COLUMN-2025 events drive global race for aerodrome defence

In Ukraine, military innovators and small firms – including some Western companies like MyDefence – have used artificial intelligence, cameras and microphones as well as electronic sensors to build a relatively cheap and effective surveillance network when it comes to tracking and killing drones. But that war – along with events in Israel – has also shown enormous capacity gaps when it comes to wider air defence, including anti-aircraft rockets to shoot down incoming missiles.

As unidentified drones brought chaos to multiple European airports last month, former Danish Air Force officer Dan Hermansen was not surprised to find his company MyDefence suddenly besieged with orders. Despite several years of drone warfare in Ukraine, as well as in locations as diverse as the Red Sea, Sudan and Myanmar and a host of incidents in the U.S. and Europe, Hermansen believes as much as 99 percent of European critical infrastructure has no system at all to detect and defend against the rising threat.

It is a hole governments want fixing fast. In Ukraine, military innovators and small firms – including some Western companies like MyDefence – have used artificial intelligence, cameras and microphones as well as electronic sensors to build a relatively cheap and effective surveillance network when it comes to tracking and killing drones.

But that war – along with events in Israel – has also shown enormous capacity gaps when it comes to wider air defence, including anti-aircraft rockets to shoot down incoming missiles. In the run-up to this summer's NATO summit, alliance Secretary General Mark Rutte said he believed member nations needed at least a 400 percent increase in spending on air defences to be credible – although to deliver truly effective protection, even that might be an underestimate.

"We've seen a tectonic shift over the past few weeks," MyDefence founder and chief executive Hermansen said in an interview last week. "There is no single silver bullet when it comes to solving this problem. It is about the right balance of technologies and data." What is at least equally important, however, is delivering that protection at a cheaper price point, as well as getting fast to mass production for new systems.

Existing systems like the U.S. Patriot are colossally expensive at around $4 million for a single rocket, creating a market opportunity for a host of new companies which their venture capital funders are now racing to capitalise on. It is a dynamic that both the Pentagon and multiple other governments are looking to speed up further.

'T-DOME', 'IRON DOME', 'GOLDEN DOME' Taiwan this month announced it would build what it called a "T-dome" air defence network along the lines of Israel's "Iron Dome", which has also inspired a much larger U.S. defence shield known as "Golden Dome" being pushed hard by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration.

Between them, those developments have all but overwhelmed the ability of existing major defence systems. U.S. firm Raytheon, which makes the Patriot, has already struck deals with Mitsubishi in Japan and European missile maker MBDA to produce the missiles in Europe and Asia.

MBDA – a conglomerate that melds the missile expertise of Airbus, BAE Systems and Italian defence giant Leonardo – is also one of a host of firms working on much smaller interceptors to bring down targets such as drones. Some of these interceptors – such as those from Stockholm-based Nordic Air Defence – are deliberately small and relatively cheap, some without explosive warheads to limit damage in facilities such as airports.

German armaments firm Rheinmetall has also touted its new SkyRanger cannon as a battlefield answer to small drone attacks – but, again, using it in populated areas might be judged too risky. PENTAGON PUSHES DEFENCE INDUSTRY REVOLUTION

There are growing signs the Trump administration's Pentagon views the Ukraine war and recent drone and missile exchanges in the Middle East as breaking the defence economic model. That has particularly included both drone and counter-drone systems, spurred in part by a 2024 drone attack on a U.S. military base in Jordan that killed three U.S. personnel and injured almost 50.

At the Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington this week, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll gave a speech that was described as "going scorched earth" on traditional U.S. defence procurement practices, pledging to dramatically speed things up and get better value. "We are going to completely disrupt the system that has held back the army for decades and lined the prime (major defence firm) pockets for so long," Driscoll pledged. "We will break down barriers until you measure acquisitions not in years and billions, but months and thousands."

Driscoll's campaign to upend the Pentagon's traditional reliance on major companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon goes beyond just air defence and drones. Namely, he has talked of dramatically revamping U.S. military repairs so they can be conducted more cheaply with 3D printing at the front line rather than be shipped back to their contractors at significant expense.

Even that decision, however, is driven in part by the rising drone and missile threat. In any major conflict – particularly in the Pacific – U.S. commanders believe that Chinese drones and missiles would make logistics resupply extremely challenging, forcing forward military units to rely on their own repairs.

Without reliable air and drone defence, those forward units would likely find themselves obliterated. By the time Iran fired more than a dozen missiles at a U.S. air base in Qatar in June in response to the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear plants, the U.S. had withdrawn almost all its troops and aircraft to safer locations out of range.

According to commanders, the U.S. and Qatari military Patriot detachments at the base then fired the largest salvo of those missiles ever launched – the exact number remains classified, but may be as high as several dozen. Neither that evacuation nor volume of expensive and scarce anti-aircraft missile launches would be viable in a major conflict.

With mainstream defence contractors increasingly outpaced, serious venture capital investment is now ploughing into firms that believe they can disrupt that model and deliver vital capability at much greater speed. Cambridge Aerospace, Incorporated barely a year ago, has raised more than £100 million and is already testing its new air defence interceptors every week.

DEFENCE ECONOMICS "Ultimately, defence comes down to economics," says Cambridge Aerospace founder Stephen Barrett.

"If the inbound threat cost $30,000 and the defence costs more than a million dollars per shot, it is not going to be sustainable. So the only way we can really create effective defences (is) by making it cheap enough that we can afford large numbers." Cambridge Aerospace says it is looking to produce thousands of units per month by the end of the decade, and will also build its own solid rocket motors, of which there is a current global shortage. Its "Skyhammer" interceptor is designed to take out cruise missiles and large drones at low altitudes, while the higher altitude "Starhammer" will target ballistic missiles.

The hefty amounts of venture capital funding now available for defence have allowed firms like Cambridge Aerospace to take much greater financial risk by starting to build factories even before major government orders are received. That is itself a very different model to conventional "defence primes", whose high charges for each government-funded piece of work are often partly considered essential to keep the companies solvent during delays and fallow periods.

Even as its own drones and missiles continue to plague Ukraine, Russia itself now also acts as a warning sign of the costs of failing to secure its airspace over key facilities. Ukrainian drone strikes have now damaged significant amounts of Russia's energy infrastructure and continue to act as a major embarrassment for the Kremlin, which has so far largely prioritised defensive weaponry over systems to defend its own domestic airspace.

The spread of drones has also dramatically revamped conflict in the developing world ranging from Libya to Myanmar, driving demand for much cheaper air defence systems. Turkish defence contractor Aselsan unveiled its own counter-drone capability last month, designed to be mounted on a wheeled armoured vehicle and provide close protection for convoys, bases and critical infrastructure. That looks set to be part of Turkey's "Steel Dome" integrated air defence effort, designed for both export and domestic protection.

All that technology, however, still requires clear rules of engagement for its use – something NATO nations were discussing in Brussels this week at meetings of ministers and defence chiefs. The issues included when allied fighter jets or defences can be authorised to fire on a manned Russian aircraft testing NATO air defences and entering national air space. "We are not going to take down an aeroplane in NATO air space if it does not pose a threat," alliance chief Rutte said afterwards. "But if it poses a threat, I can assure you that our military people have all the authorities they need."

(By Peter Apps; editing by Mark Heinrich)

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)