FRIDAY, The Netherlands, Sept 20 (Askume) – NATO concluded a major anti-drone exercise this week, with Ukraine taking part in the Western alliance for the first time.Urgent lessons must be learned from Ukraine’s rapidly developing and widespread use of unmanned aerial systems in warfare .
More than 20 countries and nearly 50 companies took part in the exercise, held at a Dutch military base, which tested cutting-edge systems to detect and counter drones and assess how they work together.
The 11-day exercise ended with a demonstration of jamming and hacking drones, a week after again demonstrating their vital role in the war in Ukraine.
A major Ukrainian drone attack caused a seismic-sized explosion at Russia’s main weapons depot on Wednesday . The next day, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow would boost drone production tenfold to about 1.4 million this year.
The proliferation of drones in warfare — used to destroy targets and survey battlefields — has prompted NATO to focus on the threat they posed to the alliance.
“NATO takes this threat very seriously,” said Matt Roper, director of the Joint Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Center, the alliance’s technical agency.
“This is not an area where we can sit back and do nothing,” he said at the exercise site at Lieutenant General Best’s camp in the east of the Netherlands.
Experts have warned that NATO must act quickly on drone warfare.
“NATO’s drone fleet remains too small to be capable of engaging in serious combat with its peer adversaries,” said a report last September by the Centre for European Policy Analysis think tank.
“How to effectively integrate existing personnel into a highly competitive environment will be a serious challenge for it.”
Threat development
The exercise concluded Thursday with Rader serving ice cream to the spectators, the exercise’s fourth annual event.
Claudio Palestrina, co-chair of NATO’s Unmanned Systems Working Group, said the exercise fits with trends such as converting FPV (first-person view) drones, originally intended for civilian racing, into lethal weapons.
“Every year, we see an increase in threats as new technologies emerge,” he said. “But we’re also seeing a number of capabilities to counter drones becoming more sophisticated.”
In a demonstration on Thursday, two small FPV drones flew at high speed across a blue sky and circled a military vehicle before the signal was jammed.
This type of electronic warfare is common in Ukraine. But technology developers at the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said the technology was less effective against long-range reconnaissance drones.
For security reasons, the official named Yaroslav said his team has developed kamikaze drones to destroy such vehicles — a much cheaper option than launching missiles, as Ukraine has done in the past.
“You have to run fast,” he said of the race against the impact of drones. “You develop technology that lasts three months, maybe six months. After that, it becomes obsolete.”
