What is the best defense against drone swarms, and what are the risks of downing them?

We begin the day with what is quickly becoming Europe's drone defense dilemma. In the last month, multiple European NATO members have reported drone incursions into their airspace. So far, there are eight countries, and counting Denmark, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Germany. NATO is pointing the finger at the Kremlin. Russia is denying any responsibility. Last week, US President Trump said that he would support allies shooting down Russian aircraft if NATO airspace were to be violated. But when asked if the US would directly support its allies in that situation, the president said that it would, quote, depend on the circumstances. So what is an understandably trigger-shy Europe to do? The European Commission is pushing hard the idea of a drone wall, an aerial defense system that would intercept drones trying to penetrate Eastern European airspace. But today, Germany's defense minister gave a reality check on that idea. In the first place, I really appreciate very much the idea, the concept of a drone wall alongside the Eastern wall. But we should pay attention to the management of expectations. We are not talking about a concept which will be realized within the next three or four years even, even more, I think. So we have to think and act in priorities. And those are others, I think. We need more capabilities and more capacities than what we described before. That means drone defense, of course, but not by a drone wall. All right. I'm joined now by Stacey Pettyjohn. She's a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security. That's an independent think tank based in Washington, D.C. It's good to have you with us. Let me ask you about these drone incursions that everyone is talking about. Are you convinced that they are deliberate? You have to differentiate. There have been two different types of drone incursions. The one into Poland was clearly, you could attribute it to Russia. They were Russian military drones that entered into Polish airspace and that were either shot down or crashed. Then you can look at many of the other incursions where it's not clear what type of drone was being used. It likely was some sort of commercial fixed wing drone. That is much harder to attribute. There's uncertainty about whether it is Russia perpetrating all of these incursions or whether there are a mix of actors involved. It does seem likely that Russia is using at least the drone incursions into Poland as a probe and a way of potentially testing NATO, testing the alliance's resolve, seeing if they can bully the alliance into backing down and reducing its support for Ukraine. What do you make of what we heard from the German defense minister today that a drone wall for Eastern Europe is for the immediate future out of the question? I think the prime minister's right to put some realism in terms of expectations about what kind of defenses can be put in place in the near term. The idea of a drone wall, I think, is a bit of a misnomer. You really do want to have drone defenses, but you want them to be part of a larger integrated network of air defenses that can protect Eastern Europe and is something that NATO has been striving for for some time and hasn't made as much progress as it really should. The drone wall may be based on the idea that the Ukrainians have found using small drones to intercept and essentially ram into hostile drones as an effective defense. And I don't think that's necessarily the best technology here for NATO. Instead, the alliance needs to look at what assets it already has, what it needs in terms of different types of sensors, and then different types of effectors that can put in place. And some of them are going to need to be mobile so they can move around, because you're never going to be able to create an impenetrable wall. So that's just a bad name to begin with. And it harkens back to ideas about the Maginot Line or different types of defensive walls. You're going to have to pick and choose your prioritized locations to defend and then have certain capabilities like NATO's fighter aircraft that can swing in and sometimes help supplement areas that don't have ground-based defenses. Just how challenging is it to bring down a drone or a swarm of drones? Because I think a lot of people, particularly amateur people out there looking at this story, would think that it would be much easier to bring down drones than it would be to bring down a missile, for example. In some ways it is, and in other ways it is not. And this is part of the dilemma. Drones are slow and they fly low, and that makes it hard to detect them. So it's the early stages of the defense intercept that are really challenging. Finding the drone, making sure that it actually is a drone, that it's a hostile drone, not a commercial aircraft or perhaps a personal jet that's flying in the sky. And because drones are hard to detect and not normally seen until they're close to the target, it leaves very little time to actually intercept them, shoot them out of the sky, jam them, or otherwise just sort of take a defensive position. So drones are difficult because they're not stealthy per se, but our defenses