PARIS — European NATO countries are eyeing drones for airborne electromagnetic-warfare operations including radar jamming, a skill many of the continent’s air forces are currently lacking.

Italy’s Leonardo says between ten and twenty NATO countries have expressed interest in a capability similar to the StormShroud radar-jammer drone it provided to the U.K.

Leonardo has taken a lead in radar-jamming drones with StormShroud, built around the company’s BriteStorm jammer on an unmanned aerial system from Portugal’s Tekever. U.S., European and Israeli rivals will be presenting some of their airborne electronic warfare offerings at the Paris Air Show starting here on Monday.

Europe largely depends on the U.S. for airborne electromagnetic warfare, a gap some countries are looking to address amid uncertainty about American commitment to the continent. Meanwhile, an aggressive Russia has been expanding capabilities based on its experience in Ukraine, where drones are omni-present, including in the electronic-warfare role.

Ukraine “has become a drone war with drone and counter-drones, and electronic jamming is part of that,” said Dick Zandee, senior research fellow at Dutch think tank Clingendael Institute and former head of planning at the European Defence Agency. “You see a ‘dronization’ taking place in a lot of areas now, including in electronic warfare.”

European NATO countries face a “critical” capability gap in airborne electromagnetic warfare, a potential risk in case of Russian aggression, analyst Justin Bronk at the U.K.’s Royal United Services Institute said in a report in March.

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Bronk called for European countries to lift funding to develop stand-in airborne electromagnetic attack capabilities, based on “relatively cheap” uncrewed autonomous systems that can loiter over hostile territory and would be a quick way to expand their capabilities.

Leonardo has received “significant interest” in BriteStorm from NATO countries as well as defense primes, according to Michael Lea, the company’s vice president of sales for electronic warfare. Lea added he doesn’t expect any public announcement before the fourth quarter of 2025.

There is “clearly the desire from some European nations to not be as dependent on the U.S. as they have been previously,” Lea said.

The executive declined to name possible drone partners, but noted Leonardo has ties with drone makers including General Atomics, the maker of the MQ-9 Reaper, and Turkish Aerospace Industries. While Leonardo won’t showcase StormShroud in Paris, it will be holding a signing ceremony for a joint venture with Turkish drone maker Baykar Technologies on Monday.

Stand-in radar jamming is typically in close proximity to hostile air-defense systems, as opposed to long-range stand-off jamming outside of weapons-engagement zone. Escort jamming is typically used to protect the own forces from enemy air defenses.

Countries in Eastern Europe including Poland face threats with a “very extended range, so you are into stand-in jamming the moment you get airborne,” Lea said. “They can’t do stand-off jamming because they’re inside the threat envelope of adversary systems.”

Drone-based stand-in jammers are cheaper, attritable, and potentially more effective by operating closer to the threat, which means that in the European theater of operations they may be a better solution than stand-off jamming, according to Lea. Still, the two approaches are complimentary and will continue to exist together, the executive said.

One thing Ukraine has shown is that uncrewed capabilities planned to accompany sixth-generation fighter aircraft need to become available “far earlier,” with systems such as StormShroud allowing fourth and fifth-generation fighters to be more effective and operate more freely.

“If you can have a larger number of electronic-warfare, decoy and deception platforms, that has a value in itself, and that has absolutely been demonstrated in Ukraine,” Lea said. “I can absolutely see how you can solve a mass challenge with uncrewed platforms that allows the four-generation platform to operate as it was intended at the start of its design case.”

The trend is to move the anti-radar mission to drones because the size and recognizability of aircraft makes them easier to detect and therefore take down, as well as “terribly expensive,” Zandee said. “So, you do that kind of thing with drones.”

Leonardo has an advantage in being able to declare an operational capability in radar-jamming drones with the Royal Air Force, though Lea expects announcements from competitors within the next 12 months.

“As a result of the very urgent requirement to operate in a contested electronic warfare environment, a lot of companies are trying to tackle this challenge,” Lea said. “We would be complacent to think that other competitors aren’t developing their products in the market.”

Raytheon makes the MALD-J, a jamming variant of its expendable decoy missile which the company says is the first-ever stand-in jammer to enter production. Leonardo meanwhile is working with pan-European missile maker MBDA to develop the Spear-EW stand-in jammer missile for the U.K.

At the Paris Air Show, Raytheon will present its Next Generation Jammer, a long-range jammer for the U.S. Navy’s E/A-18 Growler electronic-warfare aircraft. The Navy declared initial operational capability for the mid-range band version of the system in December.

Modern Western radar-jamming systems including BriteStorm and MALD use Digital Radio Frequency Memory, which allows a jammer to record incoming radar signal and retransmit them with modifications, creating false targets and signals or just overwhelming the enemy system with noise.

The work on StormShroud is based on the BriteCloud digital decoy ordered by the U.S. for the F-35, also used by the U.K. on the Eurofighter and available as an option on the Saab Gripen.

Due to the situation in Ukraine, the Middle East and farther East, “our potential adversaries are learning very quickly,” Lea said. “StormShroud’s development is the U.K.’s clear aspiration to demonstrate it has a capability that can seek to challenge those threats.”

Germany’s Hensoldt has been developing the Kalaetron Attack radar jammer for airborne electronic attack, focused on stand-off jamming or as an escort jammer onboard the Eurofighter, and also available in a stand-in jamming configuration. The company, which will be present in Paris, flight tested the DRFM-based system in 2023.

A consortium led by Indra Sistemas that also includes Hensoldt, Elettronica and Saab has been working on a project called Responsive Electronic Attack for Cooperative Tasks, or REACT, aimed at developing a multi-jamming capability that can be integrated inside unmanned aerial combat vehicles for stand-in jamming or in pods for escort jamming.

The project’s second phase will last through 2028 and received €40 million in European Union funding in 2023, on a total budget of €69.7 million, following a first three-year phase of feasibility studies and design. REACT is part of the Airborne Electronic Attack project established in 2019 within the EU’s Permanent Structured Cooperation framework.

The Danish armed forces in May tested drone-based electronic warfare with a UAS from Ukraine’s Skyeton equipped with a radio-frequency payload from Denmark’s Quadsat, which the Danes said can locate and attack an adversary from hundreds of kilometers away. Skyeton and Quadsat followed up with an agreement later that month to jointly offer drone-based electromagnetic-spectrum surveillance.

Electronic warfare until recent years has mostly been platform centric, so focused around the aircraft performing that mission, from specialists such as the U.S. Navy’s Growler to electronic-warfare suites such as Thales’s Spectra on the French Rafale.

Thales will unveil a miniaturized electronic-warfare payload for small drones on Monday, designed to detect and locate radio communications and which the company says will be a breakthrough in electromagnetic intelligence and provide forces in combat with “unprecedented operational intelligence capabilities.”

Elbit Systems will have a dedicated electromagnetic warfare section at its Paris Air Show, but said it won’t be displaying any drone-based EW systems.

For now, BriteStorm doesn’t incorporate artificial-intelligence enabled “genuine cognitive EW capability,” also due to the power requirements of AI, according to Lea.

“It’s clearly on our roadmap for the future, but we will have to understand how we incorporate some of the exceptionally rapid developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence onto a quite small payload that may have to operate autonomously,” Lea said, adding he doesn’t expect much in the way of public announcements there. “People will tend to be quite coy about that.”

Rudy Ruitenberg is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. He started his career at Bloomberg News and has experience reporting on technology, commodity markets and politics.