“Because, maybe, the fighters are not the best option.” That blunt assessment from a Spanish air force officer captures the uncomfortable lesson behind a Dutch F-35’s drone intercept marking far better than the silhouette itself. On paper, a fifth-generation fighter intercepting a small intruder looks like readiness in action. In practice, it highlights a harder engineering problem: NATO’s most advanced aircraft are increasingly being pulled into missions built around cheap, expendable drones and decoys. The issue is not whether an F-35 can find and destroy a low-end aerial target. It can. The issue is what happens to budgets, inventories, and response capacity when high-end airpower is used to solve a low-cost harassment problem over and over again.
That cost mismatch has become central to alliance planning on the eastern flank. NATO air policing units are no longer preparing only for fast jets crossing borders at altitude. They are adapting to drones that fly low, slow, and irregularly, forcing defenders to classify tracks quickly and decide whether a suspicious contact deserves a fighter sortie, a jammer, a gun system, or something cheaper. At Lithuania’s Šiauliai Air Base, a Spanish fighter wing arrived with the Crow counter-drone system, a notable sign that air policing is becoming a layered base-defense mission as much as a classic interceptor mission. The unit’s commander said crews were developing “new procedures new tactics,” while another officer acknowledged the deeper point: fighters may not be the right tool for many drone engagements.
The economics explain why. Research on Russia’s long-range drone campaign in Ukraine shows how cheap one-way systems can distort the entire defense equation. CSIS assessed many Shahed-type drones at around $35,000 per drone, while noting that defenders can be pushed into using interceptors costing far more. The same study pointed to a Patriot interceptor over $3 million and an AIM-9X-based NASAMS round just above $1 million. Even when drones are intercepted at high rates, they still succeed strategically if they consume expensive missiles, expose radar coverage, force alert launches, and reveal how quickly a defender reacts. Decoys make that logic even harsher, because an unarmed target can still be useful if it drains the other side’s magazine depth.
That is why the Dutch F-35 episode matters beyond one intercept. A decoy drone is not just a flying nuisance; it is a probe into the architecture of air defense. It tests whether the defender has enough passive sensing, enough short-range guns, enough electronic attack options, and enough low-cost interceptors to avoid spending premium combat power on disposable threats. Recent NATO experimentation points in that direction. During the Netherlands-based Bold Machina exercise, a rapidly assembled maritime counter-drone prototype fused acoustic, EO/IR, RF, and radar sensors into a passive detection system designed to track small drones without giving away its own position. That kind of sensor fusion is less glamorous than a fighter scramble, but it fits the actual problem better.
The broader trend is now unmistakable. Militaries that once treated drones as a niche threat are redesigning force structure around the cost curve itself. The United States has also been pushed toward low-cost mass, including efforts tied to small, cheap attack drone competition and wider industrial plans for large-volume production. NATO is moving in the same direction for defense: detect earlier, classify faster, and reserve fighters for the threats only fighters need to handle. The drone silhouette on a Dutch F-35 may look like a clean success. In engineering terms, it reads more like a warning label.
