TALLIN, Estonia—As Russian drone incursions across Europe spike, the European Union committed Wednesday to one of the most ambitious multi-nation defense projects in history: a Europe-wide “drone wall,” envisioned as a network of new sensors, artificial intelligence software, jammers, cheap missiles, and more to thwart small-drone attacks.
The concept is still in its infancy. But dozens of Estonian defense tech startups working in autonomy, drone detection and defeat, and other areas related to drone defense gave Defense One a glimpse of how autonomous vehicles, inexpensive short-range missiles, hunter drones and AI concepts are laying the groundwork for the future of defeating drone swarms. And nearly all of them highlighted ongoing partnerships with Ukrainian front-line commanders as part of their development process.
The drone wall’s first bricks
Estonia, a country of about 1.3 million people that shares a 183-mile border with Russia, has taken €2.66 billion in funds from the European Union to help support companies working on drone defeat. But Estonia is also one of the fastest-growing startup and tech centers in Europe, with a focus on areas such as autonomy, advanced materials, and artificial intelligence—and it’s one of Ukraine’s most active tech-sharing partners.
In August, the Estonian government awarded €300,000 to three companies as part of an ongoing effort to develop drone wall solutions. One of those is DefSecIntel, which specializes in border security, including sensors, sensor-fusion software and drones.
During a tour of one of the company’s factories here last week, Jaanus Tamm, the founder and CEO of the 7-year-old startup, told reporters that DefSecIntel has partnered with Ukraine to help the country defend itself from Russian attacks—and the partnership has given the company frontline insight into drone threats.
DefSecIntel’s drone wall strategy relies on fast-moving, highly maneuverable sensors mounted on trucks, other drones, and even manned and unmanned boats. Those moving sensors would be joined by new, drone-specific detection technologies such as acoustic sensors that can remain fixed.
The moving and stationary sensors together can spot drones that elude large, expensive radar systems. The company is also working on systems intended to intercept drones at a lower cost than multimillion-dollar interceptors. This week, it signed a deal with Latvia-based Origin Robotics, which makes “seeker” drones—which hunt other drones—in addition to truck-mounted electronic warfare guns.
Robotic vehicle maker Milrem Robotics, which is heavily involved in Ukraine’s drone-defense efforts, has another of the contracts with the Estonian government as part of the same group, to modify its tracked robotic vehicles for drone-defense roles. That could increase the number of mobile drone detectors on the border.
Russia has responded to Ukraine’s success in tracking Shahed drones by launching more of them, in barrage tactics similar to those that spurred development of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. That system is designed to autonomously find and fire on large barrages of mostly artillery rockets—an altogether different problem than tracking one or two long-range missiles with radar.
Frankenburg Technologies, the third company mentioned in the Estonian award, has developed a more affordable interceptor also based largely on experiences helping Ukraine. The small missile system is called the Mark 1, is similar in concept to the Stinger but equipped with a seeker and software-based intelligence that specifically responds to a drone threat. That allows one operator to engage multiple drones more quickly than older systems, which require one operator per shot.
“This is going semi-automatic. This is the way it needs to work. We cannot afford for each drone to threaten a drone operator,” Andreas Bappert, the company’s director of engineering, said during a reporter event here. “A Shahed drone is never coming alone. We are talking six, eight, 12 at a time. So do we need 12 operators on the ground for each incoming drone? Sorry, that’s just stupid.”
But the real value of the Mark 1, said the company’s founder, former Estonian defense secretary Kusti Salm, is that it is significantly cheaper than its competitors, at least according to the company’s projections.
“We’re looking for a production capacity in the hundreds per day,” he said.
“Weeks not months” to put new drone-defeat tech on Europe’s border
While the drone wall concept belongs to the European Union, it overlaps in geography, technology, and objectives with a separate NATO effort called Eastern Shield, a push to increase eastern-flank area defense under NATO command and control.
NATO has a strong interest in ensuring that defenses bought by the EU or member states are interoperable with NATO command and control architectures and standards through Supreme Allied Transformation Command.
Last week, NATO and civilian leadership participated in a meeting with EU members, a senior NATO official told Defense One, and the two are in close coordination, with NATO providing the EU with military requirements and counter-UAS needs. Those requirements came largely from experiences in Ukraine. But in the coming weeks, NATO, via SACT, will conduct additional testing and experimentation with new systems, ranging from electronic warfare to drone-hunting drones and more.
“We gave them a framework already, and as soon as we get the experimentation done, we’ll push it in,” the official said.
SACEUR has emphasized very rapid testing to provide the EU with military-relevant specifics, the official said. “Weeks, not months, to have something tested and experimented with, and months, not years, to have something that’s fieldable at the right price point that people can deploy.”
For many Estonian tech companies, the recent string of Russian drone incursions in eastern Europe shows that Estonia and other Baltic states cannot wait for new technology to arrive.
“Russia next year can manufacture 75,000 Shaheds. So they can hit more targets,” Tamm said.
Sense of panic
The meeting of European Union members in Copenhagen occurred under heightened security due to Russia’s increased incursions of drones and even fighter jets. And while the meeting did not result in specific new funding agreements, the union did commit to developing a roadmap to spell out the details of how and what it should fund as part of the effort.
But funding commitments are lagging behind the actual threat, Tobias Ellwood, a former UK parliamentary undersecretary of state, told Al Arabiya on Tuesday. That’s led to a “sense of panic” among NATO members. “Suddenly it’s not Ukraine we’re talking about, but it’s actually eastern Europe where Russia is probing and even attacking or certainly infiltrating airspace,” he said.
Russian commanders may be eager to test Europe’s reaction to drone incursions in part because of what the reactions reveal about their capabilities. “There isn’t any basic capability to deal with simplistic drone attacks, something that Ukraine is actually enduring all the time,” Ellwood said.
A report released Wednesday by British counter-drone tech company Alpine Shield helps explain the difficulty. “To cover roughly 2,000 kilometers of border; however, more than 200 radar sites are required. These radars typically detect small-RCS drones only between 3 and 10 kilometers. Once an intruder passes the initial radar line and penetrates beyond that range, it can no longer be reliably tracked. As a result, fighter jets must often be scrambled to chase, track and attempt interception, an approach that is costly, difficult to scale and ill suited to high-volume drone incursions.”
The European Union in June approved €150 billion in loans, which allows member states to provide grants to their own defense companies to develop new drone-stopping prototypes. A separate EU program pledges €800 billion toward new European arms before 2030. Also in June, NATO members agreed to raise defense spending to 5 percent of GDP by 2035. But 2035 is a decade away.
Wednesday’s talks in Copenhagen highlighted disagreement among EU members about key aspects of the drone wall plan, such as how quickly it can be built and how to manage it among other EU defense priorities, according to one EU official with direct knowledge of the proceedings.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said this week that an anti-drone network would not be possible within the next “three or four years,” while Latvia’s prime minister, Evika Silina, said Wednesday that three years is not “fast enough.”
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