To defend against Russian aggression Eastern Europe is considering a “drone wall.” The idea is to use sensors, drones, and counter-drone systems arranged along Russia’s border to deter and destroy drones. The project is ambitious and would require unprecedented cooperation from multiple countries to pull off.
Rene Ehasalu, the Cluster Manager for the Estonian Defense Industry Association, told Gizmodo that cooperation is key. “We want this to be an international project. The situation in Europe has changed in the past few years and even the past few months. We don’t see that it’s getting better and we need to be prepared. If we show collective force…then we can put a stop on this kind of aggression,” he said.
Ehasalu is kind of a diplomat for the Estonian defense industry. Through the association, he coordinates cooperation between different companies and the government. He’s been working on getting defense companies across Europe on board with the project.
The border between Eastern Europe and Russia is long and complicated. It encompasses dense forests, swamps, and snowy mountain terrain. It runs across multiple countries. Protecting it from an aggressive neighbor is a difficult problem. Last year, Estonia’s Interior Minister Lauri Laanemet proposed a unique solution: build a drone wall.
“As a venture of this scale, it’s unique. Drone surveillance and anti-drone capability is crucial both for deterrence and for countering the influence activities of our eastern neighbor,” Laanemet said last year when he announced the initiative.
Ehasalu told Gizmodo that Estonia and other countries have watched Russia’s war in Ukraine with horror. Moscow’s use of drones has been of particular concern. “We see that Russians don’t care what they are bombing and how they are bombing it,” he said. “Drones are one of the main articles of chaos on the battlefield, destroying civilian infrastructure…one main lesson is that Russians are using anything that they can to carpet bomb everything. The drones are here to stay.”
Drones are cheap and effective and Russia is planning to build thousands of them. A new factory in Belarus, a Russian ally nestled among the Eastern European countries looking to deter Russia, has a new factory it says will build 100,000 drones in 2025. “Mass beats quality,” Ehasalu said. “It’s not feasible to use millions [of dollars] worth of rockets to take down drones. You need some clever systems to track them and take them down.”
The clever system he and others are proposing is a wall of sensors backed up by unique counter-drone weapons. All of it would be hooked up to AI to help with target recognition and detection. “Humans can not see everything, can not detect everything. We get tired and so on. AI can help us on that side,” Ehasalu said. “Yes, there will always be a human presence but we try to make it as autonomous as it can be. Then there are different detection layers: acoustic sensors, IR cameras, RF detection, then mobile counter-UAS. All of those things make up those layers.”
Ehasalu said that he’s got a few defense companies on board. One is Rantelon, an Estonian company that built a jammer that stopped improvised explosive devices from detonating in Iraq. The plan is to use a similar device to jam drones.
Another company on board is the Estonian startup Frankenburg Technologies, which is working on cheap miniature missiles to knock drones out of the sky. The pitch is that Frankenburg can make missiles cheaper and faster, making them an affordable solution for shooting quadcopters out of the sky. The system was tested in Ukraine earlier this year.
The wall still has a long way to go before it’s a reality. “There hasn’t yet been an allocation of funds. But what we see is that Europe is putting a lot of effort into defense,” Ehasalu said.
But Ehasalu is confident about the plan and its future. The EU is planning to spend $870 billion on defense over the next four years. Germany just voted to exempt defense spending from some of its budget rules. Experts think the country could spend $652 billion over the next 10 years on defense.
“These are huge sums of money…what we hope is that these allocations will not be stalled or get lost in the bureaucracy because we need those capabilities really fast. We don’t have a lot of time and the only way you can push back the aggressor is to show force and commitment,” Ehasalu said.
Estonie and many of the other Eastern European countries were once Soviet States and Ehasalu said that the memory of Russian rule and oppression is a strong motivating factor. “There have been really difficult times..we quite well know the Russians and see through their agenda. We are always prepared,” he said. “We don’t fear. Our nation is motivated. We are one of the great examples of what the collapse of the Soviet Union can do for a country if you make the right choices. We know there is something on the other side of the border. We are always ready but we never let the fear take over.”
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