3 companies from Estonia to build the Great Wall of Europe, so what is the story? | policy

Translator’s introduction

In this article, published on the Defense One website for military affairs, Patrick Tucker, the site’s technology file editor, writes about Europe’s increasing efforts to build a defense network against Russian drones, which have penetrated more than once into the airspace of Eastern European countries, and could threaten the entire European continent in the near future, in the midst of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and the huge European support that Kiev is receiving to confront the Russian army.

Tucker paints a detailed picture of the Estonian companies involved in this effort, and also highlights the limitations facing the so-called “marching wall” project, especially differences over priorities among EU countries itself.

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Translation text

With the increasing incursions of Russian drones across Europe’s airspace, the European Union adopted at the end of last September one of the most ambitious defense projects among several countries in its history: a European-wide “drones wall.”

The project was envisioned as a network of new sensors, artificial intelligence software, jammers, cheap missiles, and more, aimed at thwarting small drone attacks.

The concept is still in its early stages, but dozens of defense technology startups in Estonia have given Defense One a glimpse at how autonomous vehicles, low-cost short-range missiles, combat drones, and artificial intelligence concepts are all together laying the foundation for defeating drone swarms. Almost all companies have confirmed that they worked with Ukrainian front-line leaders as part of the development process.

The first building block in the drone wall is Estonia, a country with a population of about 1.3 million people, which shares a 295-kilometre border with Russia, and has received 2.66 billion euros in European Union funds to support companies working on anti-drone technologies.

Why Estonia?

Estonia is one of the fastest growing startup and technology hubs in Europe, with a focus on areas such as autonomous systems, advanced materials, and artificial intelligence, and is also one of the most active technology exchange partners with Ukraine. In August, the Estonian government awarded 300,000 euros to three companies as part of an ongoing effort to develop solutions for the drone wall.

One such company is DefSecIntel, which specializes in border security, including sensors, sensor data fusion software, and drones.

During a tour of one of the company’s factories in September, Janos Tam, founder and CEO of the seven-year-old startup, said the company had partnered with Ukraine to help it defend itself from Russian attacks, and the partnership with the Ukrainians had given the company a first-hand understanding of drone threats from the battlefront.

Def Sec Intel’s drone wall strategy relies on fast-moving, highly maneuverable sensors mounted on trucks, other drones, and even manned and unmanned boats. Added to these mobile sensors are new detection technologies specific to drones, such as acoustic sensors that can be fixed in place.

Together, mobile and fixed sensors can detect drones that evade large and expensive radar systems, and the company is also working on systems aimed at intercepting drones at a lower cost than interceptions that cost millions of dollars.

Last September, DefSec Intel signed a deal with Origin Robotics from Latvia, which makes “tracker” drones that chase other drones, as well as truck-mounted electronic jamming guns that target drones.

Milrem Robotics, a robotic vehicle maker heavily involved in anti-drone defense efforts in Ukraine, has another contract with the Estonian government within the same group, to modify its tracked robotic vehicles for anti-drone defense roles. This could increase the number of mobile devices to detect drones at the border.

Russia responded to Ukraine’s success in tracking the “Witness” drones by launching more of them, using successive bombing tactics similar to those that prompted Israel’s development of the Iron Dome missile defense system. The system is designed to automatically detect and fire a large volley of short-range artillery rockets, a very different problem from tracking one or two long-range rockets via radar.

In the same vein, Frankenburg Technologies, the third company mentioned in the Estonian deal, developed a cheaper interception system, also based largely on the experience gained from helping Ukraine.

This small missile system, called the Mark 1, is similar in concept to the Stinger missile but is equipped with a seeker and intelligent software that responds specifically to the threat of drones. This allows a single operator to handle multiple drones simultaneously and more quickly than older systems, which require one operator for each drone.

Wall of drones

“This will become semi-automated. This is the way the wall should work. We cannot afford to have one drone operator in front of every drone that attacks us,” said Andreas Papert, the company’s engineering director, in an interview with reporters, adding: “A witness drone, for example, never comes alone.

