--- title: Why NATO Would Lose a Drone War Tomorrow description: "What would happen if Russia were to invade Europe? That was the question the German newspaper Die Welt and researchers at Helmut Schmidt University set out to answer in December last year, when they organized a wargame to simulate a Russian invasion of NATO. The results were devastating.\n\nThe exercise was set in October 2026, in a world where a ceasefire in Ukraine has frozen the front lines while leaving Russia in control of occupied territory. The planners envisioned a scenario in which the Kremlin falsely claims that Lithuania is preventing Moscow from properly supplying Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave wedged between Lithuania and Poland, and uses that pretext to seize the Lithuanian city of Marijampole. From there, with a combination of drones, ground troops, and mines, Russian forces steamroll through the Baltics. Moscow's success is aided by America's absence and the hesitancy of NATO members, who initially seek to de-escalate the crisis through diplomacy rather than adopt a wartime posture.\n\nThat outcome was distressing for the alliance, but it was not even the worst-case scenario the simulations produced. A second exercise, Hedgehog 2025, saw a handful of Ukrainian troops use drones to defeat a combined combat group of several thousand NATO soldiers. The lesson of both games is blunt: NATO is not ready for war in the twenty-first century, and if that does not change quickly the alliance could soon find itself facing a catastrophe.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- In a Die Welt and Helmut Schmidt University wargame set in October 2026, a Russian invasion through Lithuania steamrolled the Baltics, helped by American absence and NATO members' instinct to de-escalate rather than fight.\n- In the Hedgehog 2025 exercise, a small group of Ukrainian troops using FPV drones defeated several thousand NATO soldiers, destroying 17 armored vehicles and conducting 30 strikes in roughly half a day.\n- Intercepting cheap drones with fighter jets is economically ruinous: a two-fighter intercept costs $28,000 to $57,000 in flight hours, and a single missile shot adds roughly $1 million to $1.2 million against drones sometimes built from foam and plywood.\n- NATO troops in the wargames failed to conceal or disperse, exposing a doctrinal gap in how the alliance fights under drone observation, alongside slow, over-restricted information sharing.\n- Beyond Europe, US bases struggle with confused counter-drone guidance, while threats from Chinese container-ship swarms and Iran's expanding drone fleet sharpen the urgency.\n\n## A Wargame Without a Wartime Mindset\n\nThe Baltic scenario turned on more than firepower. As Bartłomiej Kot, a Polish security analyst who played the Polish prime minister during the games, told The Wall Street Journal: \"What this showed to me is that once we are confronted by the escalatory narrative from the Russian side, we have it embedded in our thinking that we are the ones who should be de-escalating.\"\n\nThat instinct is the soft underbelly of the alliance. The planners assumed Moscow would manufacture a supply dispute over Kaliningrad to justify aggression, knowing that NATO capitals would reflexively reach for diplomacy. Combined with the absence of American leadership in the simulation, that hesitancy bought Russia the time and political cover it needed to push through Lithuania and into the wider Baltic region.\n\nThe result is sobering precisely because it does not hinge on Russian technological superiority alone. It hinges on a mismatch of mindsets: an adversary willing to escalate against an alliance conditioned to defuse. The wargame suggested that NATO could lose ground not because it lacks weapons, but because it lacks the reflex to treat a manufactured crisis as the opening move of a war.\n\n## When a Handful of Drones Beat an Army\n\nIf the Baltic scenario was alarming, Hedgehog 2025 was worse. In that exercise a handful of Ukrainian troops, using drones, defeated a combined combat group of several thousand NATO soldiers. It bears repeating: a small group of Ukrainians defeated thousands of NATO troops using drones. In about half a day, they destroyed 17 armored vehicles and conducted 30 strikes on other targets.\n\nCalling Hedgehog the worse outcome is not a way to minimize the importance of the Baltics or the catastrophic human cost a real Russian invasion would carry. Rather, it is a recognition of how profoundly drones have reshaped warfare in just a few years, and how outsized their impact can be in the hands of experienced operators.\n\nThe defeat was not delivered by exotic hardware. The Ukrainians were using first-person-view drones, compact tactical weapons that typically weigh under 25 kilograms and operate at ranges of around 10 to 20 kilometers from their operators. Cheap, abundant, and lethal, those drones turned a numerically superior NATO force into a target set, and methodically dismantled it.\n\n## How Ukraine and Russia Learned to Fight With Drones\n\nTo understand why drones now dominate, it helps to revisit how the war in Ukraine unfolded in the air. At the outset of Russia's invasion, it was widely expected that Russia would easily wipe out Ukraine's air defenses and achieve complete air superiority within days, if not weeks. That it did not happen is a testament to the resilience of Ukraine's defenders, who inflicted such heavy losses on Russia's air fleet that Moscow temporarily pulled it out of the war. When Russian air power returned, it operated tens of kilometers from the front, relying on guided missiles rather than risking aircraft over the battlefield.\n\nUkraine, for its part, could never realistically achieve aerial dominance over Russia. It fielded a smaller force of older jets, and Russia operates capable air defense systems. Ukrainian efforts to modernize and expand the air force ran into serious headwinds, not least a shortage of qualified pilots. Severe artillery-shell shortages early in the war made the need for an alternative even more urgent.\n\nSo both countries turned to drones. According to Western officials, drones now account for 86 percent of casualties on the Ukrainian battlefield. Experts believe Ukraine alone produced between four and five million drones in 2025. The takeaway is twofold: drones are devastatingly effective in experienced hands, and in Europe, outside Ukraine itself, no one has more drone experience than Russia.