By Andrew Gray and Bart Biesemans
VREDEPEEL, Netherlands (Reuters) – NATO wrapped up a major anti-drone exercise this week, involving Ukraine for the first time, as the Western alliance urgently seeks to learn from the rapid development and widespread use of unmanned systems in warfare there.
The exercises at a Dutch military base, involving more than 20 countries and some 50 companies, tested state-of-the-art systems for detecting and countering drones and assessed how they work together.
The 11-day exercise ended with a demonstration of drone jamming and hacking in a week that once again demonstrated their pivotal role in the Ukraine war.
On Wednesday, a major Ukrainian drone strike caused an earthquake-sized explosion at a major Russian arsenal. The next day, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow was increasing drone production tenfold to nearly 1.4 million this year.
The proliferation of drones in warfare (to destroy targets and monitor the battlefield) has led NATO to pay greater attention to the threat they could pose to the alliance.
“NATO takes this threat very, very seriously,” said Matt Roper, head of the Joint Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Center at the alliance’s technology agency.
“This is not an area where we can afford to sit back and be passive,” he said at the exercise site, Lieutenant General Best’s headquarters in the eastern Netherlands.
Experts have warned NATO that it needs to catch up quickly on drone warfare.
“NATO has too few drones for a high-intensity fight against a peer adversary,” the Centre for European Political Analysis (CEPA) think tank said in a report last September.
“It would be very difficult to effectively integrate those you have in a contested environment.”
EVOLUTION OF THE THREAT
The drills that ended Thursday (with ice cream for spectators provided by a radar company) were the fourth annual iteration of the exercise.
Claudio Palestini, co-chair of a NATO working group on unmanned systems, said the exercise had adapted to trends such as the transformation of FPV (first-person view) drones, originally designed for civilian racers, into lethal weapons.
“Every year we see an evolution of the threat with the introduction of new technologies,” he said. “But we also see that many capabilities (to counter drones) are becoming more mature.”
In a demonstration on Thursday, two small FPV drones whirred and whined at high speed through the blue sky to circle an all-terrain military vehicle before their signal was blocked.
This type of electronic warfare is widespread in Ukraine, but is less effective against long-range reconnaissance drones, according to a technology developer at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
The official, who gave only his first name, Yaroslav, for security reasons, said his team had developed kamikaze drones to destroy such ships, a much cheaper option than firing missiles, as Ukraine has done previously.
“We have to move fast,” he said of the race to counter the impact of drones. “The technology that is developed lasts three months, maybe six months. After that, it becomes obsolete.”