“Tapa Camp, Estonia -- If Russia attacked Estonia, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's multinational battle group would be the first line of defense. On a subfreezing February day I joined British soldiers who, along with some 250 French troops, comprise the roughly 1,200-man battle group to see how well they are learning the lessons from the war in Ukraine. During the Aces Spyglass exercise I saw real progress as the British forces drilled with drones and electronic warfare. Yet I left uneasy that NATO partners aren't sufficiently prepared for today's warfare.
Here's a brief recap of some of the ways war is changing: Cheap weapons like aerial drones threaten expensive targets, especially when deployed in huge numbers. Use expensive countermeasures against them, and you'll quickly find your resources strained. Technology is evolving rapidly, which requires faster and nimbler procurement. Ubiquitous drones and sensors can provide combatants with a continuous real-time high-definition picture of the battlefield. What's visible there is vulnerable. The unprecedented quantity and detail of battlefield data requires changes to how intelligence is collected, analyzed and disseminated.
"We're not talking about change at the margins," says retired Gen. David Petraeus, who is studying the evolution of military technology on frequent visits to Ukraine. "We're talking about a complete overhaul of how war is waged and how it should be envisioned in the future."
During the NATO drill, I saw changes to training, the types of personnel being cultivated, the facilities where warfare is drilled, and, to some extent, the materiel used. But I also saw worrisome indicators that some NATO military leaders haven't fully absorbed the lessons from Ukraine and haven't adequately adjusted doctrines or policies, including vital changes in procurement.
The British troops in Estonia come from Britain's 12th Armored Brigade. By the time of my visit, that brigade had put about 100 soldiers through a monthlong course focused on electronic warfare, the use of drones for reconnaissance and strikes, countering drones and tactics, says Maj. Guy Walker, the Aces Spyglass exercise coordinator. I watched as a drone zoomed in low through the Estonian woods. Only a few seconds elapsed between the drone's eerie buzz and its hitting its target, a net strung over a military vehicle.
The goal isn't to become competent on any specific model of drone. Instead the training for the soldiers of the 12th Armored Brigade focused on fundamentals like hand-eye coordination on controls, evasive maneuvers and rapid attacks. Practicing in the terrain they could someday have to defend, British soldiers also learned practical lessons like how quickly a drone battery drains and how slowly it charges in frigid weather.
During the NATO exercise, troops knelt in the snow to set up an unwieldy device resembling an antenna, known as the Kraken system. Plant three of them, and you can triangulate the position of an enemy drone, among other targets. Under a new British army initiative aiming to accelerate the deployment of new technologies, the Kraken was released in months, not years -- still longer than it takes in Ukraine, but breakneck speed in the world of Western procurement.
The NATO battle group in Estonia now has a 3-D printer to make drones or build spare parts. The battle group's youngest members are showing a proclivity for using new tech to solve problems; one soldier recently 3-D-printed a replacement for a broken fuse box cover. Cultivating creative initiative at even the lowest unit levels is an important military mentality shift. It has been vital for Ukraine.
The next step is for NATO's tinkerer-soldiers to scale up production. Since August 2024 in Ukraine the Russians have been using unjammable, stealthy fiber-optic drones that get their signals from a thin wire resembling fishing line. This NATO battle group has only 10 or so of them to train with, and these are a recent acquisition. As of September, Russia produced more than 50,000 fiber-optic drones a month, according to state-run media -- and there are many other sorts of drones on the battlefield. Ukrainians now deploy some 9,000 drones daily, a Ukrainian military official estimated in October. Ukraine's target is to build seven million drones this year. A Russian official recently said Moscow's goal is to train more than 70,000 drone operators in 2026.
It's unclear if NATO military leaders fully grasp how the ground fight changes when so many drones are deployed on the battlefield. War eventually comes down to the moment "when metal meets metal," said Maj. James Curry, second-in-command of the NATO multinational battle group in Estonia. Taking and holding territory still requires close combat, and to advance rapidly you need mobile, protected firepower.
The war in Ukraine should be making it clear how much more difficult it is to field tanks and armored vehicles en masse on a battlefield dominated by drones. "The weapons that can reliably disable [tanks] are so pervasive and inexpensive that it's impossible to operate larger armored formations," says Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. It isn't hard for a drone to knock a tank off its tracks, leaving the crew stuck and giving the enemy a chance to finish the job at leisure.
But NATO doesn't seem to be fully on the same page. "I fundamentally disagree that [tanks] are any more vulnerable than they used to be," Maj. Curry told me -- and it's true that there have been ways to kill tanks about as long as there have been tanks. Maj. Curry also praised the sturdiness of the British Challenger 2 tank, which he said is capable of surviving multiple drone strikes.
"You would never just willy-nilly launch a tank," Maj. Curry said, describing how troops would prepare the battlefield through efforts like identifying enemy drone outposts and pre-positioning jammers. But drones are a highly dispersed threat, which makes them much harder to target at their source. This in turn makes it hard to shape the battlefield before your armored formations roll in. The dispersion of the drones also complicates air cover for ground forces.
Maj. Curry described several multilayered mitigations for a drone-saturated battlefield. That includes using drones for tasks that once would have required sending a soldier to the danger zone, having troops hunker down in underground bunkers, and increasing efforts to evade detection. The "last line of defense" is shooting down drones, but the goal is to avoid ending up in that situation to begin with, he said. "We don't want anyone shooting down a drone with a shotgun."
Yet that's what Ukrainians have sometimes had to do, and it's one recourse NATO forces practiced during Aces Spyglass. I saw a soldier shoot down a practice drone after a few misses. Because practice drones are in limited supply, the troops also practiced by shooting down clay pigeons, though they move more predictably than drones. In real life soldiers would likely be under attack by multiple drones at once.
For all the progress the British forces in the NATO multinational battle group showed, I found myself worrying about them. In extremis, no one has a better solution right now for the drone threat to tanks and armored vehicles -- not the Russians, not the Ukrainians, and not NATO.
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Ms. Melchior is a London-based member of the Journal's editorial board.” [1]
1. In Estonia, NATO Practices for a Drone War. Melchior, Jillian Kay. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 08 Apr 2026: A15.
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