NATO is weighing whether to redeploy anti-drone defences as drone attacks continue to sink shipping in the Black Sea, Ars Technica reports — a decision that would move equipment designed for land warfare onto a maritime problem it was not built to solve.
The Black Sea has become a proving ground for a form of warfare that naval planners did not anticipate at this scale. Cheap uncrewed surface and aerial vehicles have shown they can damage or destroy vessels at a cost that makes traditional naval defence economics look unfavourable: a multimillion-dollar interceptor is a poor answer to a machine assembled from commercial components and flown or steered from a distance. Attrition of the merchant fleet is the intended effect, and it works precisely because each attack is cheap relative to what it endangers.
Redeploying counter-drone systems would be an admission that the threat has outgrown the existing arrangement, under which protection of commercial shipping rests largely on the vessels themselves and on insurance markets that price the risk. Traffic keeps moving because crews, charterers and underwriters accept a level of danger that would be intolerable in peacetime shipping.
It would also be a political act. Alliance assets defending commercial shipping in a sea bordered by NATO members, a partner and a belligerent sit close to the line between protection and participation, and the alliance has spent years calibrating exactly how near that line it wishes to be seen standing. The question now is whether the economic pressure on Black Sea trade force the hand.