\n\n## Two Drones, Two Very Different Threats\n\nThe word \"drone\" hides a critical distinction. Everyday English still uses the single term for a wide variety of uncrewed vehicles and munitions, but two categories matter most when assessing Russia's advantage over NATO: long-range, one-way attack drones of the type bombing Ukrainian cities, and the FPVs that swarm along the frontlines and are responsible for the majority of the war's casualties.\n\nThe Ukrainians who defeated NATO in Hedgehog 2025 used FPV drones, compact tactical weapons under 25 kilograms operating at ranges of 10 to 20 kilometers from their operators. The drones Russia uses to strike cities are a different beast entirely. Capable of threatening European capitals hundreds of kilometers away, they are 200-kilogram machines based on the design of the Iranian Shahed, carrying warheads weighing between 50 and 90 kilograms. Both types serve the same strategic end, but their tactical roles could not be more different.\n\nBoth also threaten NATO directly in a full-scale war. The Institute for the Study of War recently warned that drones with a range of 500 kilometers, the kind Russia has been using, place most of Ukraine, all of Moldova, and parts of Poland, Romania, and Lithuania within striking distance if launched from Russia or occupied Ukrainian territory. Should Russia quickly conquer the Baltics, as in the Die Welt scenario, cities such as Stockholm, Berlin, and Helsinki would fall within range.\n\n## The Math That Breaks NATO Air Defense\n\nHow has NATO adjusted to this technological shift? The clearest answer lies in how the alliance has responded to Russian drones crossing into its airspace. Since the start of the war, Russian air assets have violated NATO airspace dozens of times. In 2025 alone, NATO members recorded 18 confirmed Russian airspace violations, three times as many as in 2024 and more than half of all incidents recorded over the four-year period. In one case, a Russian drone traveled 100 kilometers into Polish territory without radar detection. NATO scrambled jets to shoot the drones down, closed airports, and convened emergency Article 4 consultations for the first time over Russian action in the war.\n\nThat response was sufficient for the moment, given the small scale of the incursion, but it points to a much deeper structural problem. Scrambling F-16s and F-35s to chase down drones is, plainly, an absurd way to fight. According to Alec Pow, an economic and pricing investigator at The Pricer, a routine two-fighter intercept costs somewhere between $28,000 and $57,000 in flight hours alone. Fire a missile and the bill climbs by roughly $1 million to $1.2 million.\n\nThe targets on the other end of those shots? Some are built from foam and plywood, making them orders of magnitude cheaper. Even the costlier drones are far cheaper to manufacture and operate than the jets, which, in the case of the F-35, can cost as much as $80 million to purchase and millions more to operate. Russia would not even need to hit a single target to make the conflict ruinous. Scrambling jets and firing multimillion-dollar missiles every night would create an unsustainable cost imbalance. Yet failing to scramble them risks letting non-decoy drones through to hit NATO assets, or simply kill civilians.\n\n## The Drone Wall and Why It May Not Hold\n\nThat cost trap is part of the reasoning behind Europe's plan to build a drone wall: a layered network of sensors, radar systems, and interceptors that would initially stretch from the Baltic states to the Black Sea before expanding to cover more ground. Kaja Kallas, the EU's foreign policy chief, has said the system could be operational by 2027. On paper, the drone wall is an ambitious and genuinely necessary idea, designed to detect and intercept enemy drones.\n\nBuilding a wall, however, is one thing; making it work is another. First, there are the limits of geography. Europe is a massive continent spanning hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, and drones can come from virtually anywhere. While Shahed variants cannot easily be smuggled into Europe and launched from inside NATO territory at scale, the same is not true of smaller drones, such as those that buzzed Copenhagen airport in autumn 2025. Those incursions were a nuisance, but smaller drones can be weaponized, smuggled, and launched from within cities, rendering the wall ineffective.\n\nThey can also be unleashed from multiple points at once. As Jamie Shea, a former NATO official dealing with emerging security challenges, observed, if NATO puts a drone shield around Copenhagen, the drones would simply appear at Munich airport the next day. Then there is the challenge of technical integration across dozens of national systems, each with different airspace laws and rules of engagement. And as German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius warned, building an effective drone wall will take time, which intelligence assessments suggest the alliance may not have. While reports conflict, the fear is that Russia could be ready for war with Europe within as little as three years of the Ukraine war ending.\n\n## Lasers, Radio Waves, and Mobile Guns\n\nThe search for a faster fix has pointed in two main directions. The first is Dragonfire, a laser-based directed-energy weapon the British Royal Navy plans to deploy from 2027. According to the British government, Dragonfire is accurate enough to hit a target the size of a one-pound coin from a kilometer away at a cost of roughly £10 per shot. That economics is enormously appealing, but the system has glaring limitations. It requires line of sight, so low-visibility conditions such as fog and heavy cloud render it useless. It can also track only one target at a time, a serious flaw when the entire logic of Russian drone tactics is to send them in waves designed to overwhelm air defenses through sheer volume.\n\nThe second option Britain is exploring is a radio-frequency directed-energy weapon that fires a pulse of directed radio waves to disable a drone's internal electronics. Unlike Dragonfire, it works in bad weather and can engage multiple targets at once. Its major drawback is significant: it cannot discriminate between targets. The moment it activates, no friendly aircraft can fly in the affected area. In contested airspace where NATO jets are already scrambling against incursions, that constraint makes it extremely difficult to deploy.