Swarm-capable drones have raised the bar for naval air defense to a new kind of endurance test: not so much whether a ship can hit a target, but whether it can keep doing it as threats stack up, overlap, and come from multiple directions. It is this kind of pressure that made a recent live-fire exercise by NATO off the coast of Wales more than just a routine weapons exercise.
During Exercise Sharpshooter, which is currently being conducted by the U.K. at the Ministry of Defence’s Aberporth range, the Royal Netherlands Navy air-defense frigate HNLMS Evertsen was subjected to a combination of real and simulated unmanned attacks modeled on coordinated attacks. According to QinetiQ, which runs the exercise on behalf of the British government under a contractual arrangement, the ship, which was placed 20 miles off the coast of Wales, was “repeatedly targeted by simulated drone attacks” over three days.
The public result was remarkably detailed for this type of training. The Dutch Navy credited Evertsen with the destruction of five aerial targets and the neutralization of twosurface targets. It was also the first time a non-British NATO warship had engaged in the combination of live targets and synthetic injects that Sharpshooter offers, which is important because swarms are as much a decision and sensor management problem as they are a gunnery problem. Synthetic targets can layer cruise missile and aircraft tracks without forcing a ship to exhaust real interceptors for every cue.
The live elements were selected to place a tracking burden on the crew similar to that imposed by small, agile systems. QinetiQ employed its Banshee Whirlwind aerial target and Hammerhead unmanned surface vessel. The Banshee Whirlwind is designed to simulate small, low-flying targets and can be set up to follow sea-skimming trajectories; Hammerhead extends the surface situation into the same timeline, requiring the ship to separate air and surface contacts while still adhering to engagement rules of the game. Even without revealing what Evertsen was shooting, the scenario illustrates the current reality: a defender’s magazine and focus are limited, while unmanned aggressors can be plentiful and disposable.
This mismatch is already leading to “use-what-you-have-differently” thinking. In a recent discussion on maritime drones and missiles, for example, Adm. Lisa Franchetti spoke of the use of what they have: “Using Hellfire against unmanned surface vehicles, air-to-air, aviation platform shooting down UAVs” as part of a larger effort to innovate before they are forced to do so.
Sharpshooter and other exercises like it are caught up in the middle of this transition. Evertsen’s class of students was built in a time of aircraft and high-quality missiles, but the constant drone threat pressure causes those same sensors and command structures to have to prioritize, deconflict, and re-engage at a rate of speed that feels much more like an industrial process than a single decisive intercept.
The next challenge is less about demonstrating the capability to strike drones and more about demonstrating the capability to do so in a sustainable manner. This is why the interest has extended to non-kinetic weapons that offer a “deeper magazine.” China, for instance, has touted its Hurricane 3000 as a high-power microwave weapon that has an effective intercept range of over 3km against small drones and swarms, which disables electronics rather than attacking one target at a time.
Whether at sea or on land, the appeal is simple: area effects, rapid engagement, and independence from finite stocks of interceptors. For the NATO navies, the Evertsen’s exercise at Aberporth shows what the reality of counter-drone readiness is: a layered defense exercise conducted in a swarm-like environment, with live targets to add realism and simulated saturation to test the human and software part of the kill chain. The engineering task is no longer solely the domain of the missile launcher but is increasingly a systems integration challenge in seconds, tracks, and options left.
