Deep in Norwegian woods, some 400 kilometers away from the Russian border, an officer of the Norwegian Long Range Reconnaissance Squadron is hidden in a snow-made shelter, with only his light-grey firearm peeking out.

The officer, nicknamed Poster Boy, is part of the country’s elite Arctic task force, designed to operate far behind enemy lines to conduct surveillance missions. The snow cave serving as his concealment is known as a quinzhee, 1.5m high and 2m wide, built by piling snow together and allowing it to sinter, or harden, a task force specialty.

“It’s a constant evolution of what works and what doesn’t for us – what worked four years ago might not work today due to all the technology developments of equipment designed to catch us, some years ago a tent and camouflage could’ve been sufficient but not anymore,” the officer, who spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity around the unit, told Defense News.

Training here alongside the Norwegian soldiers were several other nations’ elite unit, including U.K. Royal Marines and soldiers of the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command. Royal Marines told Defense News that, given the speed of modern combat, units that want to stay invisible often have to move every 15 minutes to avoid detection.

Besides hiding from enemy drones, the Norwegian reconnaissance soldiers carry their own unmanned craft to spy on adversaries.

The unit is experimenting with different types of winterized surveillance drones, including the American-made Skydio and first-person-view models, to provide eyes in the sky and enable operations from greater distances on the battlefield.

Poster Boy said those systems will be increasingly relevant, especially in the event of a potential conflict with Russia, where the battle space would consist of vast stretches of icy land.

The Norwegian Army chief, Maj. Gen. Lars Lervik, told Defense News that drones were playing an important role in NATO’s largest Arctic exercise, Cold Response 2026, organized across Norway from March 9-19. He noted that aside from surveillance-type ones, forces are also testing attack drones and several unmanned ground robots in ground-to-ground and air-to-ground roles.

The name of the game for the quinzhee connaisseurs is silence and invisibility, two objectives that are increasingly hard to achieve, as seen in the war in Ukraine, where troops and equipment remain perpetually vulnerable to being located.

One way to mitigate these risks is to focus on tracking avoidance in snow, which relies on minimizing a soldier’s visual, thermal or electronic signatures. The Norwegian Defense Materiel Agency announced last month that recent trials in Denmark confirmed the effectiveness of the Swedish-made Mobile Camouflage System. Developed by Saab, the cloak is intended to greatly reduce detectability by limiting visual, thermal and radar signatures, including in Arctic conditions.

However, amid new technologies, the Norwegian top-tier Arctic unit continues to return to proven basics: using natural camouflage, such as snow, as its best bet for staying hidden.

“Using snow is our absolute best concealment – we move in darkness, foggy conditions, snow falls, where our tracks can be rapidly filled and hard to follow, and in good weather we stay static and concealed,” the officer explained.

The move came ahead of a silent march that will take place here on Jan. 31 to pay respect and show solidarity to the veterans following remarks made by U.S. President Donald Trump, which discredited the role NATO allied troops played during the war.

In a recent interview with Fox News, the president claimed that while allies sent soldiers to help U.S. troops, they “stayed a little back and a little off the frontlines.” Trump added that the U.S. “never really needed them” in the conflict.

The comments sparked a significant wave of anger among Danish leaders and veterans, who stated that such remarks were disrespectful and insulting to the sacrifices made by Danish troops and those of other countries.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Washington invoked NATO’s Article 5 for the first and only time in history. Denmark was among the first countries to respond to the call for collective defense and deployed troops, as well as military equipment, which played an important part in supporting U.S. operations during the war in Afghanistan in 2002.

A total of 44 Danish soldiers were killed before the Scandinavian country officially pulled out all of its personnel in 2021. The flags placed in flower boxes at the U.S. building in Copenhagen had their names on them before they were removed by embassy staff.

Danish media TV2 reported that they were taken down “as part of the building’s security measures.” Following widespread outrage, the flags were reinstalled and authorized to remain in place.

Residents told Defense News that the tensions between the two countries in recent weeks, centered on a threat made by the Trump administration to use military force to seize control over Greenland, have caused a major loss of confidence in Washington as a credible ally.

“It really hurts to hear those comments and erodes trust. … They were a friend, a big brother for us. It’s been hard to grasp everything that has unfolded,” said Hans Peter H. Michaelsen, a defense analyst who served for over 40 years in the Royal Danish Air Force.

One American citizen who has been residing in Copenhagen for over a year said that he and his family also plan to attend the Jan 31. demonstration to show support.

The testing, which was conducted this week, involved engaging a target at a distance of four kilometers, a first for the smaller and lighter weapon system.

“The successful engagement of a target at 4km today [in Salisbury, England] is a statement of intent – it represents a tangible demonstration of how seriously the British Army is taking the Chief of General Staff’s direction to double fighting power by 2027,” British Army Lt. Col. Chris Woods said in a press release.

The LWCLU is produced by the Javelin Joint Venture, a partnership between Raytheon (RTX) and Lockheed Martin. It is a component of the Javelin missile system designed to be 30% smaller and 25% lighter than the previous Block I Command Launch Unit, which enables soldiers to transport and deploy it faster, according to RTX.

It is said to have doubled target detection and recognition capabilities than its predecessor, per the company’s website, and is compatible with all current, past and future Javelin variants.

The United Kingdom is a key partner in the components supply chain of the Javelin and is expected to produce 3,960 rounds per year by 2026 and 900 LWCLUs by the end of the decade.

The Javelin joint venture provides £56 million ($75 million) per year to the UK economy at current manufacturing rates, an amount that RTX says will increase.

In 2022, the British government requested to buy 513 Javelin LWCLUs for an estimated cost of $300 million.

