Poland's €2 billion drone wall confronts a maths problem NATO cannot solve
The September incursion revealed uncomfortable truths about defending Europe's eastern edge
The Dutch F-35A that scrambled into Polish airspace on the night of 9 September cost $110 million. The drone it was hunting was made of plywood.
This was the scene over eastern Poland as NATO's most advanced stealth fighters chased cheap Russian reconnaissance drones drifting westward from Belarus. The pilots found and destroyed several. Others slipped through, falling to earth across the Polish countryside. Mushroom collectors stumbled upon debris in forests. A house in Wyryki-Wola took damage from a falling drone shot down overhead.
The fuel burned by a single F-35 sortie runs to roughly $50,000. The drones being hunted cost a fraction of that to build. Nobody imagined NATO airspace would be contested this way.
The night the eastern flank was tested
That September incursion—at least nineteen Russian drones entering Poland over seven hours—marked the first time NATO aircraft had engaged hostile weapons in allied territory. Prime Minister Donald Tusk told parliament it was the closest Poland had been to open conflict since the Second World War.
Warsaw invoked Article 4 of the NATO treaty, triggering mandatory consultations. Within days the alliance launched Operation Eastern Sentry: French Rafales, German Eurofighters, Danish frigates stretching from Finland to the Black Sea. German Patriot batteries went on alert. Italian surveillance aircraft flew overhead. The response was swift, coordinated, impressive.
It was also a tacit admission that existing defences had been found wanting.
Poland was not the first NATO state to experience such violations. Romania has recorded eleven drone incursions since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia have all reported similar breaches. But September stood apart in scale—some drones penetrated hundreds of kilometres into Polish territory before falling. Recovered debris revealed they carried no warheads. Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski called them an attempt to test Polish defences without triggering war.
The test succeeded. It exposed a gap.
Two billion euros for an imperfect shield
Poland's response came this month. Deputy Defence Minister Cezary Tomczyk announced a €2 billion counter-drone network along the borders with Belarus and Russia's Kaliningrad exclave. First capabilities will be operational within six months. The full system should be complete within two years.
The architecture is layered: machine guns and cannons for close engagement, missiles for longer range, electronic warfare to jam navigation and communications. All of it integrates with Poland's existing East Shield programme—€2.4 billion already under construction for anti-tank ditches, concrete barriers, bunkers, and observation towers along 700 kilometres of frontier.
The money comes primarily through the EU's new SAFE programme, which provides €150 billion in concessional loans for defence procurement. Poland received the largest allocation: €43.7 billion. Drones and counter-drone systems sit explicitly among the priorities.
But Tomczyk was candid about limits. Some weapons work only in extremis. Multi-barrel machine guns cannot fire freely in peacetime—everything that rises must fall. Electronic jamming neutralises drones but also disrupts GPS, mobile networks, airport communications. The September incident forced closures at three Polish airports.
Here lies a tension money cannot resolve. Poland is not preparing for war. It is preparing to defend against provocations during peace. The requirements differ fundamentally. Kinetic systems that devastate incoming swarms become dangerous when debris falls on villages. Jamming that blinds drones also inconveniences citizens. The defender faces constraints the attacker does not.
The arithmetic of attrition
Ukraine's education in drone warfare has been brutal, and the lessons are now Poland's curriculum.
A Russian Shahed drone costs perhaps $35,000. Ukraine now produces up to four million drones annually. Russia launches hundreds in single nights—the September strike that preceded the Polish incursion involved 415 drones and 35 missiles. Defenders expend scarce, expensive munitions. Attackers expend cheap, disposable platforms. The maths is relentless.
Patriot systems, among the most capable air defences available, cost over $1 billion per battery. Each interceptor runs to roughly $4 million. Using them against $35,000 drones is like burning furniture to heat a house. The US military has run up a billion-dollar tab defending Middle East bases since October 2023. The exchange ratio—cost to defend versus cost to attack—favours offence by orders of magnitude.
