How does one deploy one’s $700 million airborne radar plane to search around for drones that have been valued far below $10,000 each? That is the acrid economics and strategic mismatch facing the NATO as Russian unmanned raids grow sturdier by name on the eastern border. It is the latest expression of that dilemma that Turkish dispatching an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) plane to Lithuania from September 22–25 under the NATO Assurance Measures.
The scramble is the latest episode following a sequence of Russian fighter jets’ and drones’ airspace violations over Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Denmark over the past few weeks. They are not one-time incidents. In one of the most grave instances, 19 Russian Gerbera drones were followed by the radar monitors of NATO into the Polish airspace for nearly 7 hours, causing the scramble by the Dutch F-35s as well as the Polish F-16s. Four drones were shot down, but by the cost of AIM-9X and AIM-120C-7 missiles worth between $500,000 and $1 million apiece, highlighting the economics of asymmetry that is drone warfare.
AWACS aircraft, like the NATO’s E-3 Sentry and Turkey’s Boeing 737-based Peace Eagle, are particularly well-suited to picking up low-flying drones and evading planes that try to skim under ground-based radar. Flying at around 30,000 feet, their radar reach is hundreds of kilometers, so they provide early warning and combat management. As one defense article put it, the AWACS’ dome-like rotatable antenna gave birth to “the symbol of an eye in the sky that kept ceaseless vigil.” These aircraft combine surveillance capabilities with command-and-control missions so that they will be capable of controlling interceptors and cooperating with ground-based air defense armies virtually in-real time.
The timing is also well done. The Lithuanian parliament recently voted to fire on any unarmed drone entering its unarmed airspace. Poland’s government also this week have invoked the Article 4 consultations of the alliance, members’ tools to discuss when they believe their security is under threat or their borders breeched. Western diplomats interpret Moscow’s overflights as deliberate testing’s to see how prepared and unified the NATO is. The deploying unarmed Gerbera drones decoys based on the Iranian Shahed means Moscow is also capable of taking intelligence, testing the NATO defenses, without the escalation soon to come.
Technical challenge is daunting. Drones are hard to detect, harder still to prosecute safely over busy skies. Airports from Copenhagen to Aalborg have been closed by sightings of drones, highlighting the weakness of existing civilian detection gear. military-standard counter-drone defense capability radio-frequency detection, electro-optical track, jamming by electronic warfare means, intercepter drones is also being pulled into the NATO Eastern Sentry mission, but gaps in coverage still exist.
Turkey’s AWACS Contributions also demonstrate its wider approach of strategic balancing. Although Ankara has tourism and energy links with Moscow, Russia’s Ukraine invasion has been criticized by it, Ukraine has been provided by it with Bayraktar TB2 armed drones, defense cooperation been expedited including mutual manufacture of naval corvettes as well as potential Ukrainian engine construction investment, and this twin-track policy provides Turkey with leverage as both an alliance big gun — it deploys the alliance’s second-largest army — and as a regionary interlocutor towards Russia.
The AWACS mission off the coast off Lithuania is one piece of the Alliance’s strategy to layer defense: high-altitude airborne radar to increase detection range, ground-based interceptors such as Patriot and NASAMS for extended-range intercept, and short-range kinetic and electronic warfare nodes to counter massed swarms of drones. Operation Eastern Sentry, one senior NATO commander reported, is “deliver even more focused and flexible deterrence and defense where and when needed.” However, the recent transits have revealed the dilemma that arises out of trying to defend oneself with high-tech machinery from cheap, disposable drones.
For the moment, the Turkish AWACS over the Baltic republics is a visible demonstration of alliance unanimity. It also offers the live fire environment to practice the Alliance’s airborne early warning-counter-UAV capability, an ability that is sure to be game-changers if Russian probing sorties are replaced by even MORE aggressive violation of the skies.