are not optimized for seeing them. They're much more attuned to fast-flying jets or missiles, as you mentioned. And therefore the air defenses that we have can be exploited right now by these low, small drones. The other challenge with drones is just the number of them that you face. Because the types of drones that we're seeing are relatively cheap, even the military ones, it is a cost-imposition strategy on NATO and on Western countries to have to shoot these down with very expensive surface-to-air missiles like the IRIS-T system or the NASAM system, or heaven forbid, something like a Patriot, where you're expending a much more expensive and sophisticated missile to shoot down what amounts to a very cheap drone, in some cases made of plywood and styrofoam. What about shooting it down on the cheap? Are laser weapons, are they the answer? I don't think so. Laser weapons might be part of the solution, but they're very expensive to develop and there's been uneven progress in this area. The U.S. military has had trouble developing laser weapons. Only the U.S. Navy has deployed them. I think the German Navy is looking into this too. And naval ships in some ways are ideal platforms for high-energy weapons like a laser because they are big mobile power plants. But many other places don't have those sort of resources. So lasers could be useful as a part of fixed defenses of either critical infrastructure or bases. But there are also concerns about collateral damage in terms of the laser damaging aircraft in the sky, potentially even satellites. So I think that the near-term solution in terms of ground-based defenses is a much more gun-based one where you look at what Ukraine has done with the Gephardt anti-aircraft guns that they've been given by Germany and then just the mobile gun trucks that they have kind of patched together to take out the drones. Those have been really, really effective and are a cost-effective solution to this problem. So bullets maybe instead of lasers. What happens though if you have a swarm of drones coming in and you want to take them all down, the risk of those drones crashing down onto homes, people, that risk is enormous, isn't it? It is. It absolutely is. And swarms are where it gets really difficult and not even just a true autonomous swarm that's fully collaborating, but just a whole bunch. Think of how many drones Russia has been firing into Ukraine. That's going to overwhelm most kinetic defensive systems, whether they're lasers, guns or missiles, because each of those systems has to identify and then target each drone individually, shoot it. In the case of the laser, maintain its beam on the drone until it's destroyed, then move and find the next drone. And when we get to these very large attacks, the only system that can take down a bunch of drones at the same time is a high-powered microwave, which is a different form of energy weapon that puts out a burst of electromagnetic energy and fries the electronics of the drones. But it's very short range. There's potentially collateral damage there. A lot of the defensive systems that have worked well in Ukraine or have worked well for US forces in the Middle East are not ones you want to be using in populated areas, because you're right, the bullets or the missiles, there's shrapnel that's going to come down as well as the drone. You're looking for low collateral options, which really limits what you can do. And many of these drones are not susceptible to jamming, which is another counter for some of the cheaper off-the-shelf systems. And this electromagnetic weapon that you're talking about, wouldn't that also pose a risk to the electric grid, the infrastructure on the ground? Not the electric grid, but any electronics in its vicinity could potentially be damaged. So there are systems that are being developed by the US military that are working to limit and direct the effect of this. But like all of these systems, there are potential collateral effects. And ultimately, it's going to be incumbent upon politicians to decide under what conditions they're going to authorize their forces to take the risk and use different types of defenses. Yeah, drones may seem simple, but defending ourselves from them, it's not as simple as maybe we thought even going back two or three years ago, is it? It is absolutely not. And it's only going to get harder. One of the challenges with drones is they've proliferated. This is really based on commercial technology. So you can go for the DGI quadcopter that anybody can buy online and use, and that can be weaponized. But even the drones that Russia is building, the Shahids, or that Iran has used, or the Houthis, are comprised of commercial subcomponents, commercial cameras, commercial antennas. And that's what makes them so cheap. And the proliferation of these systems is really what is so challenging, because you can't spend all of your time just defending. It really does become a course of strategy that can wear you down over time. You have to figure out a cost-effective way to protect your forces and your people, but at the same time, not focus only on protection, because the military always has other missions that it needs to undertake as well. Stacey Pettyjohn from the Center for a New