\n\nFrance is pursuing its own system, Proteus, which reuses and upgrades old 20-millimeter anti-aircraft cannons by mounting them on mobile trucks fitted with modern optics, sensors, and fire-control software. The goal is an agile, fast, low-cost system that can shoot drones down. But trucks, however fast and however numerous, can only be in so many places. A coordinated swarm across multiple targets would stretch any mobile system to its breaking point, forcing commanders into impossible choices about what to protect and what to leave exposed. These weapons represent genuine progress, but they are years from widespread deployment. What Europe needs now, it largely does not have.\n\n## Germany's Spending Surge and a Misallocated Bet\n\nWhich brings the question to Germany. Berlin is in the middle of what may be the most significant military spending surge in its post-war history, planning to spend $761 billion over the coming five years to modernize its military. Much of that has flowed to big-ticket items: 35 US-made F-35s, Eurofighter Typhoons, Chinook helicopters, and new warships and submarines. Orders for thousands of tanks and armored vehicles are also being prepared. The drone and AI allocations are only a fraction of that total, despite Germany's foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, lamenting that Berlin was practically empty-handed when it came to drones.\n\nNone of this means tanks and armored vehicles are useless. But they are not what defeated several thousand NATO troops in Hedgehog 2025. Drones were. If NATO went to war tomorrow, it would find itself in a world where conventional force mass is vulnerable to cheap, proliferated unmanned systems in ways that no quantity of Leopard 2 tanks can easily resolve.\n\nThe spending mix matters because the threat is not theoretical. The same drones overwhelming Ukrainian and Russian positions today are the systems NATO has, so far, underweighted in its rearmament. A force built around expensive, conspicuous platforms is precisely the kind of target the wargames showed drone operators can dismantle.\n\n## A Doctrine Problem, Not Just a Hardware Problem\n\nBeyond the need to buy drones and counter-drone tech, the wargames revealed a more pressing lesson: NATO does not yet know how to fight under drone observation. According to one participant in Hedgehog 2025, the NATO battle group moved through the exercise without any attempt at concealment, parking tents and armored vehicles in the open as though the drone threat did not apply to them. Many of their positions were destroyed.\n\nNick, a Ukrainian drone commander who took part, put it bluntly: \"The infantry reacted weakly to approaching threats. In some cases they tried to disperse, in some they did not. They did not understand it was a threat. We told them it should not be like that. If there is a threat from the sky, you need to take cover (...) because if you are spotted, consider that you will be killed.\" He also described a NATO unit that pulled into a holding area and parked its vehicles 30 to 50 meters apart without dispersing, allowing him to methodically pick them off one by one.\n\nThis was only an exercise, but on a real battlefield such behavior would be catastrophic. NATO soldiers understand that drones are dangerous; they do not seem to grasp how dangerous. That gap will get soldiers killed. There is a parallel lesson about speed in decision-making. Ukrainian forces used the battlefield management system DELTA to share operational data rapidly between command and subordinate units, accelerating strikes. In several Allied militaries, the tendency to restrict access to sensitive information slows reactions and complicates coordination. To catch up to Ukraine and Russia, NATO must do more than buy better hardware. It must fundamentally change how information moves through its command structures, eliminating anything not essential to battlefield success.\n\n## Europe's Untapped Industrial Edge\n\nNATO also needs to invest in its own startups and tech companies. The American stereotype holds that Europe is hopeless at cutting-edge technology, but the continent is home to a highly qualified workforce and plenty of promising defense startups. The real obstacles are onerous rules and a lack of venture capital that make scaling difficult.\n\nGiven that, there are worse things Europe could do than pour a substantial share of its rearmament money into startups at the bleeding edge of technology. Many would naturally fail, but those that survived could lead a defense revolution. After all, it was massive government subsidies flowing into a constellation of private companies that turned Ukraine into one of the world's drone superpowers in just four years.\n\nThere are encouraging signs. Germany's defense minister, Boris Pistorius, recently opened a dedicated innovation center for the German military and promised more investment in new technologies and cooperation with technology companies. Berlin has committed to spending $10 billion in the coming years and has already placed significant orders with Helsing, whose AI-enabled HX-2 strike drone has been battle-tested in Ukraine. NATO can also learn from members and partners who have already solved parts of this puzzle. Turkey has quietly built one of the most capable drone industries on the planet, controlling, by some estimates, about 65 percent of the global armed-drone export market. Israel has developed some of the most sophisticated AI-assisted targeting systems in existence; its Gospel system processes intelligence from satellites, drone footage, and intercepted communications simultaneously, compressing what once took human analysts days into minutes.\n\n## Washington's Own Blind Spots\n\nEurope is not alone in its vulnerability. In 2025, the Center for a New American Security's Defense Program published a report concluding that the United States was unprepared to defend against present and future drone threats. A Defense Department Inspector General report reinforced the finding, noting that confused counter-drone policies had left US military bases unable to adequately protect themselves, with base commanders scrambling over unclear guidance on how to even respond to incursions. And incursions are no longer rare: drone sightings over American military installations have jumped considerably, to the point where security officials now treat them as routine operational threats rather than isolated incidents.