“The interception marking highlights the combat credibility of the F-35 as well as the desire of the country to actively participate in the collective defence of Europe.” The unfortunate engineering fact encapsulated in that line is that a drone under the size of a carriage now has to be flying under the canopy rail of an F-35A to where its small silhouette is now belched out in the air, which recurs earlier in the textbook scenario of a drone intercepting an expensive response when low-cost drones become the new order of the day and force expensive strategies to survive.
The marking of the Dutch jet came with the shooting of a drone on its mission as part of the NATO air-policing duties in Poland. Some of the breaching systems were later found by analysts to be Gerbera-type decoys, a division of expendable air vehicles that may not be armed but still disruptive in their operation. In practice, the involvement emphasized not so much the ability of a fifth-generation fighter to strike a small target and more the cost of continuing to do so.
The F-35A has been designed to combat in the airspace: sensor fusion, a contemporary electronic warfare system, and the capability to use its internal gun and air-to-air weapons. The result of those strengths is the detection and track quality with small and low signature objects, especially at night and in crowded air pictures. However, that technological superiority proves a strategic drawback when that target is meant to be discarded. This sortie generation, tanker support, maintenance burden and the opportunity cost of binding high-end planes to low-end intercepts is precisely the stress that decoys are intended to generate. That is, the airplane scores the intercept and the attacker solves the calculations.
The fact that math has been obvious whenever there are one-way drones and the use of decoys on a large scale. An empirical evaluation of long-range drone salvoes determined that Russia had deployed more than 14,700 one-way attack drones in the years under observation, showing how large-scale, comparatively cheap systems can ensure that air defenders are in a state of perpetual squandering, of ammunition, flight hours and concentration. Similar analysis noted a conservative estimate of $35,000 per Shahed, and the fact that cost-effectiveness was not coming as a result of making perfect decisions but making defenders make repeated decisions which are resource-demanding.
A brief lesson can be drawn out of the paint of the Dutch F-35: it is often the internal dynamics of the interceptors that counts.
In the case of NATO the sustainable need is architectural. Small objects should be detected and categorized sooner by the sensors; the tracks should be combined by the command-and-control system in time, not to be congested; and the defeat layer should be comparable to the target set at a reasonable cost. The situation is critical when the high-end interceptors are employed against low-end drones since industrial capacity is as important as the unit cost. The CSIS analysis observed that the U.S. production was climbing to 137 AIM-9X per month and 48 PAC-3 per month, but nevertheless reacted to the larger issue by suggesting the need to remain on the right side of the cost curve when the drones are cheaper to produce than the modern missiles.
This is what has made NATO training no longer exist as missile “find a better antimissile” but counter-UAS as a system. In 2025, the NATO Communications and Information Agency became part of Joint Power Optic Windmill (JPOW) 2025 that aims at integrating counter-drone sensors and effectors with national air-defense networks. The technical focus on interoperability, including distributed simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, and standardized tactical data sharing, is an indicator that counter-UAS is being considered an integrated problem of air-and-missile-defense instead of a low-priority capability.
The most practical lesson of the Dutch intercept is not that air policing by NATO was effective. That, it is possible to be a successful decoys without blowing anything up, merely by dragging better stuff into patterns that can be spotted, and that look expensive, to make defenders show response speed, burn readiness, and waste limited capacity in trade-off, in exchange of a low-priced airframe and a simple route plan.