American Security. Stacey, we appreciate your time and your insights tonight. Thank you. Drones have transformed warfare in Ukraine and in other conflicts around the world. Militaries are scrambling to find a way to combat drone swarms, and many have set their sights on laser weapons as a potential answer. Ukraine's capital under drone bombardment. Israel under missile and drone attack from Iran. Even Poland, a NATO member country, has seen multiple Russian drones violate its airspace. Cheap and plentiful drones are increasingly hard to combat. Traditional air defense systems like the US-made Patriot were engineered to take down big threats like cruise missiles. They're expensive and hard to replace. Ukraine has scrambled F-16 fighters to chase down attack drones, and even put old propeller planes into use. The drones often fly in swarms that include even cheaper unarmed decoy drones that must also be shot down. For years, militaries have experimented with laser systems to knock down airborne threats. Now Israel says it has successfully tested a high-powered laser that can target drones and destroy them with high-energy bursts. It says its so-called iron beam lasers will go into use later this year, against drones, as well as rockets, mortars, and aircraft. Laser systems have many advantages over conventional air defense setups. Intercepting a drone with lasers can cost between $1 and $5, while rocket interceptors start at $50,000 each. The systems are much cheaper than a Patriot battery, which can cost a billion dollars and takes years to produce. The disadvantages of lasers include poor performance in rainy or stormy weather, and limited range compared to conventional systems. It's not just Israel. An Australian company says it has sold a system to an unnamed NATO member country. Meanwhile, the European Union's Defense Agency and Ukraine have also been developing laser weapons. And China displayed its LY-1 laser system at its 2025 military parade. The system is already in use by its navy. So far, all these laser systems are for defensive use. As the drone arms race ramps up the need for protection against assaults from the air. And I'm joined now by Larry Freese. He is an aerospace engineer with Aerial Information Systems, which specializes in drone engineering services and consulting. He joins me from Pensacola, Florida. Mr. Freese, it's good to have you with us. I want to start with the basics here. Can you give us an idea of how laser weapons actually work? Is it as simple as pointing the laser? Yeah, so a laser weapon that we're using for air defense systems is, if you can think of it, it's a lot like, you know, your common red or green laser pointer you might use in the office. It's just scaled up quite a bit. There, it's a significantly higher power level. It's at a different wavelength that we can't see typically with eyes. And the apertures are what basically the size of the pen's a lot bigger. You can see from your earlier shots in your video that we're typically talking about lasers, you know, device sizes of upwards of 25 centimeters, half a meter in size. And what about existing laser-based systems? Can you give us a sense of what they look like in practice? Yeah, as I said, most people are probably used to red and green lasers. In military practice, those beams are moved to the infrared part of the spectrum. And so you're not going to be able to see it with your eyes. And it's primarily moved there for that reason, so it won't damage people's eyes. So these systems will typically, if they're road mobile, they will be hooked up to battery systems, which will enable them to shoot maybe upwards of 200 or 300 shots. If the system is hooked up to the electrical grid, it can shoot almost an endless amount of shots. You know, a lot of people around the world are asking now, what makes drones well-suited to defending against, or lasers, rather, to defending against drones? Is it, you know, when compared with missiles or guns, is it the speed? Is it the cost, the precision? I mean, what would you say are the biggest advantages? The biggest advantage is what we refer to as the deep magazine. And that is the number of shots that we can put on targets. The, as I said, you know, 200 on maybe a field mobile system, if you're protecting a high-value asset such as a nuclear power plant, then you're looking at almost endless depth. Compare that to a gun or missiles, eventually you're going to run out of projectiles or missiles. The other thing is the speed of engagement. It is difficult to beat the speed of light. You know, looking as an engagement time for a laser versus a drone is on the, you know, on the series of maybe a few seconds. Now, we have, with lasers, we have to dwell on the target, because you have to think about where, instead of, it's not like a movie where we're shooting and blowing up the target. What we're doing, it's more like a hot knife through butter. So we have to dwell on the target a little bit. But still, even after that dwelling, the engagement time is so fast, it's possible to prosecute, you know, 20 targets a minute with lasers. Wow. Yeah. Trying to beat the speed of light. Amazing. Aerospace engineer Larry Friese. Mr. Friese, we appreciate your time tonight. Thank you.