On Saturday, a pair of jet-powered attack drones soared over the Black Sea and into NATO airspace. Minutes later, Romanian Air Force F-16 fighter jets blew them out of the sky with Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, sending the fragments plummeting into the murky waters below.
This has become something of the norm for the more easterly members of the alliance. NATO fighters had to down a suspected Russian UAV over Lithuania on September 15, and were scrambled earlier that month to meet another drone in southern Estonia.
The alliance’s air forces have repeatedly demonstrated they can take down these intruders, albeit at great cost. But what if two drones become 20, or 200? Or, as Ukraine experienced in a single day earlier this year, 999—plus several cruise and ballistic missiles?
Newsweek put that question and many others to Lieutenant General Guillaume Thomas, deputy commander of NATO Allied Air Command, alongside senior air defense officers stationed along the alliance’s Eastern flank and an independent air power researcher, to gauge the state of the security bloc’s readiness for modern war.
Their answers reveal the scale of the challenge the alliance is facing, and what its military leaders are trying to do about it.
The Price of Protection
As the wars in Ukraine, the Middle East and Sudan have demonstrated, cheap, explosive-laden drones can inflict devastating damage and trouble some of the world’s best air defenses. With protests over the cost of living and other economic concerns engulfing cities across Europe, scrambling fighter jets worth millions of dollars to fire missiles worth hundreds of thousands apiece at cheap drones constitutes an obvious financial conundrum.
This was not, however, at the top of Thomas’ list of concerns.
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"If there is a risk for the population, if there really is a risk for infrastructure, especially civilian infrastructure, we do not hesitate to use fighter jets, even with missiles, to shoot down drones," he told Newsweek.
"The purpose of air defense is to protect people, critical infrastructure and military capabilities," Colonel Fredi Karu, Estonia’s Air Force Chief of Staff, added. "The potential damage caused by even a relatively inexpensive unmanned aircraft can be considerably higher than the cost of the drone itself."
As most NATO members have worked an increase in defense spending into their budgets, this cost-benefit analysis still just about works out—for now. The real problem arises when these intermittent interceptions become routine.
"Beyond consuming scarce missiles, every interception also strains flying hours, maintenance capacity and aircrew readiness that may be needed against much more sophisticated threats," Arun Dawson, an air power researcher at King's College London's Freeman Air and Space Institute, told Newsweek.
Routine they are indeed becoming. Romania alone has recorded 35 unauthorized drone entries in 2026, compared with nine throughout 2025 and seven in 2024. The Baltic states and Poland have also faced dozens of drone-related incidents and several incursions of their own. One such violation of NATO airspace by more than 20 Russian drones in September 2025 provided the impetus the alliance needed to rethink its approach to air defense.
Operation Eastern Sentry, launched just over a year ago, saw additional fighters, surveillance aircraft and ground-based air-defense systems installed along the eastern flank, and in July NATO officially upgraded its longstanding air-policing mission into an alliance-wide air defense posture.
In practice, this means air defense commanders are gaining access to a wider range of technologies and capabilities to face aerial threats, rather than resorting to scrambling fighter jets by default.
"We all agree within air command that we must be on the right side of the cost curve," said Thomas. "We are working to integrate mobile firing teams, helicopters, cheaper drone effectors to intercept oncoming drones, and other technologies into a multi-layered air defense design."
But giving NATO commanders more weapons solutions to choose from creates a new challenge.
Eyes on the Prize
A radar detects something approaching NATO airspace. Is it a Russian attack drone, a wayward Ukrainian air defense interceptor, a commercial aircraft, or something else? Which unit is best placed to reach it? And what is the most efficient and effective weapon in this scenario?
These are just some of the questions the alliance’s air defense commanders must negotiate before a single aerial threat can be dealt with; a process Thomas summed up as "sense, make sense and act." But as the number of drones threatening NATO territory increases, and the set of weapons available to intercept them becomes more diverse, that process becomes exponentially more complex.
"One of our biggest challenges is to get the command and control system able to face these threats, especially when it comes to more mass. If we have to face hundreds, even thousands, of drones and missiles at the same time, then you have to make decisions very quickly," Thomas told Newsweek.
To recommend and launch an interception, commanders need reliable information about what is approaching in the first place. This is where NATO’s Baltic members, who share a land border with Russia and constitute the first line of defense, are concentrating their efforts.
"The sooner an approaching object is detected, identified and tracked, the more time there is to assess the threat and select an appropriate response," Estonia’s Col. Karu explained. "Air surveillance and early warning are therefore among the core tasks of our Air Force.
"No single sensor can provide a complete solution, especially against small, low-flying or otherwise difficult-to-detect unmanned aircraft. This means combining different types of sensors and ensuring that the information they produce can be brought together into a recognized air picture."
The importance of cultivating accurate intelligence was demonstrated in Kyiv just last week, when President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine had received no advance warning from its partners about Russian ballistic missile launches which battered civilian and energy infrastructure.
To this end, Estonia’s Air Surveillance Wing maintains a Command and Reporting Center in the capital Tallinn, which processes information from radar sites across the country to produce a real-time picture of NATO’s Eastern flank. Meanwhile, Lithuania’s Air Force is currently testing SkyFortress—a Ukrainian monitoring network developed to identify low-flying drones and cruise missiles—to see whether it can enhance NATO’s existing early warning systems.
"Lithuania is adapting based on Ukraine’s war experience and developing acoustic, electromagnetic, and other detection systems, building them together with kinetic systems to match the threat, and updating our operating procedures," Major Romas Zakaras, commander of Lithuania’s air defense battalion, told Newsweek.
