurement practice where defense ministries issue detailed technical specifications for new products, and then companies bid for contracts.

The war in Ukraine has effectively created a two-speed procurement process in Europe, says Siete Hamminga, CEO of Netherlands-based Robin Radar Systems. Robin Radar’s technology is already widely in use in Ukraine and was recently updated to detect Shaheds at a 12-kilometer (7.5-mile) range.

“If a country wants to buy equipment for Ukraine, they have a highway route to do so,” he told CNN. “They have a mandate to go to a company and say, ‘we need XYZ ASAP.’ If they want to buy that for themselves, they have to go through a whole procedure. That is not helping.”

And yet, with the Ukraine war providing a real-time testing ground for new tech, there are signs of change.

Take Portuguese-founded defense tech startup Tekever. Since 2022, the UK government has bought more than $350 million-worth of the company’s AR3 surveillance drones to send to Ukraine. Earlier this year, Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) announced it would be adopting the AR3 for its new electronic warfare system, StormShroud. And there are immediate plans to scale manufacturing.

This week, Tekever announced it was opening a new 1,000–job drone factory about 80 miles west of London, its fourth site in the UK. Karl Brew, head of Tekever’s defense unit, told CNN the company’s approach is to split the risk for developing new technology between government and industry.

“When the RAF took our AR3 into service it had actually been working in our R&D (research and development?) program some time beforehand. What they did is they said, ‘ok, we’re now going to bank all the experience in Ukraine, add this special sauce of Western technology in terms of electronic warfare here.’ And they brought it in within six months,” he told CNN.

The new Chief of the UK Defence Staff, Richard Knighton, has highlighted the need for a new approach. “Achieving the required speed demands that we change our relationship with industry to innovate at a wartime pace,” he said in his first public comments last week.

Agris Kipurs, the CEO and co-founder of Latvian drone startup Origin Robotics, told CNN his country was “developing new mechanisms for how to work with the new industry,” its proximity to Russia driving even greater urgency.

Origin’s attack and surveillance drone BEAK, initially supplied to Ukraine, is already in use by the Latvian and UK armed forces and it now has a new interceptor drone, the BLAZE, funded by an R&D grant from the Latvian government.

“We are a small country… we’ll never be able to afford sufficient air defense capability if we are limited to the options that we currently have in the markets,” Kipurs told CNN.

And even the newly re-named US Department of War is now racing to get ahead of this drone and counter-drone arms race.

In a July memo, secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, warned that “US units are not outfitted with the lethal small drones the modern battlefield requires.” He laid out measures to remove red tape and risk-aversion when it comes to drone acquisition, including “delegating authorities to procure and operate drones from the bureaucracy to our warfighters.”

“One of the key lessons people are taking from Ukraine is, just experiment,” said Tollast. He believes the key to effective drone defenses is a “high-low mix of very expensive capabilities” like the F-35s and Patriot batteries on display in Poland last week and “things that might be a little bit less reliable, like Ukraine’s drone interceptors.”

Even if Europe can speed up adoption of the more experimental tech on the lower end, there’s still the problem of volume.

Russia, according to a July estimate from Ukraine’s defense intelligence, is now pumping out 5,500 units per month of its updated Shahed-equivalent, the Geran, as well as the cheaper Gerbera variant drone at its fast-growing factory in Tatarstan. This month, for the first time, Russia fired more than 800 drones at Ukraine in one night.

Morten Brandtzaeg, CEO of Norwegian ammunition and missile producer Nammo, told CNN the morning after Russia’s drone incursion into Poland that his company was working on “higher volumes of low-cost missiles” in order to “match the price of the missile with the target that we’re shooting down.”

Nammo, now one of the biggest ammunition producers in Europe, has already been transformed by the continent’s rapid rearmament. It has scaled up production of artillery ammunition from just a few thousand shells a year before the full-scale invasion to around 80,000 last year. It also produces solid rocket motors used to launch air-to-air missiles, crucial components for high-end air defense systems.

His message to policymakers is stark: “We are just in the beginning of the beginning of ramping up the capacity. Don’t believe that we have done enough.”

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