London — The war in Iran has highlighted the threat relatively cheap drones pose to both human life and crucial infrastructure. It has also highlighted a seeming unreadiness to counter the weapons among the militaries of the U.S. and some of its major allies in the Middle East.
As President Trump sharply criticizes America’s longtime NATO allies in Europe, they are moving quickly to take the lead in anti-drone warfare capabilities, taking advantage of technology and skills honed over four years of warfare in Ukraine.
Russia’s ongoing full-scale invasion has forced Ukraine to build up robust, modern anti-drone capacities. Already Kyiv has sent experts and equipment, at the request of the U.S., to help protect U.S. personnel and American allies in the Middle East as they fend off drones launched by Iran and its regional proxy groups.
But some of America’s European NATO allies, including Poland, have also been learning from the Ukrainian battlefield, and they are developing robust anti-drone systems to protect their own territories.
“You just need what works, and you need it as soon as possible”
Poland is currently developing “one of the most capable and dense counter-drone systems in the world,” Robert Tollast, a research fellow in land warfare at the British military think tank RUSI, told CBS News.
“A lot of NATO countries, including the U.S., have been quite slow to adapt to the drone threat,” Tollast said, in part due to an over-focus on experimentation with new technologies, including lasers. “What we’ve seen in Ukraine — and I think the Polish and now the Germans actually are really picking up on this — is you just need what works, and you need it as soon as possible.”
In January, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced a new anti-drone program, SAN, named after a river.
It will be “the largest counter-UAS [Unmanned Aircraft System] system in Europe,” Radoslaw Piesiewicz, co-founder of Polish radar manufacturer Advanced Protection Systems, told CBS News.
APS is building the SAN system along with Poland’s state-controlled defense group PGZ and Norwegian defense company Kongsberg. APS’ technology has been battlefield tested in Ukraine, Piesiewicz said.
“In protecting the Polish airspace, obviously we are protecting a big chunk of the eastern NATO flank,” he told CBS News. “This is going to be not only for Poland, but this is to be a … platform to export this technology to other countries as well. And there is already interest from other NATO countries to join in the effort.”
How SAN anti-drone system will work
SAN will incorporate radar and other sensors, including cameras and radio frequency sensors, to detect enemy drones, and then jammers and weapons of different calibers to disable or destroy them.
“A lot of radars in Western air defenses were designed for tracking and detecting large objects in the sky — think, a ballistic missile, high altitude, jet planes, enemy jets, that sort of thing,” Tollast said. “Drones are obviously quite small, and they typically will fly very low. That creates loads of problems for a conventional radar.”
“You cannot use legacy radars that are good radars but were meant to detect jets and things like that, because they are incapable to detect properly Shaheds [Iranian-made drones] and smaller drones,” Piesiewicz told CBS News. “So, two important things: You need good radars to monitor the airspace, and then you need a good software command and control, C2 system, that allows you to monitor that airspace and take proper action.”
In addition to radar technology that can detect small, low-flying drones, SAN will also consist of a mobile fleet of about 700 vehicles, and 50 to 60 platoons, each with 30 to 50 service members, Tollast said.
This will enable the system to flexibly cover large areas and detect drones as small as the commercially available devices flown by hobbyists, as well as the Shaheds Iran is currently using to attack its Gulf neighbors and ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
Practically, Piesiewicz explained how SAN will detect and neutralize drones heading toward Polish airspace.
For larger drones such as Shaheds, the specialist radar will be able to “very precisely track its position in space many kilometers away … more than 10 kilometers [about 6 miles] away from the operator. And it also helps the operator classify the target as a Shahed.”
He said the tracking information is processed by software that allows a counterdrone operator to launch “a drone against that Shahed. That interceptor drone is directed automatically on that target, using the information from the radar, up until it almost reaches the target.”
Then the interceptor drone’s camera system takes over, enabling the operator to “do the job, because he’s very close to the target, and he can simply hit it.”
The SAN radar system will pick up smaller drones, but not from as far away as something the size of a Shahed or other military weapons.
“Our radar see these tiny drones from far enough to automatically direct the guns on the targets … and then steer the gun properly so that that drone, that threat, can be eliminated,” Piesiewicz said.
Wider significance
Piesiewicz said APS has gotten “many” calls since the ongoing war in Iran began.
“Serious ones, from the serious places,” he said. “These guys have problems there, the different countries, and it’s — you don’t have to be a genius to see that, to understand that there’s a big problem with that,” he told CBS News, declining to give more information about who had called to inquire about APS’ anti-drone technology.
“Britain, the United States … we’re starting to move out of that experimentation phase when it comes to counter-drones,” Tollast said, adding, “We’ve got to move a lot more quickly.”
And he acknowledged that, for the world’s most powerful militaries, the shift to thinking about and focusing on anti-drone systems may be easier said than done.
“It brings in what you call force design questions. In other words, if we’re worried about a high intensity war — so, in Europe with Russia, with America, potentially China — how many soldiers, how many air force personnel are involved in the counter-drone defense effort?” he said. “What does the future army look like? … This is expensive equipment, and you don’t win wars by being excellent at defending yourself, basically. There are trade-offs.”
Speaking Tuesday on a visit to London, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made it clear that he sees the two ongoing wars as connected, calling Russia and Iran “brothers in hatred,” and noting that Iran sells Shahed drones to Russia to use in Ukraine.
Despite the trade-offs, Piesiewicz says it’s imperative that Western militaries begin equipping themselves with state-of-the-art anti-drone systems to protect human life, but also for economic reasons.
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