How NATO joined forces with the counter-drone industry

NATO has placed counter-drone capability development and industry engagement at the center of its modernization agenda, hosting a dedicated Counter-UAS Week at Alliance headquarters in Brussels.

On January 28, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte joined an Industry Day held as part of C-UAS Week, bringing together more than 100 representatives from NATO bodies, Allied nations and industry. The event follows an October 2025 decision by NATO defence ministers to expand counter-drone capabilities across the Alliance in response to the growing threat posed by small, low-cost drones.

“Drones are here to stay. Growing in quantity, growing in quality,” Rutte told participants, pointing to the war in Ukraine and recent drone incursions near Allied airspace as evidence that NATO must accelerate its approach to detection, tracking and defeat. “We need to be able to respond to this threat and we must be prepared.”

Layered C-UAS as a NATO priority

The Brussels event comes amid a broader NATO push to move counter-drone concepts more rapidly from experimentation into operational capability. Allied Command Transformation has designated the Layered Counter-UAS Initiative, known as LCI-X, as one of its 2026 “Beacon Projects,” a label reserved for efforts intended to drive faster capability delivery across the Alliance.

LCI-X focuses on layered defense architectures that integrate sensors, command-and-control systems and effectors across air bases, deployed forces and critical infrastructure. Rather than treating counter-drone as a niche or standalone capability, the initiative emphasizes interoperability and integration with existing air and missile defence structures.

Industry engagement is a central element of this approach. LCI-X relies on requests for information, live demonstrations and experimentation to shape requirements and ensure that systems offered by industry can operate within a multi-layer, multi-domain framework. NATO officials have positioned C-UAS Week as a venue to communicate those expectations while giving companies an opportunity to demonstrate how their technologies fit into Alliance architectures.

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From testing to fielding

C-UAS Week also builds on several years of NATO-led technical testing and experimentation. In 2023 and 2024, NATO conducted Counter-UAS Technical Interoperability Exercises that brought together more than 60 systems, including sensors, jammers, effectors and threat drones, to assess performance under common standards.

Hosted by the NATO Communications and Information Agency and national partners, these exercises evaluated radar, radio-frequency sensing, electro-optical and infrared systems, command-and-control software and kinetic and non-kinetic effectors in live scenarios. The results have fed directly into NATO’s evolving reference architectures and data-sharing requirements for counter-drone operations.

Alongside these exercises, NATO bodies are running parallel market surveys and procurement activities. One recent invitation for international bidding seeks red-force support for LCI-X through 2026, while an NCIA multi-award framework is pre-qualifying mobile, transportable and static counter-drone systems for potential rapid fielding beginning in 2026.

Operational drivers shaping demand

NATO’s counter-drone priorities are being shaped by operational trends both inside and near Alliance territory. Since 2022, NATO has expanded a major anti-drone exercise in the Netherlands into an 11-day event involving more than 20 nations and 50 companies, testing jamming, cyber, kinetic and layered defensive tactics. Ukraine joined the exercise in 2024, bringing direct combat experience from a conflict where small UAS, loitering munitions and FPV drones have become central to operations.

Closer to NATO borders, Allies have reported multiple incidents involving suspected Russian drones or debris entering Polish and Romanian airspace. Elsewhere, Spain recently deployed a fighter wing to the Baltic Air Policing mission equipped with an organic counter-drone capability, signaling that base defense and air policing are increasingly being planned with small UAS threats in mind.

These developments are reinforcing NATO’s emphasis on scalable, interoperable systems that can be deployed quickly and integrated across domains, rather than bespoke solutions designed for narrow use cases.

Implications for industry

For companies operating in the counter-UAS sector, NATO’s C-UAS Week and Industry Day highlight several clear signals. Systems that can meet NATO interoperability and data-sharing standards are likely to be favored over closed, proprietary solutions. The Alliance’s focus on layered defense is creating demand across the spectrum, from man-portable sensors and effectors to fixed-site systems capable of protecting large air bases or critical infrastructure.

Lessons drawn from Ukraine and NATO exercises are also pushing requirements toward mobility, rapid setup and the ability to counter swarms and FPV-style threats.