Ukraine participates in NATO drill to test anti-drone systems

• The 11-day exercise concluded with a demonstration of jamming and hacking drones
• The proliferation of drones in the war has prompted NATO to increase its focus on the threat they pose.
• Experts warn NATO that it needs to catch up on drone warfare.

NATO concluded a major anti-drone exercise this week, marking Ukraine’s first participation as the Western alliance seeks to learn urgently from the rapid development and widespread use of unmanned systems in the ongoing war.

The drills at a Dutch military base involved more than 20 countries and about 50 companies, testing cutting-edge systems to detect and counter drones while assessing their interoperability. The 11-day exercise concluded with a demonstration of jamming and hacking drones, highlighting their critical role in the Ukraine war once again.

On Wednesday, a large Ukrainian drone attack triggered an earthquake-sized blast at a major Russian arsenal. The next day, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Moscow would ramp up drone production tenfold to nearly 1.4 million this year. The proliferation of drones in the war—used to destroy targets and survey the battlefield—has prompted NATO to increase its focus on the threat they could pose to the alliance.

“NATO takes this threat very, very seriously,” said Matt Roper, chief of the Joint Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Center at the alliance’s technology agency.

“This is not a domain we can afford to sit back and be passive on,” he said at the exercise site, Lt. Gen. Best Barracks in the east of The Netherlands.

Experts have warned NATO that it must quickly catch up on drone warfare.

“NATO has too few drones for a high-intensity fight against a peer adversary,” a report from the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank declared last September.

“It would be severely challenged to effectively integrate those it has in a contested environment.”

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