\n\nSo far those incursions have been harmless. But it is not difficult to imagine an adversary, such as China, unleashing a swarm of drones from a container ship against a wide array of undefended targets. After Ukraine launched a successful drone ambush on multiple Russian airbases last year, one of them thousands of kilometers from the front, US analysts began discussing a similar attack from Chinese merchant vessels docked at American ports. The discussion intensified after confirmation that COSCO Shipping, China's state-owned shipping giant, operates across key US ports despite being designated by the Department of Defense as a Chinese military company. Retired Navy commander Thomas Shugart warned, in an interview with Newsweek, that such an attack was extremely likely, given how full Chinese military doctrine is of references to sudden and surprise strikes.\n\nIran is a further concern, because few countries have access to the battlefield data Iran does on the performance of its drones. Russia has made extensive use of Iran's Shahed drones in Ukraine, generating data that has helped Iran refine its drone program. Although Tehran and Washington are engaged in negotiations, those talks could break down. Iran recently announced that 1,000 new strategic drones had joined its forces, including one-way suicide drones capable of hitting fixed and moving targets on land and at sea. Tehran does not need to strike the American homeland to inflict serious damage; US bases in Qatar, Bahrain, and across the Gulf, along with key American allies in the region, all sit comfortably within range of Tehran's aerial assets. Washington has taken steps to protect them in the short term, but more clearly needs to be done.\n\n## A Narrow Window\n\nThe picture is bleak, but the alliance is not asleep. There are genuine signs that NATO is beginning to grasp the scale of the problem, even if the pace remains frustratingly slow. The harder truth is that the alliance still has not figured out how to deploy FPV drones at scale or integrate them into its doctrine the way Ukraine and Russia have. Nor does it have its own answer to Shahed-type drones capable of cheaply saturating enemy defenses, or an easy way to shoot them down.\n\nThis really needs to change, and change in large institutions is never fast. NATO is about as large as institutions come: procurement cycles are long, bureaucracies are deep, and political will tends to arrive only after the crisis already has. With EU defense officials warning that Russia could be ready to test NATO's borders as early as 2030, the alliance has a narrow window to get this right.\n\nIf it does not, the next time a handful of drone operators defeat thousands of NATO troops, it might not be a wargame.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What did the two wargames reveal about NATO's drone readiness?\n\nThe Die Welt and Helmut Schmidt University wargame, set in October 2026, showed Russia seizing the Lithuanian city of Marijampole using a false pretext and then steamrolling through the Baltics — aided by American absence and NATO's conditioned instinct to de-escalate rather than fight. The Hedgehog 2025 exercise was even more striking: a handful of Ukrainian troops using FPV drones defeated a combined combat group of several thousand NATO soldiers, destroying 17 armored vehicles and conducting 30 strikes in roughly half a day. Together, the games showed that NATO is not ready for drone-dominated warfare.\n\n### Why is intercepting drones with fighter jets economically unsustainable?\n\nA routine two-fighter intercept costs between $28,000 and $57,000 in flight hours alone, and firing a missile adds roughly $1 million to $1.2 million per shot. Many of the drones on the other end of those shots are built from foam and plywood, costing a tiny fraction of that amount. An F-35 can cost as much as $80 million to purchase and millions more to operate. Russia would not even need to hit a single target to impose ruinous costs on NATO simply by sending drones over its airspace night after night.\n\n### What is Europe's drone wall, and why might it fail?\n\nThe drone wall is Europe's planned layered network of sensors, radar, and interceptors, initially stretching from the Baltic states to the Black Sea, which EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said could be operational by 2027. It faces the limits of geography across hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, the near-impossibility of stopping small drones smuggled and launched from within cities, and the challenge of integrating dozens of national systems with different airspace laws and rules of engagement. Building it will also take time that intelligence assessments suggest the alliance may not have.\n\n### What doctrinal weaknesses did the wargames expose in NATO forces?\n\nNATO forces in Hedgehog 2025 moved through the exercise without any attempt at concealment, parking tents and armored vehicles in the open as though drone threats did not apply to them, and many positions were destroyed. A Ukrainian drone commander described picking off vehicles parked 30 to 50 meters apart one by one. The exercises also highlighted slow, over-restricted information sharing, contrasting with Ukraine's use of the DELTA battlefield management system to rapidly accelerate strikes from intelligence to action.\n\n### How do China and Iran factor into the drone threat facing NATO and the US?\n\nAnalysts fear China could launch a drone swarm from a container ship against undefended US targets — a concern sharpened by the fact that COSCO Shipping, a state-owned Chinese company designated as a Chinese military company, operates across key US ports. Iran, which has gathered battlefield data from Russia's use of its Shahed drones in Ukraine, recently announced 1,000 new strategic drones including suicide drones capable of hitting fixed and moving targets on land and sea, putting US bases in Qatar, Bahrain, and across the Gulf comfortably within range.\n\n## Sources\n\n1. https://www.wsj.com/opinion/nato-has-seen-the-future-and-is-unprepared-887eaf0f\n2. https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/a-wargame-shows-just-how-vulnerable-europe-is-to-a-russian-attack-12dfdbfa\n3. https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/02/13/nato-exercise-reveals-alliance-cant-survive-ukraine-style-drone-warfare/\n4. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/02/13/british-brigade-destroyed-by-ukraine-in-nato-wargame/\n5. https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article6984a7189d88d6e920be111f/ernstfall-podcast-wargame-exposes-gaps-in-germanys-response-to-a-hypothetical-russian-attack-on-lithuania.html\n6. https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nato-drone-defense-plans-0accac42\n7. https://archive.is/M588a\n8. https://www.ft.com/content/62f4a0f7-ffc9-49c8-b1e5-649703018dd1\n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/nato-drone-warfare-readiness-gap.