NATO's Drone Summer of Hell.

Every so often, there comes a stretch of summertime that's just special. The summer of love certainly comes to mind, the summer of rage, you get the idea. And for the NATO alliance, it now looks like 2026 is going to be a summer to always remember, but for all of the wrong reasons.

Across Europe, NATO spent much of the last three to four months intercepting a steady flow of Russian drones, which have been not just increasingly frequent, but also increasingly bold in where they go, including to military facilities.

There are never enough of them at once, with enough of an explosive payload for the famously risk-averse alliance to admit to what they really are, but that's the point. of this looks like the kind of all-out assault that Ukraine is facing. There's been some damage throughout the continent, but the goal here is, very specifically, not to wreak havoc.

Instead, NATO's hot drone summer seems designed to test how capable the alliance is at defending itself from the drone's presence, and NATO's results are not looking great.

The first few years of the Ukraine war have demonstrated an obvious danger to continental Europe, but until the last few months, NATO member states were still largely able to treat the whole thing as something happening on the other side of the border, almost as if it was somebody else's problem. war was still a massive wake-up call to the continent, that

The EU needed to get its act together on defense, but there was still a way for NATO to invert the logic and convince itself that everything would turn out okay.

After all, if Europe could get stronger, then Russia might be put off from escalating beyond Ukraine.

And honestly, I mean, yeah, those were the days, weren't they? the following months, it became increasingly obvious that NATO's deterrence logic might not be all that it was cracked up to be.

That was especially true for poor Romania, which hit a very unfortunate geographic lottery because it sits directly across the Danube River from parts of Ukraine that Russia's targeted relentlessly. you might expect, there was some spillover, although it's up to you and it's up to alliance members to try and figure out how much of that spillover has truly

Been accidental.

That became a really important question to ask exactly a year ago today, when Poles woke up to discover that roughly 20 Russian drones had crossed into their airspace.

Several were shot down, while others managed to escape. That was a really big deal at the time, and also a thirst for NATO. Never before during the Ukraine war had an alliance member actually opened fire on something violating its airspace.

Warsaw responded by invoking Article 4, forcing formal consultations with the rest of NATO on the matter, just one step shy of the famous collective defense clause in Article 5. year on, though, it's clear how much has changed for the NATO alliance, and we don't mean change for the better.

This summer seems to have been a clear turning point, where these low-grade Russian airspace violations stopped feeling like an occasional breach and became almost expected across NATO's eastern flank.

Things started to really heat up earlier in May, or when Romanian F-16s shot down a Russian Shahhead-style drone after it crossed into the country. the first of three separate shoot downs in just a few days from there it was all downhill almost every week brought another report of a drone crossing into allied airspace or turning up where it was very clearly

Not supposed to be and unlike the first few years this wasn't just romania experiencing the bitter side effects of living next door to a war this summer saw similar instances across the baltics more in poland and even germany being dragged into the fray this summer was also a shift in terms of the geography of the attacks while they had previously been

Almost exclusively limited to nato's eastern flank they were now showing signs of spreading westward there had of course been occasional suspected russian hybrid attacks across europe before this but over the past year and particularly over the summer the hybrid attacks hit a new level drones or other unidentified aircraft disrupted airports in both germany

And lithuania appeared over military bases and related facilities in belgium and the netherlands even reached some of europe's most critical strategic cities including klein brogel where american nuclear weapons are believed to be stored in non-nato european countries drones even came close to hitting planes that carried ukrainian president vladimir zelensky

First in ireland and then just hours ago at the time of writing in moldova by the time september rolled around the wall street journal had counted 16 separate nato countries that had suffered drone incursions over the previous two years with the vast majority taking place more recently for the most part the damage was quite limited the point seems to have

Been less focused on destroying something and more on testing how quickly and effectively the alliance could identify and stop the drone overflights regardless though when this is stretching from the black sea all the way to the north sea and atlantic coast the idea of quote spillover from ukraine doesn't really do the job anymore perhaps most alarming about

This whole thing has been the case of germany which seems to have been on the receiving end of one of the more aggressive attacks by russia at leipzig airport which is one of the continent's largest cargo hubs and a vital node in the operations that send military supplies to ukraine a drone carrying explosives seems to have been deliberately flown into the

Wing of a ukrainian an-124 aircraft these are massive cargo jets second only to ukraine's now destroyed and 225 ripped to the goat and they're an iconic ukrainian symbol as well as strategic asset for kiev thankfully the explosive charge failed to detonate probably thanks to the dubious miracles of russian engineering but another drone collided with a

Separate aircraft at leipzig later that night investigators subsequently found at least one additional drone with explosives on board in the general vicinity berlin ultimately concluded that the operation had been prepared in russia over a period of months and was deliberately targeting germany as punishment for its support of kiev now despite the

Overwhelming majority of these drones having indeed been confirmed or at least credibly suspected as having come from russia we do want to address an important caveat here some of them do genuinely appear to be spillover from the war itself from both sides of the fight and yes that does include confirmed cases ukrainian drones that got knocked off course

Particularly when they flew north over nato territory from ukraine to hit russian oil export terminals in the baltic sea that's an important caveat to emphasize because moscow aligned outlets will present those cases as proof positive that even the most egregious russian drones ones that were decidedly not spillover from the war either didn't exist or a

False flag operation from kiev or some variation on those ideas and quite frankly that's just pure fantasy from moscow and the kremlin's hope is that enough people will buy the fantasy that nato will be too slow in acknowledging its new reality the alliance is now emerging from this past summer into a different world than at the outset one where these

Incidents have become dramatically more frequent spread far wider than previously seen and increasingly targeted military facilities once a threat like that becomes routine there's a much harder question to answer what's nato supposed to do about it rules of engagement if you dear viewer heard that last question and thought to yourself that the answer was

Obvious i mean if nato is threatened by drones then shoot them down then yeah point well taken and indeed we've seen several nato countries do exactly this especially poland which seems to have made shooting down russian drones into something of a national sport in warsaw prime minister donald task has made clear that any object violating polish airspace

Will be shot down without waiting around to hold a political convention on the matter the problem with this is that actually putting that rule into practice which is something that we and other analysts would like to see more of across the continent is a bit more complicated than you might assume when a russian geran drone crossed into romania back in may

For example romanian f-16s were already airborne and were cleared to engage their new target but they held their fire because the drone was flying over a populated area out of an abundance of caution to prevent the thing from raining down on civilians below they never engaged the lesson learned in this case was that caution itself can be problematic the

Drone ultimately crashed into an apartment building and injured a woman and a child but if romania had chosen to shoot down the same drone earlier then it would have risked replacing the injuries to that woman and child with injuries to other civilians perhaps it would have been another woman or child or perhaps an apartment block or a hospital or a

Sleepaway camp falling drone debris is notoriously unpredictable and there's just no way to be sure that it won't harm civilians who are in range other countries have had more haphazard responses which is where the real problems have started to arise back in may three drones entered latvia from russia with two of them crashing inside the country and the

Third crossing and exiting latvian airspace nato fighters did scramble but ultimately didn't engage because they required both visual identification of the target and confidence that civilians wouldn't be endangered it's not very easy in an emergency situation to tell the difference between say a small civilian pleasure craft and a drone flying at a similar

Altitude and airspeed lithuania ran into a similar problem where a suspected drone entered lithuania from the direction of belarus and other ultimately crashed into a lake without being intercepted. be clear, there have also been successful shootdowns in all of those countries, scenarios where everything went just right on NATO's side. the overarching

Problem here is that there just isn't one coherent response to how NATO handles these things, either in the promptness of the alliance's response or in its willingness to destroy a suspected threat.

NATO does have a well-established chain of command, and the alliance has coordinated air defense across borders for decades. in that regard, responding to whatever Russia sends NATO's way isn't exactly a new challenge to address.

Where things get messier is when it comes to actually engaging the threat, not just from within NATO's borders, on the soil of a specific NATO member state.

Different countries maintain different rules, restrictions, different national exemptions on when weapons can be used and when they can't. might have been manageable when these incidents didn't happen very frequently. no longer makes much sense to expect airspace violations to be infrequent after the summer Europe just had.

And one of the more unfortunate outcomes of NATO's summer of hell is that Russia has now had ample opportunity to test NATO's eastern border and figure out just how each member state would respond. military officials have openly warned that this appears to be one of Moscow's objectives, with Russia using these incursions to probe reaction times, acceptance,

The specific military assets NATO has at its disposal in certain areas.

In other words, even when a drone seemingly accomplishes nothing, let's say transiting through NATO airspace briefly, just to return to Russia or crash into a lake, still handed Moscow some useful information. has started trying to close some of those gaps, and the most substantial change that we've seen came back in July. the Ankara summit, the alliance

Upgraded its Baltic air policing operation into an actual air defense mission, giving pilots more authority to engage through NATO's military chain of command, rather than having them wait for approval from whichever capital governs their airspace.

Estonia's then-defense minister, Hanno Pevko, weighed in that the combined air operations center would now have the ability to authorize engagements in most cases, unless a country has specifically imposed their own restrictions. genuinely a big step forward for the alliance, and it's worth treating it as such. with all that progress, though, NATO is still

Dealing with a threat that has evolved faster than either NATO's rules or its capabilities can match. alliance is genuinely getting better at deciding who can shoot at what and when, across thousands of kilometers of borderlands, there's a lot more to work out than just the chain of command. after the summer that Europe just had, has become a much more

Immediate problem. catch-up. ultimately draws the line on its chain of command dilemma, there's another problem that urgently needs resolution.

Europe still needs better solution than just chasing these drones around with fighter jets. the largest challenges that the alliance is currently grappling with is the sheer scale of the border territory through which Russia can actually send their drones.

Norway, Finland, the Baltic States, and Poland collectively share more than 3600 kilometers of border with russia and belarus not to mention the ukrainian territory that the drones can overfly that would be difficult enough on its own but a considerable portion of nato's border runs through forests and sparsely populated areas where infrastructure to monitor

Tiny drones is currently lacking and that's a problem that nato's so-called drone wall proposal is trying to address the basic idea here is that the border is simply too big to truly seal against drones in any conventional way so nato defenses will naturally have to work together across many nations in the system nato is building a drone that flies into nato

Territory somewhere in finland or the baltics might be picked up by one sensor network tracked as it moves and then handed off to a different system further along the flight path before the drone is eventually jammed or shot down we do have some encouraging news on nato's drone wall bringing it out of the category of fancy future thing european officials

Keep talking about while the continent-wide system is slated to come online over the next few years some of the countries that would host the system have already started building their parts of the puzzle latvia has installed acoustic drone detectors along the entirety of its eastern border and deployed additional air defense units there romania brought a

New system online in june with the purpose of making sure that whatever crosses into its airspace is quickly identified and as needed intercepted and on that front nato has had assistance from precisely the country you'd expect ukraine which has already built system that's more or less an equivalent to the nato drone wall kiev's version features thousands of

Relatively cheap sensors positioned across the country's eastern flank with the job of listening for the distinctive buzz that incoming drones make from there they feed that information into a wider tracking network which notifies the powers that be that they've got targets incoming the system's not immune to problems and russia has been constantly modifying

And swapping out its attack drones to get around ukraine's sensors but by this spring ukraine was managing to intercept some 90 of its targets using the integrated drone wall system the trouble with building a nato version of course is that moscow hasn't been blind what the rest of europe's been up to and if we're being honest the russians haven't had to

Work too hard to keep pace given the slow speed of nato's rollout ukrainian intelligence estimates that russia is now producing thousands of newer jet-powered geron drones every month significant step above its prior models which were already bad enough jet-powered drones blur the line between a drone and a traditional cruise missile they are way faster than

Propeller driven alternatives and as a result way harder to shoot down but they're way cheaper and easier to produce than standard cruise missiles that's a concern but it's compounded by the uncertainty of just what role the united states wants to play here the trump administration has been very outspoken that it wants europe to rely less and less on

Washington a message that has at this point been heard oh so loud and clear but what's less certain is the back and forth on the us's own participation in the alliance even as it does sprint to catch up back in may the U.S. announced that it would be withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany, just a portion of the 35,000-plus stationed there, but hardly a

Reassuring message to send, given the administration's frequent threats to withdraw even more.

Poland, too, seemed as though it was going to be on the chopping block for further U.S. pullouts, though later reporting shows that, after hearing of the plans when they leaked, President Trump phoned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and told him to keep U.S. troops stationed there.

And while Warsaw ultimately ended up receiving an influx of American troops, it came only after the message was sent to the world that the administration is very divided on the matter.

That sort of uncertainty helps to underscore the urgency with which Europe needs to continue its rearmament program, but it's also a problem that Europe just can't treat as a surprise any longer. American presidents have been telling Europe to carry more of its own defense burden on a bipartisan basis, dating back to the Kennedy administration.

And for most of that time, they've received responses that found various ways to politely say, "No, thank you." The Pentagon and U.S. defense majors have really enjoyed having Europe dependent on the American arms market.

But it's only now, with the president openly questioning how much protection Washington should continue providing, that Europe has finally begun moving. And despite this genuine progress, the White House seems less inclined than ever to actually work with Europe and shore up collective security.

In particular, the fact that Poland was under consideration for cuts is pretty incomprehensible. Poland has done more than just about any country in NATO to both and maintain its defensive capabilities. And we're rolling into the autumn now, and NATO's summer of hell is definitively behind us.

But Europe is now barreling headfirst toward a period of accelerating Russian aggression. The alliance's broader defenses are half-built at best, and their American security guarantee is looking shakier than ever at exactly the moment that Moscow has decided it's the perfect time to start testing both. Thank you for watching.