Directed energy weapons offer theoretical escape. Lasers engage targets for cents per shot. The Australian firm Electro Optic Systems advertises its 100-kilowatt Apollo system at 10 cents per engagement. Britain's DragonFire laser, due on Royal Navy destroyers by 2027, costs about £10 per shot. These systems can engage dozens of targets per minute without exhausting ammunition.
Theory, however, runs ahead of practice. US Army experimentation reveals persistent reliability problems. Optics fail frequently. Dust and humidity degrade performance. Current systems, one general noted, cannot operate outside sterile environments. The Pentagon spends roughly $1 billion annually on directed energy development. Field-ready solutions remain years away.
What cybersecurity learned the hard way
The closest parallel to Poland's predicament comes from an unexpected domain.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks overwhelm expensive defensive infrastructure with cheap, numerous, disposable attackers. The structural similarity to drone swarms is striking. DDoS attackers compromise thousands of ordinary devices—computers, routers, cameras—coordinating them into botnets that flood targets with traffic. No single request is dangerous. The volume is devastating. Traditional perimeter defences failed. Victory went to whoever could sustain attrition longer.
Cybersecurity's evolution took over a decade. The industry developed distributed, automated, multilayered defences. Machine learning enabled response faster than human operators could manage. Cloud-based mitigation absorbed attacks at scale. The concept of impenetrable perimeters gave way to defence in depth—accepting that some attacks would penetrate while ensuring systems continued functioning.
Poland's counter-drone architecture shows signs of this thinking: multiple sensor types, multiple effector types, layered engagement zones, artificial intelligence for threat identification. The approach mirrors what eventually worked in cybersecurity.
The timeline presents a problem. Cybersecurity's painful learning took a decade. Poland hopes for initial capability in six months. And the stakes differ fundamentally. Failed cyber defences mean disrupted services. Failed drone defences can mean casualties.
A European problem, a national solution
Poland's investment arrives at an inflection point in continental defence. The SAFE programme represents something genuinely new: the EU borrowing collectively for national defence procurement. Nineteen member states submitted investment plans within months of adoption.
The September incursion made the case for shared concern. Dutch pilots engaged the drones. German systems went on alert. French, Danish, and Italian forces deployed within days. Poland's eastern borders are Europe's eastern borders. The response demonstrated that this is now understood.
Yet execution remains stubbornly national. Tomczyk explicitly prioritised Polish projects over the EU's proposed pan-European drone wall. Poland coordinates with Baltic neighbours but is not waiting for continental solutions. Urgency precludes patience.
The political significance may matter as much as military capability. Poland is not defending alone. That reality—backed by €150 billion in available EU loans and the demonstrated willingness of allies to scramble fighters over Polish territory—shapes Russian calculations in ways that counting missiles cannot capture.
Buying time in an age of cheap threats
Return to that September night. Stealth fighters worth nine figures hunting decoy drones built from materials costing less than a family car. The scene crystallises everything that makes counter-drone warfare so difficult: economic asymmetry, technological mismatch, the absurdity of exquisite platforms chasing disposable threats.
Poland's €2 billion cannot resolve these contradictions. It cannot make the exchange ratio favourable. It cannot eliminate the peacetime deployment paradox. It cannot guarantee that swarms will not occasionally penetrate.
What it can do is raise the cost and complexity of provocation, provide response options that do not require scrambling fighters or launching million-dollar missiles, and signal that Poland takes the threat seriously and is not defending alone.
Whether this proves sufficient depends on questions Warsaw cannot answer. How will Russia probe the boundary between provocation and war? How quickly will counter-drone technology mature? Will Ukraine's continued resistance buy Europe time to adapt?
Tomczyk offered his own assessment. As long as Ukraine fights, Europe faces provocations and sabotage rather than conventional war. The €2 billion is a bet on that calculus holding—buying time, building capability, hoping the window of vulnerability closes before someone decides to force it open.
Certainty is not on offer. In a world where plywood drones trigger NATO's most advanced defences, it never was.