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/nato-drone-warfare-readiness-gap datePublished: 2026-06-02 dateModified: 2026-06-02 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/TT-3oEDgmVE/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: deb85dd51d0ef8f894c9befa1cd04c11aa464a6bcd3d71304a978682365b1d3e tokens: 6512 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/nato-drone-warfare-readiness-gap.md.summary.md --- What would happen if Russia were to invade Europe? That was the question the German newspaper Die Welt and researchers at Helmut Schmidt University set out to answer in December last year, when they organized a wargame to simulate a Russian invasion of NATO. The results were devastating. The exercise was set in October 2026, in a world where a ceasefire in Ukraine has frozen the front lines while leaving Russia in control of occupied territory. The planners envisioned a scenario in which the Kremlin falsely claims that Lithuania is preventing Moscow from properly supplying Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave wedged between Lithuania and Poland, and uses that pretext to seize the Lithuanian city of Marijampole. From there, with a combination of drones, ground troops, and mines, Russian forces steamroll through the Baltics. Moscow's success is aided by America's absence and the hesitancy of NATO members, who initially seek to de-escalate the crisis through diplomacy rather than adopt a wartime posture. That outcome was distressing for the alliance, but it was not even the worst-case scenario the simulations produced. A second exercise, Hedgehog 2025, saw a handful of Ukrainian troops use drones to defeat a combined combat group of several thousand NATO soldiers. The lesson of both games is blunt: NATO is not ready for war in the twenty-first century, and if that does not change quickly the alliance could soon find itself facing a catastrophe. ## Key Takeaways - In a Die Welt and Helmut Schmidt University wargame set in October 2026, a Russian invasion through Lithuania steamrolled the Baltics, helped by American absence and NATO members' instinct to de-escalate rather than fight. - In the Hedgehog 2025 exercise, a small group of Ukrainian troops using FPV drones defeated several thousand NATO soldiers, destroying 17 armored vehicles and conducting 30 strikes in roughly half a day. - Intercepting cheap drones with fighter jets is economically ruinous: a two-fighter intercept costs $28,000 to $57,000 in flight hours, and a single missile shot adds roughly $1 million to $1.2 million against drones sometimes built from foam and plywood. - NATO troops in the wargames failed to conceal or disperse, exposing a doctrinal gap in how the alliance fights under drone observation, alongside slow, over-restricted information sharing. - Beyond Europe, US bases struggle with confused counter-drone guidance, while threats from Chinese container-ship swarms and Iran's expanding drone fleet sharpen the urgency. ## A Wargame Without a Wartime Mindset The Baltic scenario turned on more than firepower. As Bartłomiej Kot, a Polish security analyst who played the Polish prime minister during the games, told The Wall Street Journal: "What this showed to me is that once we are confronted by the escalatory narrative from the Russian side, we have it embedded in our thinking that we are the ones who should be de-escalating." That instinct is the soft underbelly of the alliance. The planners assumed Moscow would manufacture a supply dispute over Kaliningrad to justify aggression, knowing that NATO capitals would reflexively reach for diplomacy. Combined with the absence of American leadership in the simulation, that hesitancy bought Russia the time and political cover it needed to push through Lithuania and into the wider Baltic region. The result is sobering precisely because it does not hinge on Russian technological superiority alone. It hinges on a mismatch of mindsets: an adversary willing to escalate against an alliance conditioned to defuse. The wargame suggested that NATO could lose ground not because it lacks weapons, but because it lacks the reflex to treat a manufactured crisis as the opening move of a war. ## When a Handful of Drones Beat an Army If the Baltic scenario was alarming, Hedgehog 2025 was worse. In that exercise a handful of Ukrainian troops, using drones, defeated a combined combat group of several thousand NATO soldiers. It bears repeating: a small group of Ukrainians defeated thousands of NATO troops using drones. In about half a day, they destroyed 17 armored vehicles and conducted 30 strikes on other targets. Calling Hedgehog the worse outcome is not a way to minimize the importance of the Baltics or the catastrophic human cost a real Russian invasion would carry. Rather, it is a recognition of how profoundly drones have reshaped warfare in just a few years, and how outsized their impact can be in the hands of experienced operators. The defeat was not delivered by exotic hardware. The Ukrainians were using first-person-view drones, compact tactical weapons that typically weigh under 25 kilograms and operate at ranges of around 10 to 20 kilometers from their operators. Cheap, abundant, and lethal, those drones turned a numerically superior NATO force into a target set, and methodically dismantled it. ## How Ukraine and Russia Learned to Fight With Drones To understand why drones now dominate, it helps to revisit how the war in Ukraine unfolded in the air. At the outset of Russia's invasion, it was widely expected that Russia would easily wipe out Ukraine's air defenses and achieve complete air superiority within days, if not weeks. That it did not happen is a testament to the resilience of Ukraine's defenders, who inflicted such heavy losses on Russia's air fleet that Moscow temporarily pulled it out of the war. When Russian air power returned, it operated tens of kilometers from the front, relying on guided missiles rather than risking aircraft over the battlefield. Ukraine, for its part, could never realistically achieve aerial dominance over Russia. It fielded a smaller force of older jets, and Russia operates capable air defense systems. Ukrainian efforts to modernize and expand the air force ran into serious headwinds, not least a shortage of qualified pilots. Severe artillery-shell shortages early in the war made the need for an alternative even more urgent. So both countries turned to drones. According to Western officials, drones now account for 86 percent of casualties on the Ukrainian battlefield. Experts believe Ukraine alone produced between four and five million drones in 2025. The takeaway is twofold: drones are devastatingly effective in experienced hands, and in Europe, outside Ukraine itself, no one has more drone experience than Russia. ## Two Drones, Two Very Different Threats The word "drone" hides a critical distinction. Everyday English still uses the single term for a wide variety of uncrewed vehicles and munitions, but two categories matter most when assessing Russia's advantage over NATO: long-range, one-way attack drones of the type bombing Ukrainian cities, and the FPVs that swarm along the frontlines and are responsible for the majority of the war's casualties. The Ukrainians who defeated NATO in Hedgehog 2025 used FPV drones, compact tactical weapons under 25 kilograms operating at ranges of 10 to 20 kilometers from their operators. The drones Russia uses to strike cities are a different beast entirely. Capable of threatening European capitals hundreds of kilometers away, they are 200-kilogram machines based on the design of the Iranian Shahed, carrying warheads weighing between 50 and 90 kilograms. Both types serve the same strategic end, but their tactical roles could not be more different. Both also threaten NATO directly in a full-scale war. The Institute for the Study of War recently warned that drones with a range of 500 kilometers, the kind Russia has been using, place most of Ukraine, all of Moldova, and parts of Poland, Romania, and Lithuania within striking distance if launched from Russia or occupied Ukrainian territory. Should Russia quickly conquer the Baltics, as in the Die Welt scenario, cities such as Stockholm, Berlin, and Helsinki would fall within range. ## The Math That Breaks NATO Air Defense How has NATO adjusted to this technological shift? The clearest answer lies in how the alliance has responded to Russian drones crossing into its airspace. Since the start of the war, Russian air assets have violated NATO airspace dozens of times. In 2025 alone, NATO members recorded 18 confirmed Russian airspace violations, three times as many as in 2024 and more than half of all incidents recorded over the four-year period. In one case, a Russian drone traveled 100 kilometers into Polish territory without radar detection. NATO scrambled jets to shoot the drones down, closed airports, and convened emergency Article 4 consultations for the first time over Russian action in the war. That response was sufficient for the moment, given the small scale of the incursion, but it points to a much deeper structural problem. Scrambling F-16s and F-35s to chase down drones is, plainly, an absurd way to fight. According to Alec Pow, an economic and pricing investigator at The Pricer, a routine two-fighter intercept costs somewhere between $28,000 and $57,000 in flight hours alone. Fire a missile and the bill climbs by roughly $1 million to $1.2 million. The targets on the other end of those shots? Some are built from foam and plywood, making them orders of magnitude cheaper. Even the costlier drones are far cheaper to manufacture and operate than the jets, which, in the case of the F-35, can cost as much as $80 million to purchase and millions more to operate. Russia would not even need to hit a single target to make the conflict ruinous. Scrambling jets and firing multimillion-dollar missiles every night would create an unsustainable cost imbalance. Yet failing to scramble them risks letting non-decoy drones through to hit NATO assets, or simply kill civilians. ## The Drone Wall and Why It May Not Hold That cost trap is part of the reasoning behind Europe's plan to build a drone wall: a layered network of sensors, radar systems, and interceptors that would initially stretch from the Baltic states to the Black Sea before expanding to cover more ground. Kaja Kallas, the EU's foreign policy chief, has said the system could be operational by 2027. On paper, the drone wall is an ambitious and genuinely necessary idea, designed to detect and intercept enemy drones. Building a wall, however, is one thing; making it work is another. First, there are the limits of geography. Europe is a massive continent spanning hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, and drones can come from virtually anywhere. While Shahed variants cannot easily be smuggled into Europe and launched from inside NATO territory at scale, the same is not true of smaller drones, such as those that buzzed Copenhagen airport in autumn 2025. Those incursions were a nuisance, but smaller drones can be weaponized, smuggled, and launched from within cities, rendering the wall ineffective. They can also be unleashed from multiple points at once. As Jamie Shea, a former NATO official dealing with emerging security challenges, observed, if NATO puts a drone shield around Copenhagen, the drones would simply appear at Munich airport the next day. Then there is the challenge of technical integration across dozens of national systems, each with different airspace laws and rules of engagement. And as German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius warned, building an effective drone wall will take time, which intelligence assessments suggest the alliance may not have. While reports conflict, the fear is that Russia could be ready for war with Europe within as little as three years of the Ukraine war ending. ## Lasers, Radio Waves, and Mobile Guns The search for a faster fix has pointed in two main directions. The first is Dragonfire, a laser-based directed-energy weapon the British Royal Navy plans to deploy from 2027. According to the British government, Dragonfire is accurate enough to hit a target the size of a one-pound coin from a kilometer away at a cost of roughly £10 per shot. That economics is enormously appealing, but the system has glaring limitations. It requires line of sight, so low-visibility conditions such as fog and heavy cloud render it useless. It can also track only one target at a time, a serious flaw when the entire logic of Russian drone tactics is to send them in waves designed to overwhelm air defenses through sheer volume. The second option Britain is exploring is a radio-frequency directed-energy weapon that fires a pulse of directed radio waves to disable a drone's internal electronics. Unlike Dragonfire, it works in bad weather and can engage multiple targets at once. Its major drawback is significant: it cannot discriminate between targets. The moment it activates, no friendly aircraft can fly in the affected area. In contested airspace where NATO jets are already scrambling against incursions, that constraint makes it extremely difficult to deploy. France is pursuing its own system, Proteus, which reuses and