Experts and NATO officials in Latvia say new drone technology is being met with countermeasures in as little as six weeks, outpacing traditional procurement timelines.
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Experts say drone and robotics developments are moving faster than many militaries can adapt, highlighting the challenge of keeping procurement and policy aligned with how quickly countermeasures are being developed in the Ukraine war.
The warning came during demonstrations and discussions in Latvia, where Canadian Defence leadership and officials from 27 NATO countries attended a multinational event focused on persuading NATO military officials to buy drone and related technologies.
On Aug. 13, near Selija in southwestern Latvia, a drone demonstration included an interceptor designed to destroy a target drone. Under cloudy skies, one drone flew overhead before another aircraft arrived from behind it; the second drone, an NS3 interceptor capable of reaching speeds of 350 kilometres per hour, placed an explosive charge on the target drone and destroyed it, drawing applause from participating dignitaries.
The event included industry participation, with Latvia facing repeated drone incursions suspected of originating from Russia and Belarus. Organisers said the programme brought together 375 industry representatives, including manufacturers such as DK Unity.
DK Unity’s business development manager, Aleksandrs Stupans, said some of the company’s systems are already being deployed in Ukraine and that its product improvements rely on rapid feedback from Ukrainian forces. He described weekly updates informed by battlefield experience through a partner company in Kyiv working with more than 100 different battle units.
Stupans’ remarks were part of a broader discussion of how rapidly countermeasures are emerging. An analysis by a French parliamentary committee on foreign affairs and defence, cited during the event, documented an average six-week turnaround for opposing forces to develop countermeasures to new battlefield technology.
Riga Centre for Geopolitical Studies expert Janis Kazocins, and a former national security adviser to Latvia’s president, said armies that adapt quickly gain an advantage. He described a shift in Russian tactics after Ukrainian forces developed an effective method to detect drones by sound and shoot them down using heavy machine guns, noting that Russian forces changed flight altitude so bullets could not reach.
Kazocins said the core challenge is that while unmanned hardware may be relatively simple, the software and communications systems evolve quickly, meaning what works one month may not work soon after.
He also cautioned NATO countries against assuming they can buy large quantities of the most effective unmanned systems and simply store them for a future threat. “The most dangerous thing to do is to imagine that we now know how drones or robotics work,” Kazocins said. “We need to buy a service, something which is developing all the time, to which we need to contribute our technology as well.”
At the Ādaži military base, Canadian Col. David Brassard, commander of NATO’s multinational brigade, said his unit is modernizing its procurement procedures to be more agile and respond to rapidly evolving technology. Brassard said innovation is increasingly coming from soldiers on the front lines rather than exclusively from factories.
He pointed to Ukrainian troops who reportedly use computer programming and 3D printers to modify drones directly on the battlefield as threats emerge. Brassard acknowledged that NATO forces in Latvia have not reached the adaptability of Ukrainian troops, but he said he expects they will.
Kazocins added that he prefers the term “robots” rather than “drones,” arguing that unmanned vehicles are operating beyond the air, including on land and at sea.
He cited Ukraine’s deployment of autonomous maritime platforms, including the seven-metre-long Magura MV1, which he said can operate for seven days at sea and carry a payload of 2,200 kilograms. Kazocins said such platforms are used to bring drones that launch from the sea platform to attack in the Black Sea and along the Crimean and Russian coasts.
The discussion also included autonomous drone tactics and the role of artificial intelligence. Kazocins said the use of drone swarms—where multiple robots coordinate to achieve a shared objective—has been enabled by more capable software and communications, and that such tactics are already being used in Ukraine for different missions including decoys, surveillance and attacks.
International concerns have followed the rapid growth in autonomous weapons. In a joint appeal published Aug. 25, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and International Committee of the Red Cross President Mirjana Spoljaric urged countries to establish rules so technological advances do not outpace international humanitarian law, warning that machine-driven autonomous targeting of human beings risks crossing a moral line.
The appeal came ahead of discussions in Geneva on ways to regulate lethal autonomous weapons systems. According to the material, over the past three years, 65 countries participating in the Conference on Disarmament have examined regulation of lethal autonomous weapons systems, with a report expected at the seventh review conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in November.
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