> "The aggressor", he concludes, "will observe, adjust, repeat – until they get through".
Reminds me a lot of digital sec.
I don’t know if we’ve seen Shahads since 10 September, but note that Shahads can be ship-launched as well.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/may/04...
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/01/16/we-need-eyes-and-ear...
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.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-cyberespionage-gig-...
Every news report I read about this stuff has at best /r/ufos level of uselessly vague photography.
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?
[0]: https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/gesetzgebungsverfahren/DE...
Tracking them is a need first and foremost. How about a down-facing radar on top of the Aviation Control Tower?
Once a drone has been spotted notifying the correct person and getting the drone started would take a few minutes I assume.
Furthermore you can't really deploy a drone at an airport while it is still active, which is the reason they are banned from operating there in the first place.
a couple of RPG sized rounds dropped from 10000 ft up could easily close runways and shutdown an airport for hours. hell just being there and being UFO could lead to all sorts of flight re-routing and chaos
I would have expected this to be table stakes at running large busy airports.
The bigger issue I assume is probably that even if you react very quickly the drone might be already gone already anyway.
In Paris they developed an electronic barrier wall for drones. Yes maybe these are autonomous enough that when the link is cut they continue on their mission but I think something is better than nothing.
These tools are widely available.
On publics airports? Where planes have to land all the time? Can they be pinpointed exactly on one specific target without disturbing the others? And this is assuming there even is a remote-control to jam.
What you can certainly double down on is tracking and close to the ground monitoring. And it would be surprising if this did not give results (over hundreds of sightings) as to who is launching them and recovering some hardware. Drones fall off pretty easily and it might be hard to repeatedly recover drones without getting caught if there is a surge of police around.
But yes detection is key and surprising airports don’t already have this. This is not an exactly new phenomenon.
But of course, electronic countermeasures / jamming should be attempted first, so they can be recovered intact and traced.
The same is true for jamming, which sounds like a bad idea at an active airport, although targetted jamming will probably work. Not sure how quickly such a system can be deployed however.
So that means you need to wait until operations have paused at which point the drone has already disappeared.
I fell like tracking the drone to identify the operator with strong zoom cameras mounted on the airport might work though. At least some commercial systems seem to use this approach: https://www.dedrone.com/industry/airports
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.
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
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.
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
China is as much of an adversary to the west as Russia but they are a lot smarter about it.
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.
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.
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?
(I am not saying this is the whole story. But the main part of it, yes.)
Yokolos•2mo ago
billy99k•2mo ago
Now if China gets involved? It's a different story.
immibis•2mo ago
victorbjorklund•2mo ago
aduwah•2mo ago
Y-bar•2mo ago
China, Turkey, and India are main buyers of Russian oil at the moment: https://energyandcleanair.org/october-2025-monthly-analysis-...
victorbjorklund•2mo ago
gambiting•2mo ago
pdabbadabba•2mo ago
Cthulhu_•2mo ago
But I don't see how that would work, unless the US is intentionally witholding intel from their allies - the US, since the invention of spaceflight, has had spy sattelites trained at Russia and they would see large accumulations and transports of tanks and tank parts.
gambiting•2mo ago
https://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/wiadomosci/7%2C114881%2C3206584...
But it's not the one I read which was literally a general saying "they are building tanks and not sending them to the front - why if not to fight with NATO eventually".
pdabbadabba•2mo ago
> Russian factories are working at full speed, producing new tanks and repairing those that have been dusty for years," writes "Le Figaro". The French daily refers to its sources and data from independent study groups. On the other hand, experts also point to the fact that this year the losses of the Russians have decreased - this year it was only 200 tanks. According to the newspaper, this may be due to the fact that the participation of these vehicles in the fighting at the front has been reduced. This, in turn, is the result of greater use of drones.
This actually strikes me as fairly plausible: it suggests that Russia has decided that tanks are not ideally suited for the current drone war in Ukraine. So they're continuing to ramp up production, but aren't (at this point) sending them to the front.
This doesn't necessarily mean that they have a long-term plan to invade NATO, however. I can think of many other scenarios where it would be in Russia's strategic interest to have a large modernized tank force in reserve.
kakacik•2mo ago
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
DocTomoe•2mo ago
Such is propaganda: You need to keep the population in fear so they will follow your policies.
Cthulhu_•2mo ago
red-iron-pine•2mo ago
discount at the gas station while a potential rival hollows itself out and turns into the Canada of China -- a mostly empty resource hub that follows your lead
littlestymaar•2mo ago
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).
sigwinch•2mo ago
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.
AnimalMuppet•2mo ago
sigwinch•2mo ago
I think the West now expects a complex and probably mortal fight for succession, with the Patruchevs being favored right now.
I’ve heard people talking about factions: one ensuring Putin’s physical security; another ensuring a continuity of their power so that oligarchs and siloviki are indivisibly secure.
red-iron-pine•2mo ago
something to the effect of: "Russia has a way out of this war. They can release some or all of Ukrainian territory, take their ball and go home.
Putin however has no way out of this war, as dictators cannot look weak and there was already the revolt from Prigozhn.
There is no reality where he can just walk away without facing repercussions.
He could try to repress his way to security but the Tsars tried that too..."
bluGill•2mo ago
slightwinder•2mo ago
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.
Yokolos•2mo ago
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?
slightwinder•2mo ago
Yes, but how is that relevant? Everything is always open for terror. Russia itself is not safe either. Or are you assuming Russia is out for pure blind destruction? Degrading themselves to become lousy terrorists? Just spreading destruction for no reason?
I would assume they at least will have some aim and reasoning behind their targets, which would mean they will come with soldiers and tanks, and conquer land, or destroy the highest profile-targets. In the first case, they will have very limited resources to spare for attacks on middle European targets. For the second case, you only need to focus your defence on those targets.
> I've seen zero indication that this is true.
May you are following the wrong sources? Building up drones-defence is in progress for a while now. Whether it's going well is a different story, but I would assume that they will not talk very openly about those things for obvious reasons.
red-iron-pine•2mo ago