upgrades old 20-millimeter anti-aircraft cannons by mounting them on mobile trucks fitted with modern optics, sensors, and fire-control software. The goal is an agile, fast, low-cost system that can shoot drones down. But trucks, however fast and however numerous, can only be in so many places. A coordinated swarm across multiple targets would stretch any mobile system to its breaking point, forcing commanders into impossible choices about what to protect and what to leave exposed. These weapons represent genuine progress, but they are years from widespread deployment. What Europe needs now, it largely does not have. ## Germany's Spending Surge and a Misallocated Bet Which brings the question to Germany. Berlin is in the middle of what may be the most significant military spending surge in its post-war history, planning to spend $761 billion over the coming five years to modernize its military. Much of that has flowed to big-ticket items: 35 US-made F-35s, Eurofighter Typhoons, Chinook helicopters, and new warships and submarines. Orders for thousands of tanks and armored vehicles are also being prepared. The drone and AI allocations are only a fraction of that total, despite Germany's foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, lamenting that Berlin was practically empty-handed when it came to drones. None of this means tanks and armored vehicles are useless. But they are not what defeated several thousand NATO troops in Hedgehog 2025. Drones were. If NATO went to war tomorrow, it would find itself in a world where conventional force mass is vulnerable to cheap, proliferated unmanned systems in ways that no quantity of Leopard 2 tanks can easily resolve. The spending mix matters because the threat is not theoretical. The same drones overwhelming Ukrainian and Russian positions today are the systems NATO has, so far, underweighted in its rearmament. A force built around expensive, conspicuous platforms is precisely the kind of target the wargames showed drone operators can dismantle. ## A Doctrine Problem, Not Just a Hardware Problem Beyond the need to buy drones and counter-drone tech, the wargames revealed a more pressing lesson: NATO does not yet know how to fight under drone observation. According to one participant in Hedgehog 2025, the NATO battle group moved through the exercise without any attempt at concealment, parking tents and armored vehicles in the open as though the drone threat did not apply to them. Many of their positions were destroyed. Nick, a Ukrainian drone commander who took part, put it bluntly: "The infantry reacted weakly to approaching threats. In some cases they tried to disperse, in some they did not. They did not understand it was a threat. We told them it should not be like that. If there is a threat from the sky, you need to take cover (...) because if you are spotted, consider that you will be killed." He also described a NATO unit that pulled into a holding area and parked its vehicles 30 to 50 meters apart without dispersing, allowing him to methodically pick them off one by one. This was only an exercise, but on a real battlefield such behavior would be catastrophic. NATO soldiers understand that drones are dangerous; they do not seem to grasp how dangerous. That gap will get soldiers killed. There is a parallel lesson about speed in decision-making. Ukrainian forces used the battlefield management system DELTA to share operational data rapidly between command and subordinate units, accelerating strikes. In several Allied militaries, the tendency to restrict access to sensitive information slows reactions and complicates coordination. To catch up to Ukraine and Russia, NATO must do more than buy better hardware. It must fundamentally change how information moves through its command structures, eliminating anything not essential to battlefield success. ## Europe's Untapped Industrial Edge NATO also needs to invest in its own startups and tech companies. The American stereotype holds that Europe is hopeless at cutting-edge technology, but the continent is home to a highly qualified workforce and plenty of promising defense startups. The real obstacles are onerous rules and a lack of venture capital that make scaling difficult. Given that, there are worse things Europe could do than pour a substantial share of its rearmament money into startups at the bleeding edge of technology. Many would naturally fail, but those that survived could lead a defense revolution. After all, it was massive government subsidies flowing into a constellation of private companies that turned Ukraine into one of the world's drone superpowers in just four years. There are encouraging signs. Germany's defense minister, Boris Pistorius, recently opened a dedicated innovation center for the German military and promised more investment in new technologies and cooperation with technology companies. Berlin has committed to spending $10 billion in the coming years and has already placed significant orders with Helsing, whose AI-enabled HX-2 strike drone has been battle-tested in Ukraine. NATO can also learn from members and partners who have already solved parts of this puzzle. Turkey has quietly built one of the most capable drone industries on the planet, controlling, by some estimates, about 65 percent of the global armed-drone export market. Israel has developed some of the most sophisticated AI-assisted targeting systems in existence; its Gospel system processes intelligence from satellites, drone footage, and intercepted communications simultaneously, compressing what once took human analysts days into minutes. ## Washington's Own Blind Spots Europe is not alone in its vulnerability. In 2025, the Center for a New American Security's Defense Program published a report concluding that the United States was unprepared to defend against present and future drone threats. A Defense Department Inspector General report reinforced the finding, noting that confused counter-drone policies had left US military bases unable to adequately protect themselves, with base commanders scrambling over unclear guidance on how to even respond to incursions. And incursions are no longer rare: drone sightings over American military installations have jumped considerably, to the point where security officials now treat them as routine operational threats rather than isolated incidents. So far those incursions have been harmless. But it is not difficult to imagine an adversary, such as China, unleashing a swarm of drones from a container ship against a wide array of undefended targets. After Ukraine launched a successful drone ambush on