We’re talking about six, eight, or twelve drones coming in at the same time. Do we need 12 operators on the ground for each one? Sorry, this is simply stupid.” But the real value of the Mark 1, as described by the company’s founder and former Estonian Defense Minister Kosti Salm, is that it is much cheaper than its competitors, at least according to the company’s estimates and speculation.

Salem said that Europe is “looking for a production capacity in the hundreds per day,” and is seeking to put the technology to defeat the new drones on Europe’s borders within weeks, not months.

While the “drones wall” concept belongs to the European Union, it overlaps in geography, technology and objectives with a separate NATO effort called “Eastern Shield”, an effort to increase the defense of the eastern region under NATO command and control.

NATO has a strong interest in ensuring that defenses purchased by EU or Member States are interoperable with NATO command and control structures and standards through the Supreme Allied Command Transformation (SACT).

Last September, NATO and the civilian leadership participated in a meeting with members of the European Union, according to a statement by a senior NATO official in an interview with the Defense One website, who said that the two parties are in close coordination with each other, and that NATO is providing the European Union with military requirements and anti-drones needs.

These requirements came largely from experiences in Ukraine. But in the coming weeks, NATO, through its Supreme Command Transformation (SACT), will conduct additional tests and experiments with new systems, ranging from electronic warfare to anti-drone, and much more.

“We have already given them a framework, and once we finish the trials, we will move things forward,” the NATO official said. The Supreme Allied Commander in Europe confirmed very rapid testing to provide relevant military details to the EU: “Weeks, not months, to have something tested and tested, and months, not years, to have something that can be deployed at an affordable price that people can start working with.”

For many technology companies in Estonia, the recent series of Russian drone incursions into Eastern Europe shows that Estonia and other Baltic countries cannot wait for new technology to arrive.

Tam said, “Next year Russia will be able to manufacture 75,000 Shahed aircraft, so it can hit more targets.” Therefore, the meeting of European Union members was held in Copenhagen amid tight security measures due to the increase in Russian incursions of drones and even military fighters.

Although the meeting did not result in specific new funding agreements, the Union committed to developing a roadmap to detail what part of this effort should be funded, and how.

Challenges and obstacles

But funding commitments lag behind the actual threat level, Tobias Ellwood, the former British Minister of State, said in an interview with Al Arabiya. This led to a “sense of panic” among NATO members, as he described it: “Suddenly we were no longer talking about Ukraine, but about Eastern Europe itself, where Russia is testing and attacking, or at least infiltrating, European airspace.”

Russian leaders may be eager to test Europe’s response to drone incursions in part because of what these responses reveal about European capabilities: “There is no basic capacity to deal with rudimentary drone attacks, and that’s something Ukraine bears all the time,” Elwood says.

A report issued Wednesday by British anti-drone technology company Alpine Shield helps illustrate the difficulty of this matter, stating: “To cover nearly 2,000 kilometers of border, more than 200 radar sites are needed.

These radars usually detect small aircraft with a low radar cross-section only within a range of 3-10 kilometers. Once an infiltrating object crosses the first radar line and penetrates beyond this range, it cannot be reliably tracked.

As a result, fighters must typically be sent to intercept it, track its path, and attempt to shoot it down, an approach that is expensive, difficult to scale, and unsuitable for large drone incursions.”

In June, the European Union approved loans worth €150 billion, allowing member states to provide grants to their defense companies to develop new anti-drone prototypes, and a separate EU program earmarked €800 billion for new European weapons before 2030. Finally, NATO members agreed in the same month to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035.

But 2035 is still about a decade away, and the Copenhagen talks showed disagreement among EU members over key aspects of the marching wall plan, such as the speed of its construction and how to manage it amid other European defense priorities, according to an EU official with direct knowledge of the discussions.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has said that an anti-drone network will not be operational within “the next three or four years”, while Latvian Prime Minister Ivica Selina said that taking three years is “not fast enough”.