A drone attack on Kyiv and appearance of a cluster of drones over Polish territory in September 2025 has highlighted the threat posed by the rapid advancement of autonomous and uncrewed aerial vehicles.

Drones provide a unique advantage for the world's militaries. For one, they are cheap to make, have been deployed in major conflicts, such as the Russia-Ukraine war, and efforts to defend against them are in a constant state of development.

They can be built quickly and can fly low to avoid radar detection. 

"Drone manufacturing has a head start, and so the [effort to] counter drones is still playing catchup," said Christopher Adams, a senior policy analyst in homeland security and technology at RAND, a think tank in the US.

But there are methods that exist to help nations defend against drone incursions, each with their own benefits and risks.

Tools of the drone trade

As uncrewed aircraft, drones rely on electronic systems to function and, often, radio frequency (RF) connections guide them. Favored techniques to neutralize drones include "spoofing" and jamming.

Spoofing involves beaming fake radio signals to the drone to misdirect it. RF jamming works to cut off communications with the base of operation.

But militaries are finding new ways to counter these methods.

"More and more, drones operate autonomously," said Markus Müller, head of Video Exploitation Systems at the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation. "You've got the image data of the target area, then you program the flight path, and it can fly autonomously to the target."

In the absence of RF interference, conventional methods like surface or air-to-air missiles are also used to bring down drones.

Systems such as the Rheinmetall Skyranger anti-drone platform have already been committed to supporting Ukrainian defense. Many defense manufacturers have similar technologies available.

Müller also points to Kamikaze drone systems, which aim to ram adversaries from the skies, and energy cannons that use high-powered lasers or microwaves to destroy the target, or fry the electronics of drones in flight.

Offense trumps defense

The weapons that bring drones down are often many times more expensive.

"The fact is that defense is usually more expensive than the offense," said Dominika Kunertova, a security studies research scholar at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, US.

While a drone might cost a few hundred thousand dollars to make, a single missile can figure in the millions. At one point, Ukraine used Australian-made cardboard drones to attack Russian targets.

Defenders also need to consider public safety. Firing missiles or high-powered lasers in urban settings could harm or kill innocent people. Similarly, drones falling from the skies might harm civilians or cause damage to infrastructure.

The speed that drones can be built is also proving a challenge to defense capability.

"The development of the use of drones in terms of quantity but also quality has been so fast," said Kunertova. "This is the challenge."

It's not just military drones that pose challenges

Typically, defense forces rely on radar technology to detect drone incursions.

These systems aren't foolproof, but they are getting better at distinguishing genuine threats from flying animals or non-threat aircraft.

But while military-standard drones are a top detection priority, there is also a need to build technology that can identify drones near critical infrastructure and public spaces, to protect against the use of consumer drones for violent attacks.

Adams said commercially available consumer drones are a "bigger potential threat."

"Having a non-radio emitting drone that can do […] various threat scenarios, is quite accessible commercially to the average non-state bad actor," Adams said.

For this reason, protecting airports and harbors, public events like music festivals and sports matches, is critical.

But "there's no current, reliable system on the market that deals with small drones in the range of, let's say, 200 to 400, 500 meters," Müller told DW.

While some systems work at shorter ranges, for large public events, authorities needed to develop technology to detect drones used for terrorist attacks at medium range, he said.

Teams at Fraunhofer are working on this. One of the institute's platforms, MODEAS, which uses optronics and radar to help identify, classify and track drones, is at the prototype stage.

If manufactured, it could be made available to security services and private companies to better manage drone threats.

No simple solutions to counter Russian drones

Analysts DW spoke to said that defensive investments should be a priority for governments, particularly Europe's NATO members.

Kunertova, who has performed several analyses of drone usage in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, said Russia is well ahead in drone development and developing countermeasures against Ukrainian drones.

In contrast, NATO and EU countries, Kunertova said, are "not putting enough effort into the countermeasures, the defenses against the drone threat."

"I would like to see more initiatives, more intense efforts to go into countering the drone threat, rather than being excited by the new [offensive] uses that small drones offer," Kunertova said.

Given drones have an offensive advantage against countermeasures, building a multi-layered approach to defense, which uses RF interference, conventional munitions and laser or microwave technology, could be a pragmatic way forward.

"No device is going to defend you [completely]," said Kunertova, "and so the best defense is a layered defense — a layered set of detectors, and a layered set of effectors."

Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany