The nature of warfare is changing faster than defence structures can adapt to meet it, as the news from a recent NATO exercise in Estonia has shown.
During the large-scale Hedgehog war game last year, a team of just 10 Ukrainian drone operators simulated the destruction of two NATO battalions in a single day. Using real-time data fusion and rapid strike coordination through Ukraine’s Delta battlefield management system, they identified and “neutralised” armoured vehicles and formations within hours.
In Ukraine, drone-saturated warfare has compressed the kill chain from hours to minutes. Persistent aerial surveillance makes concealment increasingly difficult. Detection, classification and strike coordination are integrated in real time. Small, agile teams equipped with the right systems can outmanoeuvre and overwhelm much larger conventional forces.
The exercise exposed a structural gap between Europe’s defence architecture and the demands of modern warfare. Across much of NATO and the EU, doctrine, procurement cycles and force design still reflect a slower, ground-first model. Information flows remain fragmented, responsibilities are divided across services and jurisdictions, and systems are layered rather than fully integrated. NATO has studied Ukraine’s battlefield experience closely and European policymakers debate autonomy, resilience and sovereignty with urgency – like we saw at the annual Munich Security Conference recently. But until those debates translate into structural change, these seams will continue to represent vulnerabilities.
Modern threats move differently. Cheap, autonomous systems are easy to build, hard to attribute and capable of crossing borders and domains with ease. They are moving beyond targeting military formations to affect infrastructure, logistics hubs and civilian airspace. They punish slow decision-making and reward persistent awareness.
Countering this environment demands acquiring substantial end capability: continuous detection and tracking, fast data fusion and the ability to act proportionately at the speed of the threat. Rather than reacting to incidents, true resilience can only be built by designing systems that assume constant pressure and operate across shared airspace by default.
The lesson from Estonia must be urgency.
Experience matters. Ukrainian operators now possess years of hard-earned expertise in autonomous, networked warfare. Europe must translate those lessons into deployable, scalable capability. It can not simply lead to more discussions or incremental upgrades to legacy systems.
In this new landscape, speed, integration and autonomy are what truly provide the advantage.
Europe has the technology, talent and industrial base to adapt, but now it must convert this awareness into operational capability before the next wake-up call is no longer a simulation.
