1) Russian sabre-rattling
2) NATO countries running "secret" drills in public in anticipation of 1)
The UFO community is of course running with a third option that doesn't warrant any seriousness.
Maybe I just didn't read the article well enough.
In the USA we get over 100 drone sightings near airports per month. ( https://www.faa.gov/uas/resources/public_records/uas_sightin...? ) ( we are certainly 'NATO aligned', but it's the easiest source of drone incursion records I could find )
What about Asian countries? African Countries? Does the EU have better drone detection? Does the EU overreact due to the current tension levels within the EU?
the whole article reads like a FUD-laced sales pitch for gathering public support for an expensive anti-drone tech. There's even a whole section talking about how it will be a 'financially controversial question'. The article starts with fearmongering around the drones not having explosives 'yet'.
Maybe there are normal or slightly elevated levels of drone incursion due to idiots with access to cheap drones. Maybe the drone-wall vendor working with their partners within the EU saw an opportunity to exploit fear to gather support
edit: I tried to get data for the EU similar to what the FAA produces. I failed. Chatgpt says there "maybe" reason to believe in a recent spike in sightings. I am maybe overly cautious about trusting that a spike is indeed happening and it has hostile intent. I am reminded of the mass delusion in New Jersey of the 'drone sightings' that ended up being nothing interesting.
it is almost certainly Russia, or NATO running drills.
also don't underestimate idiots and assholes in the same way that incoming flights to airports still have to deal with people shining laser pointers at them on an irregular but not uncommon basis
Side question: How likely are autonomous reconnaissance drones today?
I'd expect them to be impervious to traditional jamming.
I could imagine a pair of drones, a few km apart, communicating by laser line-of-sight, where the reconnaissance one acquires data, send it to the nearby drone, that one would use it to confirm data and do something else with it (aka, spotter and actor).
Because they are doing it to stir up public hysteria.
Actually some years they were very proudly showing birds of prey that they had trained to do just that. Whatever happened to that?
After 9/11 there was a huge worldwide shift in e.g. airplane security due to the threat of terrorism, but now there's drones out there they can fly into planes or that can drop bombs they're doing... what? Mentioning it in the news?
This isn't allowed in most countries, so they usually also have no equipment for this. Some countries seem to have changed the laws recently for this case and building up on defence more openly now. Which also leaves space for speculations if this wasn't maybe also sometimes a false-flag-operation.
> Actually some years they were very proudly showing birds of prey that they had trained to do just that. Whatever happened to that?
They are trained for small slow commercial drones, those which are around the same size as the bird, or smaller. Military long-range-drones are usually a bit bigger and faster, meaning the bird could probably for simply reason of physic not doing much.
This probably is also a main problem here, that most drone-defences in the last years were developed against private actors, not military threats.
> but now there's drones out there they can fly into planes or that can drop bombs they're doing... what? Mentioning it in the news?
It's never been a real threat so far, so nobody really was working on it seriously. There is an endless amount of theoretical threats, you can't protect everything against all of them, you have to go case by case. But reacting takes time. This is going for just some months(?), and still not even a real threat, as nobody knows anything for real (as far as we know). But many things seem happening in secret, outside the public view.
> "The aggressor", he concludes, "will observe, adjust, repeat – until they get through".
Reminds me a lot of digital sec.
these projectiles aren't going to travel 9km unless you're shooting off SAMs or other serious AA
i'd be more worried about FOD on the runways getting sucked into an engine or popping the tires of service vehicles
It's thought that it's Russian illegal agents doing this. A lot of them locals recruited online. Really cheap ops done by really cheap people, using cheap and deniable gear.
I don’t know if we’ve seen Shahads since 10 September, but note that Shahads can be ship-launched as well.
(I am not saying this is the whole story. But the main part of it, yes.)
Every news report I read about this stuff has at best /r/ufos level of uselessly vague photography.
Since then, coordinated launches of screens of smaller civilian drones. I don’t think we’ll get hard numbers, but I’ve heard that NATO is more interested in ground-detection of GPS and satellite uplink jamming.
So the question now is: how are some civilians coordinating within NATO countries, and how are they getting drones that can jam?
Drones are not for conquering, but destruction. We see this in Ukraine now, where Drones are not making the whole war, but are just one gear of the machinery. And Western leaders know this, they are preparing Drones, but refitting the western machinery takes time. Probably one reason why they seem busy to bind Russia in Ukraine.
Yes, and we have plenty of infrastructure to destroy. It's a target rich environment.
> And Western leaders know this, they are preparing Drones
I've seen zero indication that this is true. Do you have sources that we're in any way preparing for a large-scale drone war?
Now if China gets involved? It's a different story.
Such is propaganda: You need to keep the population in fear so they will follow your policies.
Also russia has firm footing in EU politics already - for example every single far right group is parroting russian propaganda even when directly aimed against given country. It took decades to build to sow division in whole EU and they are using it now to their fullest.
[EDIT] Gotta love the downvotes, I am just describing what I see across whole EU including my own country. Would love some constructive feedback but this is clearly a touchy topic for many folks
I mean of course drones would be a massive problem for western forces as they have never faced that kind of threat at scale.
But at the same time the Russian army has suffered dramatic attrition in Ukraine, especially in anti-air capabilities which used to be USSR's specialty and which western analyst feared it would allow the Russians to perform wide anti access on the Baltic's while they would quickly take over the Suvalki corridor and the whole Baltic states soon after.
With limited maneuvering capability left to quickly overwhelm local land armies and a significantly diminished air defense asset, I think the Russians would just lose the sky very quickly and then be unable to supply their ground forces.
And I really don't think Putin wants to lose a quick conventional war and end up with just the nuclear deterrence as his only card so I'm not too worried about him attacking EU directly. (But then again it made little sense to attack Ukraine in the first place yet he did it no matter what, so who knows…)
(Had the Ukrainian army collapsed and the 2022 campaign gone as planned by the Russian command, then the prospects would have been extremely grim for the Baltic states and the European Union as a whole. We Europeans collectively owe a lot to the Ukrainians).
On the topic of a wide drone attack coinciding with land invasion, I think (rightly or wrongly) the drone attack will be attributed to Russia early. Even though the life of a Russian soldier is approximately the same as a drone, it’d be very helpful for Russia to manifest the drones in support of some other origin of the troops.