Some of the most important work is taking place in Latvia, where Allied Command Transformation—the branch of NATO focused on military adaptation and modernization—is holding a series of exercises to test whether sensors, command systems and drone interceptors developed by different NATO members can share information and operate as a single defensive network.
So, the alliance is deploying a wider variety of air defense systems, and developing the command and control architecture required to connect them into one cohesive, integrated network capable of recognizing and guiding defense systems to take out multiple threats.
What happens if the first wave of drones is followed by another? And another?
Preparing for the Long Haul
Ukraine’s air defenses destroyed more than 4,700 Russian drones and missiles just in the month of September, but thousands more penetrated Kyiv’s defenses to wreak havoc. Even the U.S. expended an estimated 1,060 to 1,430 PAC-3 Patriot interceptors in the first 39 days of the Iran war—roughly half its prewar stockpile—according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
For NATO, the prospect of confronting attacks on anything like that scale presents a problem that extends far beyond the military’s ability to identify and intercept incoming threats. When Newsweek pressed Thomas on how the alliance would sustain its defenses under such conditions, his response was blunt.
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"I would say the answer doesn't rely on our side at the military level. I talk about the cost curve, but there is also the production curve. The fact is that our industries must be able to produce at scale the ammunition we need to counter this mass."
In Lithuania, the supply problem is already influencing military preparations. Major Zakaras told Newsweek that his air defense operators regularly train under "low missile procedures," practicing how to allocate limited ammunition during mass attacks.
In July, the alliance announced two initiatives—NATO Front Door and NATO Engine—designed to expand industrial production for air-defense and strike capabilities, and to simplify the procurement process to better connect governments and militaries with defense companies.
But new factories, production lines and purchasing agreements take time to translate into deployable weapons, and stockpiling enough weapons to manage an extended Russian assault is only part of the equation; NATO must also ensure the weapons it produces remain effective against a threat that is constantly evolving.
Of the 4,700-plus Russian aerial threats intercepted by Ukraine in September, almost 2,000 were jet-powered drones, capable of traveling considerably faster than their propeller-driven predecessors and leaving defenders with less time to react.
"Ukraine’s success with cheaper interceptor drones creates an incentive for Russia to make its drones faster and harder to kill," Dawson told Newsweek. "It is not enough to stockpile today’s counter-drone technology—you need supply chains capable of rapidly adapting to the latest threat, because every successful defensive innovation creates incentives for the attacker to find a way around it."
Therein lies a potentially ruinous pitfall: governments simply can’t afford to commit billions of dollars to weapons that are already outdated by the time they are manufactured and integrated into service. Deciding which emerging systems are worth purchasing is ultimately one extremely high-stakes game of trial and error.
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Senior research fellow for Airpower and Technology at the RUSI think tank, Justin Bronk, has suggested one interim solution: repurposing low-maintenance and cheap jet trainer aircraft to create a dedicated NATO air defense squadron.
Such aircraft, like the Czech-made L-39 Skyfox, could be maintained and operated at a fraction of the cost of advanced fighters, using machine guns and relatively cheap guided rockets to intercept the fastest of Russian drones. This low-cost, low-maintenance squadron would solve neither the mass nor innovation challenge facing NATO, but could handle the bulk of Russian threats in the short-term while the alliance works to bring its next generation of sensors, AI-assisted command systems and drone interceptors into service.
The Best Defense…
Four-and-a-half years into Russia’s war in Ukraine, Western governments are yet to come up with a clear consensus on how to respond to Moscow’s drone incursions, part of what are often referred to as "hybrid attacks" or "grey-zone" warfare.
Many analysts argue these terms allow NATO’s political and military leaders to downplay the seriousness of events like repeated drone incursions, only to put off facing the difficult question of how to respond.
"We are a defensive alliance, so our first mission is to defend our nations and our airspaces," Thomas told Newsweek. "Shooting down a drone sends a deterrent message that we're able to do it, to detect, to intercept."
When asked whether he would like to see more costs imposed on Russia for sending drones into NATO airspace, he responded: "The answer to Russia is a difficult question; I just have to stay at my tactical and military level. But we are able to demonstrate that we can protect the airspaces, and if needed, counter any attack against our countries at any moment."
Dawson, free from the level of scrutiny to which one of NATO’s most senior commanders is subjected, argued that the alliance must prepare for the possibility that a great defense may not be sufficient on its own to deter Russian offense.
"Ukraine has also shown the importance of shooting the archer as well as the arrow," he said. "Simply relying on your 'shield' to take out every single threat, however many are inbound, is unsustainable. Defense must be coupled with efforts to disrupt launch systems, logistics, production and command networks generating the threat in the first place, but that may require crossing certain thresholds which some NATO allies deem too escalatory."
But no military, however powerful or well equipped, can guarantee that every incoming threat will be stopped. The Gulf states, whose wealth and strong defense ties with the U.S. afford them well-equipped militaries and air defense systems, have been unable to prevent drones and missiles launched by Iran and Yemen’s Houthi rebels from destroying energy infrastructure or targeting civilian airports.
"NATO publics need to wake up to the fact that when they see Dubai apartment blocks hit by drones, the same could happen in Europe. When they see ballistic missile attacks against Kyiv, whose shortage of Patriot interceptors is well-documented, the same tactics could be used here," Dawson said.
"There is no sanctuary."
For a man shouldering this degree of responsibility, Thomas seemed remarkably relaxed.
"It’s a difficult job, but I like it!" he told Newsweek.