In Exercise After Exercise NATO Keeps Failing the Same Drone Test
Naval and land exercises alike offer unmistakable proof that the alliance's armies have fallen behind the times. Both Russia and Ukraine now operate far ahead of NATO.
A single operator and a low-cost drone can now outmatch equipment worth millions of dollars. Photo: Oleg Palchyk/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
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In mid-August, The Wall Street Journal reported on a military exercise that pitted US and Ukrainian army units against each other. The maneuvers proved disastrous for the overseas superpower, and the American daily states bluntly in its summary that the Pentagon has yet to learn its lesson from a war that has ravaged Eastern Europe for four and a half years.
The Combined Resolve exercise, held on German soil in April and May, showed that even in 2026 the world's strongest army still is not fielding reconnaissance and other tactical drones. Ukrainian forces, deploying small drones, exposed their adversaries at every turn. Had this been real combat, that edge would have been enough to wipe out both their equipment and their troops.
A naval drone destroyed by F-16 fighter jets in the Black Sea near the Neptun Deep offshore gas project. Photo: Radu Miruta/Facebook/Reuters
Same Mistakes, New Battlefield
This exercise did not reveal NATO's unpreparedness for modern warfare for the first time. In March, Iran and the armed groups it backs, directly or indirectly, had already shown how to overwhelm costly US air defense systems with a barrage of cheap missiles and drones.
A single PAC-3 missile fired from a Patriot system rangesfrom €2.8m–€6m ($3.2m–$7m), depending on the level of modernization, and the US can produce only 650 of them annually. Ukrainian electronic warfare (EW) assets tell a different story. Stationary or mobile drone jammers can be reused indefinitely, and their value was proven long before the attack on Iran, throughout the war in Ukraine.
The contrast is starker still for drone interceptors. Ukraine's domestically produced four-rotor FPV Sting, designed to shoot down Iranian Shaheds, costs around €1,800 ($2,000). A single Shahed, by comparison, runs to more than €29,000 ($33,000). Yet as the German exercise made clear, price is not the whole story. Today, any army that goes to war without drones is already beaten.
A Russian FPV drone is caught in anti-drone netting covering a road in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region on 20 August 2026. Photo: Stringer/Reuters
Air, Land and Sea, All Exposed
A NATO exercise off the coast of Portugal in September 2025, reported only in mid-March, demonstrated that drones are reshaping warfare at sea as decisively as on land. Ukrainian naval drones exposed just how vulnerable large modern vessels have become.
"The era of large military machines is coming to an end; the future belongs to drones – in all domains", commented Lieutenant Colonel Maksym Zhorin of Ukraine's elite 3rd Army Corps on the results of the exercise.
Modern unmanned aerial vehicles are classified by range into tactical, operational and strategic categories, whether they serve as reconnaissance, suicide, or any other type of drone. Yet of all the world's armies, only Russia's and Ukraine's are equipped to deploy every category in practice.
Romania offers a case in point. On 20 August, it deployed an F-16 fighter jet to destroy a naval drone that, President Nicusor Dan said, was Russian. A Spanish F-18 fighter jet on NATO air-policing duty had already shot down a drone that violated Romanian airspace just days earlier, and a Romanian F-16 did the same in late July.
As early as September 2025, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte warned that Alliance members cannot keep spending millions on missiles to shoot down drones that cost only a fraction of that price.
In mid-April, echoing an operation from the summer of 2025, Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps captured a position held by Russian troops without a single Ukrainian soldier taking part in the fighting. Robots and drones did the work instead. Russia's invading forces, by contrast, have managed nothing comparable since the war began. One Ukrainian robot, after coming ashore on a riverbank, held the position unaided for 45 days.
Ukraine still does not have enough robots to spare any for training exercises. Even so, its forces keep winning every military exercise they join with NATO. In Sweden in May of this year, for instance, they destroyed multimillion-dollar tanks belonging to the Nordic country's army using nothing more than inexpensive Chinese-made drones.
And yet, an exercise in Estonia a year before went no better for the allied forces. Ukrainian instructors say they hope NATO will finally draw the obvious lesson from its repeated failures in these exercises: that it needs to rearm and abandon doctrine that time has left behind.
The exercises point to a deeper vulnerability too: wounded soldiers. NATO still plans around the "golden hour" standard, under which medics are expected to keep a wounded soldier alive for just one hour, the time it should take to evacuate them to a stabilization point and on to a field hospital.
On the front lines of the Russia-Ukraine war, that standard has collapsed. Enemy drone activity now delays evacuation by an average of up to 15 hours and considerably longer for those wounded in the gray zone. Medics on both sides abandoned the golden hour rule years ago as a result.
Should a drone superpower ever attack a NATO country, the alliance could face enormous losses of life within the first few weeks.
