When Defence Secretary John Healey announced that Britain would help build a European ‘drone wall’, he was right to push the idea of a curtain of British-made interceptor drones to guard Nato’s eastern flank. Recent Russian incursions have shown that business as usual is no longer enough. Now, the challenging part begins: turning those buzzwords into a functioning defence system before the next crisis tests the alliance. The impetus is obvious.
In recent weeks, Europe has been prodded by a rash of incursions and ‘mystery drones’ over airports and military sites across the continent. Denmark and Sweden have both, in the past week, closed airspace in Copenhagen and Oslo, with the former even going as far as to temporarily ban civilian drones from flying in the city. This is hybrid warfare in slow motion: cheap drones forcing expensive responses, sowing doubt and probing defences.
The recent drone incursions demonstrate that the threat to our security is not theoretical
Brussels has already taken similar steps. Following a series of airspace infringements, from suspected Russian drones over Poland and Romania to Russian fighters entering Estonian airspace, EU ministers last month agreed to establish a ‘drone wall’ as a key part of defences along the bloc’s eastern flank. During discussions, they emphasised large-area detection methods (radars, acoustic sensors) and the need for low-cost interceptors. As Andrius Kabilius, the EU’s defence commissioner, pointed out:
If you are using … air missiles from your air fighter to shoot the drone, then you are using … [a] missile which costs 1 million to kill the drone which costs 10,000.
In other words, we cannot keep firing million-pound missiles at drones that cost a fraction of that sum.
Here, as the continent grapples with this growing threat, London has something truly useful to offer, but only if we deliver it swiftly. Under Project Octopus, the UK and Ukraine have agreed to co-develop and mass-produce interceptor drones, with a goal of manufacturing thousands per month – although when, they haven’t said. Technology of this kind has already proven effective against Shahed-type one-way attack drones and costs less than 10 per cent of the missiles they aim to destroy. Financially, this is the right option.
However, a wall is more than bricks; it comprises foundations, mortar, and maintenance. Similarly, a European drone wall worthy of the name requires three layers. The first is having and using cheap sensors – everywhere.
This involves integrating wide-area radars with acoustic, optical, and radio frequency passive sensors, along with civil feeds from airports and coastguards, so we are not blind to low, slow, small threats. The EU’s outline for their drone wall plan rightly emphasises this, but it must also be capable of defending important domestic sites as well as international borders, ring-fencing ports, power stations, and air bases with persistent, federated sensor grids.
Second, it needs to be able to jam early and often. Soft-kill options – methods that knock the drones out of the sky or prevent them from reaching their targets without needing explosive munitions, such as smart jammers, spoofers and capture systems – are far cheaper than interceptors. They will not stop everything, but they reduce the number and save bullets for what gets through.
In parallel, the UK’s development of high-power microwave systems, which deliver weaponised electromagnetic interference to counter drone swarms and knock them out of the sky, shows real promise. Nevertheless, these systems still need to progress from trials so that prototypes can be tested for their abilities to protect actual sites. We might also consider purchasing Israel’s revolutionary Iron Beam, a laser interceptor costing just $3 (£2.20) per shot. The Iron Beam is an air defence system that uses a high-powered laser to destroy short-range rockets, mortars, drones, and other airborne threats at the speed of light.
Third, this ‘wall’ must be able to intercept any drones coming towards European territory at a price we can afford every night. Octopus is the right model: cheap, expendable interceptors launched in volume to hunt and eliminate inbound drones without depleting our missile stocks. They should be built for easy, rapid improvements based on frontline feedback from Ukraine. If we are serious about a defence wall, we need mass-production lines in Britain, not expensive, cutting-edge, big-ticket military hardware with long development and procurement timelines.
The recent drone incursions Europe has experienced demonstrate that the threat to our security is not theoretical. Nato aircraft have already intercepted some 20 Russian drones straying into Polish airspace during strikes on Ukraine; Scandinavian air corridors have faced repeated disruption; and governments across Europe are now openly debating a shift from routine ‘air policing’ to full-fledged air defence along the eastern flank.
The Kremlin recognises that a few inexpensive drones can tie up vital assets and unsettle civilians. Our response must be a layered system that alters the economics of defence procurement in our favour.
In my Henry Jackson Society paper, War in the Twenty-First Century, I argued that Western procurement cycles are cost- and specification-heavy, risk-averse, and poorly suited to drone-age warfare. We need to shift from decade-long programmes to 90-day spirals; from gold-plated requirements to ‘good-enough now, better next quarter’; from monopoly primes to an ecosystem of SMEs and open architectures. That is how Ukraine developed a wartime drone industry under fire; it is also how we must build our drone wall in peacetime.
Whitehall must move beyond outdated budget battles between the Treasury and Ministry of Defence. The wall is not a single contract to be ‘let’ – it is a living network of sensors to detect threats, effectors to neutralise them, and a digital backbone that shares this information across borders. That demands open information sharing so Latvian sensors can cue a British interceptor and a Polish jammer; shared ranges for Nato and EU partners to test defences; and the ability to quickly deliver urgent equipment to usersand allow rapid learning from failures.
If Denmark can ban drones nationwide for a week to keep this week’s EU summit secure, the UK can move faster to protect its own bases, ports, and energy infrastructure without waiting for a perfect, monolithic solution.
The government will have to resist the temptation to overclassify everything, to gold-plate requirements until the price soars and to keep decisions in committee until the moment passes. They mustn’t. The entire point of a drone wall is to make harassment expensive for the aggressor, not for us. If the wall ends up being a handful of dazzling but scarce systems guarded by lawyers and locked behind proprietary software, it will fail its first real test.
Europe has the money, the engineers and, thanks to Ukraine, the combat data to make a drone wall work. Britain is right to want to get involved. For that to mean something, however, we have to adopt the cleverer, faster, cheaper Ukrainian tempo and build a wall that the Kremlin bumps into every night.
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