Constanta, (Romania): After months of delays, NATO has adopted its first counter-drone doctrine, testing its tenets in an exercise along the Black Sea shore that was marred by real-life interference wafting across the water.
The focus of the Ramstein Legacy drill, held June 3-14, was on developing the alliance’s integrated air and missile defence with an additional eye on combating Class 1 unmanned aerial system threats — a reference to small, mini and micro drones.
Participating units hailed from Romania, Germany, Portugal, Hungary, France, Turkey and Poland, supported by British and Finnish fighter jets. In addition, three companies were invited to introduce some of their counter-drone equipment, including the US-based firm Echodyne, the French CS Group, and German electronics specialist Rohde & Schwarz.
“Class 1 UAS have become one of the most important threats we observe at the moment in military conflicts. Where for many years having air superiority was one of the pillars of the NATO doctrine, we have seen recently that’s no longer the case,” said Cristian Coman, chief scientist at the joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance centre at NATO’s Communications and Information Agency (NCIA).
On the first day of the training, participants were asked to get familiar with the capabilities of the systems at the exercise, including electronic warfare equipment, radars, and command-and-control systems.
The following days were focused on practical exercises and hands-on training, with each scenario increasing in difficulty. Part of the personnel involved in this segment were officers from the Italian C-UAS Centre of Excellence, who performed the job of the enemy.
“We are here acting in the role of the red team in this exercise, where we are the threat the trainees need to identify and counteract. We are flying the drones, which are common civilian ones,” Italian Navy Lt Cmdr Federico Fugazzotto told reporters.
Some of the models displayed included the American-made Parrot Disco first-person-view drone as well as two Chinese-made DJI types. Exercise participants were instructed to use their detection equipment for picking up the drones’ electronic signatures.
According to Fugazzotto, increasingly complex scenarios entailed flights of varying lengths, hiding the drones’ points of departure on the ground, and attacking with multiple systems at once.
As the training unfolded, experts with NCIA confirmed that GPS spoofing was detected and affected some of the drones, though officials did not name the source. The interference method feeds false coordinates to drone navigation systems in an effort to crash or disorient them.
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