Good afternoon. Just under a week ago 19 Russian Gerbera drones entered Poland. It was the single largest violation of NATO airspace since the alliance was founded. Initially, I was open-minded about whether this might have been an accident. Now, I think the evidence clearly points to a deliberate Russian probe. If the drones were merely trying to get around Ukraine’s western air-defences, they would not have travelled so deep into Poland. Nor does their flight path suggest that they were jammed, as Belarus claims.

If Russia was probing NATO’s air defences, then the results are mixed. As I explained this week, NATO has a formidable network of sensors and interceptors that operate across the air, land and sea. These would have seen the drones crossing the border. Poland claims that it shot down only some because it could see that most (if not all) were decoys. I am not convinced that is true. But the bigger problem is that NATO air defences are not really configured for low-level drone incursions in peacetime.

The interceptors fired by NATO jets and ground-based air defences are both expensive and scarce. The alliance, unlike Ukraine, currently has few means of low-cost interception. Although 19 drones are not a big problem, hundreds would be. This is something the alliance cannot ignore. CSIS, an American think-tank, has noted that in 2022 a typical Russian salvo against Ukraine involved about 100 weapons and occurred about once a month. By 2025, with Russia churning out far more ammunition, the average has tripled to almost 370 munitions in each round of strikes, with a barrage every eight days. If NATO had to respond to that, it would run out of interceptors frighteningly quickly—though, in a full-scale war, it would also go after the launch sites and depots to attack the problem at source.

If Russia was testing NATO politically last week, then I am not convinced that the alliance passed. Donald Trump played down the incursion, suggesting that it might have been inadvertent, a claim fervently denied by Poland. The open split is surely what Russia was seeking to achieve.

In the days after the incursion, NATO launched “Eastern Sentry”, an operation to beef up joint monitoring and patrols. Details are vague. But, notably, there has been no discussion of shooting down drones over Ukraine before they enter NATO airspace, much as Israel, aided by partners, destroyed Iranian ones during salvos last year. That would probably disrupt civilian airspace. It might also require all 32 allies to agree to give the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, NATO’s military chief, new powers. That remains unlikely, in part because it would be seen—wrongly, in my view—as a step towards direct involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war.

In other news this week, we looked at trends in political violence in America, following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. We asked how Israel’s audacious air strike in Qatar—which seems to have been launched from over the Red Sea, and appears to have failed to kill its targets—might affect America’s relationship with its Gulf allies. We surveyed how America, Australia and China are battling for influence across the Pacific. “At airfields, ports and police academies around the region,” we write, “expect Chinese officials to keep on pushing their luck.” And I wrote about how navies around the world are reinventing the aircraft-carrier by putting drones on the deck.

Thanks for your letters. Robert in Australia asks why Israel chose to launch air strikes on Doha when it could have mounted a ground operation to assassinate Hamas’s leaders. Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, reportedly refused to carry out a ground operation. It believed the action would harm Israel’s relationship with Qatar, which has been serving as an intermediary in peace talks. One of the targets of the strike is thought to have been Khaled Meshal, a former head of Hamas. Mossad tried to kill him with poison in Jordan in 1997, It failed, Mossad agents were captured, and Bill Clinton, then America’s president, demanded that Binyamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s prime minister, supply an antidote. You can see why Israeli spies might have been wary this time round. 

Richard in Toronto asks why Ukraine cannot use Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defence system to protect itself. There are two answers. One is that Israel will not supply it. “We’re concerned…with the possibility that systems that we would give to Ukraine would fall into Iranian hands and could be reverse-engineered,” warned Mr Netanyahu in 2023, “and we would find ourselves facing Israeli systems used against Israel.” The other thing to note is that Iron Dome is only really useful against short-range rockets, which follow ballistic (up-and-down) trajectories. Ukraine’s problem is largely large salvos of long-range drones, which fly more slowly on flatter trajectories. And that brings us to the next question.

Keith in France would like a rundown of current anti-drone systems. It depends on the size of the drone, of course: small quadcopters armed with a grenade need different solutions to big, high-flying spy drones. Speed, size and altitude all make a difference. The crucial problem, as I noted above, is how to develop anti-drone technology cheaply enough to scale up. One answer is to revive old-fashioned anti-aircraft guns, which create a wall of lead. Another is to use interceptor drones, which are essentially drones you manoeuvre to head off other drones—a practice pioneered by Ukraine. A third approach is to use lasers, which have the great advantage of never running out of ammunition, so long as you can generate enough power. In general, the answer is usually to layer different solutions on top of each other, because you want to hedge against an attacker adapting their drones to cope with any one type of interceptor.

Thank you for reading. As always, get in touch with your comments, questions and thoughts at [email protected]. See you next week.