multiple Russian airbases last year, one of them thousands of kilometers from the front, US analysts began discussing a similar attack from Chinese merchant vessels docked at American ports. The discussion intensified after confirmation that COSCO Shipping, China's state-owned shipping giant, operates across key US ports despite being designated by the Department of Defense as a Chinese military company. Retired Navy commander Thomas Shugart warned, in an interview with Newsweek, that such an attack was extremely likely, given how full Chinese military doctrine is of references to sudden and surprise strikes. Iran is a further concern, because few countries have access to the battlefield data Iran does on the performance of its drones. Russia has made extensive use of Iran's Shahed drones in Ukraine, generating data that has helped Iran refine its drone program. Although Tehran and Washington are engaged in negotiations, those talks could break down. Iran recently announced that 1,000 new strategic drones had joined its forces, including one-way suicide drones capable of hitting fixed and moving targets on land and at sea. Tehran does not need to strike the American homeland to inflict serious damage; US bases in Qatar, Bahrain, and across the Gulf, along with key American allies in the region, all sit comfortably within range of Tehran's aerial assets. Washington has taken steps to protect them in the short term, but more clearly needs to be done. ## A Narrow Window The picture is bleak, but the alliance is not asleep. There are genuine signs that NATO is beginning to grasp the scale of the problem, even if the pace remains frustratingly slow. The harder truth is that the alliance still has not figured out how to deploy FPV drones at scale or integrate them into its doctrine the way Ukraine and Russia have. Nor does it have its own answer to Shahed-type drones capable of cheaply saturating enemy defenses, or an easy way to shoot them down. This really needs to change, and change in large institutions is never fast. NATO is about as large as institutions come: procurement cycles are long, bureaucracies are deep, and political will tends to arrive only after the crisis already has. With EU defense officials warning that Russia could be ready to test NATO's borders as early as 2030, the alliance has a narrow window to get this right. If it does not, the next time a handful of drone operators defeat thousands of NATO troops, it might not be a wargame. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What did the two wargames reveal about NATO's drone readiness? The Die Welt and Helmut Schmidt University wargame, set in October 2026, showed Russia seizing the Lithuanian city of Marijampole using a false pretext and then steamrolling through the Baltics — aided by American absence and NATO's conditioned instinct to de-escalate rather than fight. The Hedgehog 2025 exercise was even more striking: a handful of Ukrainian troops using FPV drones defeated a combined combat group of several thousand NATO soldiers, destroying 17 armored vehicles and conducting 30 strikes in roughly half a day. Together, the games showed that NATO is not ready for drone-dominated warfare. ### Why is intercepting drones with fighter jets economically unsustainable? A routine two-fighter intercept costs between $28,000 and $57,000 in flight hours alone, and firing a missile adds roughly $1 million to $1.2 million per shot. Many of the drones on the other end of those shots are built from foam and plywood, costing a tiny fraction of that amount. An F-35 can cost as much as $80 million to purchase and millions more to operate. Russia would not even need to hit a single target to impose ruinous costs on NATO simply by sending drones over its airspace night after night. ### What is Europe's drone wall, and why might it fail? The drone wall is Europe's planned layered network of sensors, radar, and interceptors, initially stretching from the Baltic states to the Black Sea, which EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said could be operational by 2027. It faces the limits of geography across hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, the near-impossibility of stopping small drones smuggled and launched from within cities, and the challenge of integrating dozens of national systems with different airspace laws and rules of engagement. Building it will also take time that intelligence assessments suggest the alliance may not have. ### What doctrinal weaknesses did the wargames expose in NATO forces? NATO forces in Hedgehog 2025 moved through the exercise without any attempt at concealment, parking tents and armored vehicles in the open as though drone threats did not apply to them, and many positions were destroyed. A Ukrainian drone commander described picking off vehicles parked 30 to 50 meters apart one by one. The exercises also highlighted slow, over-restricted information sharing, contrasting with Ukraine's use of the DELTA battlefield management system to rapidly accelerate strikes from intelligence to action. ### How do China and Iran factor into the drone threat facing NATO and the US? Analysts fear China could launch a drone swarm from a container ship against undefended US targets — a concern sharpened by the fact that COSCO Shipping, a state-owned Chinese company designated as a Chinese military company, operates across key US ports. Iran, which has gathered battlefield data from Russia's use of its Shahed drones in Ukraine, recently announced 1,000 new strategic drones including suicide drones capable of hitting fixed and moving targets on land and sea, putting US bases in Qatar, Bahrain, and across the Gulf comfortably within range. ## Sources 1. https://www.wsj.com/opinion/nato-has-seen-the-future-and-is-unprepared-887eaf0f 2. https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/a-wargame-shows-just-how-vulnerable-europe-is-to-a-russian-attack-12dfdbfa 3. https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/02/13/nato-exercise-reveals-alliance-cant-survive-ukraine-style-drone-warfare/ 4. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/02/13/british-brigade-destroyed-by-ukraine-in-nato-wargame/ 5. https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article6984a7189d88d6e920be111f/ernstfall-podcast-wargame-exposes-gaps-in-germanys-response-to-a-hypothetical-russian-attack-on-lithuania.html 6. https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nato-drone-defense-plans-0accac42 7. https://archive.is/M588a 8. https://www.ft.com/content/62f4a0f7-ffc9-49c8-b1e5-649703018dd1 <!-- youtube:TT-3oEDgmVE -->