Nato takes Ukraine lessons into Europe’s top air defence drills
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Nato commanders have drawn lessons from Ukraine's use of drones in its fight against a Russian invasion.
PHOTO: AFP
VREDEPEEL, Netherlands – Nato commanders said they were drawing on lessons learnt in the drone war over Ukraine to conduct Europe’s largest air defence exercise that ends in the Netherlands on March 26.
New alliance members Sweden and Finland took part for the first time in “Joint Project Optic Windmill”, a biennial 10-day virtual exercise involving 15 states to test Nato’s response to missile and drone attacks.
Commanding officer Peter Gielen, at an airbase in the southern Netherlands on March 25, said: “We’ve never encountered the number of threats that is now being seen on the battlefield.”
He added: “We learnt from the Ukrainians how they act on that... and there is special attention being paid to drones in this exercise.”
The Iranian-style Shahed exploding drone that Moscow has deployed throughout its Ukraine campaign was of particular focus and incorporated in the training, Brigadier-General Gielen said.
Military officers who asked not to be identified for security reasons told AFP that this included aspects such as tracking the drones’ flight patterns towards a target.
Information from the Ukrainian theatre “helps us a lot because it’s what you need to be able to train your own personnel to react against those kinds of threats”, Brig-Gen Gielen said.
“So we follow what’s going on in Ukraine very closely... getting information out of that and trying to bring that as fast as we can into exercises like this,” he added.
Around 700 soldiers participated in total, including from Britain and the US.
During the drill, soldiers dealt with a changing scenario from peace to a full-scale war, as well as with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats.
One of the exercise’s main aims was for air defenders “to integrate all technology and systems as a whole, to counter any threats better than any single system can”, the Dutch Defence Ministry said.
The exercise comes in the wake of the shock US policy shift in ties with Europe after President Donald Trump questioned whether the US should continue its central role in Nato.
Brig-Gen Gielen said the shift served as a “wake-up call for Europe”, adding that “we have to invest more in the military”.
He said: “If we then invest in military, we certainly should invest also in air defence.” AFP
