There have been seventeen NATO allies who have rotated Baltic Air Policing since 2004, and one thing has been notably missing namely; a dedicated, deployed counter-drone system flying with the fighters as part of the detachment.
This was altered when the 15 th wing of the Spanish Navy landed at the Šiauliai Air Base in northern Lithuania carrying the Crow counter-UAS system of indra and with its fighter package. In the case of a mission of rapid-response jet policing, operating over Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, the relocation is not so much a new device, but a change of structure to the new category of airspace threat that is not only small inexpensive aircraft but also hard to detect, easy to deploy, and disruptive relative to its cost.
Crow is tailored to this task that fighter patrols and legacy air-defense constructs are ill suited to perform well at scale: continuous detection and identification of small, slow targets at low altitude, and non-kinetic means of defeat. Its design incorporates a combination of radar, optical sensors, and electronic-warfare devices to identify, monitor, categorize, and subsequently deactivate the drones by disrupting their control channels instead of burning them with missiles that should be used to intercept high-speed jets. However, in Lithuania, the system is managed by a Spanish Air and Space Force tactical group consisting of nine personnel who have round-the-clock watch, which provides an always-on coverage that supplements the occasional intercept stance of the F-18s.
Integration is the larger picture. NATO Baltic Air Policing was originally a provisional measure of new members who lacked fighters, and was made permanent in 2012, with deployment bases being established at Šiauliai and the Latvian military base Lielvārde, as well as doing so at Aémari in Estonia. The identical logic of rotation is currently being projected on to the case of ground-based air defense by the Rotational Air Defense Model developed by the alliance, with a Dutch Patriot firing squadron coming to carry out exercises in Lithuania. Counter-UAS is aligned to that trend: it is as much of a site-defense and airspace-management challenge as it is a fighter tasking challenge.
The Drone disruptions in Europe that have happened in the recent past have highlighted a very painful fact: technology is present, but coverage, legal jurisdiction and data exchange are often missing. The lack of coordination has not been softened down by industry mouthpieces. Dedrone Ash Alexander-Cooper argued that even with C-UAS systems in place within individual countries, which were sufficient, there is no system currently present to share data in real-time across countries that can be digested easily, so as to assist with shared comprehension of the character and magnitude of the threat.
The deployment of Crow in Spain is another interoperability, rather than presence, proof. Indra has noted the showing of Crow in NATO Anti- Drone Interoperability Exercises with its command and control layer connecting 27 sensors and effectors with C-UAS AEDP-4869, which is an alliance standard to make mixed vendor counter-drone systems act as a coherent system. That would be important in the Baltics since the air picture is already by its nature multinational; counter-drone capabilities which could not connect with the allied command-and-control systems would become isolated islands about individual bases.
Lithuanian Defense Minister Robertas Kaunas contextualized the Spanish action in deterrent terms, but the engineering meaning, more precisely, of the move is that the low-end aerial threats are being made a constant, controlled variable, and not an exception. The network, sensors, data fusion and when, where, how rules becomes the center of gravity of the operations.
When Baltic Air Policing is an example of shared sovereignty in the air, the presence of a special-purpose counter-drone shield demonstrates what the next step would look like: fewer single-purpose systems, more stacked systems, aimed at persisting, interoperating, and responding without wasting limited high-end munitions.