These are some of the hundreds of munitions that were fired here near the Arctic circle during Exercise Lightning Strike 24 (LS24), where five NATO artillery units – the French, British, Swedish, Finnish and Americans – practiced joint long-range fire capabilities.

LS24 is part of the Dynamic Front series, the alliance’s largest artillery exercise series ever conducted in Europe, taking place across five countries – Finland, Estonia, Germany, Romania and Poland.

The name of the game here in Lapland, the northernmost region of Finland, was to have a call for fire made by one of the nations and the fires delivered by other ones to increase the interoperability of the different artillery systems. In total, this leg of the exercise included 130 pieces of artillery equipment, according to Finnish Col. Janne Makitalo, the event’s director.

The training was meant to rehearse the chain of forward observers finding simulated targets and sending their coordinates to the guns for “servicing,” as the jargon of artillerymen goes.

The information passed digitally all the way to the different platforms, including to the unit in charge of allocating the fire mission, the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, or ARCC, a rapid reaction force maintained by NATO. Officials at that unit, alongside with supporting formations, determined where and which national artillery platform could best respond and would connect it with the assignment.

Ideally, it’s a relay race of sensors and shooters across multiple nationalities, in the blink of an eye.

“When we speak of deciding of the best platform – whether it is Swedish, British, or French – the decision is not based upon the national unit [per say], it is based upon how we can get the best effect on the ground,” British Col. Alex Forbes, commander of the multinational field artillery brigade told reporters.

The specific system that connects all the pieces is ASCA, which stands for Artillery Systems Cooperation Activities, NATO’s digital language for putting “warheads on foreheads,” as another U.S. military adage goes. It’s an encrypted software suite that creates a unified network of communication, digitally linking artillery and command and control systems from different nations.

The software also allowed the sharing of real-time information about the simulated battlefield to other units in Estonia and Germany. While it was created in the 1980s, it gets refined every time it is used in exercises or other events, based on what worked and what did not in the evolving nature of combat, U.S. officers told Defense News.

Fifteen countries used ASCA throughout the event, the highest number ever integrated in a NATO exercise, which allowed to nullify language barriers and share all targeting data between users regardless of individual fire control systems.

Forbes explained that in terms of artillery, the types of operations practiced here, while complex, were necessary to help further the “deconfliction of fires across a battlefield,” something participants were now achieving in an advanced manner.

The exercise scenario featured a simulated near-peer enemy confined to a small “kill-box” – another military term of art that describes a geographic location from which it’s best to stay away – that allies had to neutralize by “massing multinational fires to enable freedom of movement for infantry and armor forces,” Maj. Nicholas Chopp, deputy media chief for US Army Europe and Africa said.

Artillery units used small drones, deployed from concealed sites, to secure the fire missions while vulnerable. Finnish F-18 Hornets were also in the air to help service targets.

Shortening the ‘kill chain’

An objective identified by the heads of the participating artillery units, inspired in part by Russian tactics in Ukraine, was to shorten the amount of time required between the identification of a target and the shot.

“The link between C2 [command and control], the drone and the launcher has to be shortened… We are trying to work on this here, accelerating the time between the target acquisition and the firing,” French Brig. Gen. Eric Lendroit said during a press conference here on Nov. 20.

Maj. Gen. Rafferty, the head of the U.S. 56th artillery regiment, added that Ukraine served as a reminder that the Russian Army “is built around the fires of war-fighting action,” that is long-range artillery protected by sophisticated air defenses.

The U.S. official said that if they were to “counter” such an advantage, then NATO countries have to keep on practicing as a “multinational fires and artillery team” to enable combined arms maneuvers.

Even in light of significant shortages of ammunition faced by several European countries, officials told Defense News that magazine depth – that is, not having sufficient rounds in combat – was not a constraint of the exercise.

While Rafferty and Brig. Gen. Takamaa, Finnish deputy chief of staff for Army operations, said they were unconcerned about munition scarcity, given that the U.S. and Finland both accelerated the production of 155mm shells, the French official shared a different perspective.

“We all know that in [almost] all the nations the stock of ammunition is a key issue – but at the tactical level, [one thing we do practice] is to have the best target acquisition and ammo to produce the greatest effect to minimize our consumption of munitions,” he said during the press conference.

The shift is animated in large part by proliferating ground-based air defenses that make manned flight over the battlefield almost impossible.

“In 2024, helicopters at the front, due to the threat and saturation of anti-aircraft means, primarily perform fire support along the line of combat engagement, using the toss bombing tactics [unaimed strikes by unguided missiles] and have also been a means of countering unmanned systems,” said Serhii Kuzan, a former adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

He recalled the Russian emphasis on helicopters during the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Moscow’s troops had planned a large-scale landing operation, which eventually failed, at the Antonov airport near Hostomel, only 25 kilometers from Kyiv.

The vulnerability of combat helicopters has translated into a high number of losses on the Russian side. In February, a report published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies found that the Russian Aerospace Forces had lost 40% of their pre-war Ka-52 Hokum-B attack helicopter fleet.

“Russian rotary losses have continued, but changes in tactics and the introduction of new weapons, in particular the LMUR (also known as the Kh-39) air-to-surface missile, which provides a greater stand-off range, have had an effect,” Douglas Barrie, senior fellow for military aerospace at IISS told Defense News.

Maj. Gen. Pierre Meyer, commander of the French Army Light Aviation (ALAT), said Russia’s helicopter-based landing attempt should be a cautionary tale for military planners.

“At Hostomel, we saw Russian helicopters intervening almost on parade for two days, at a certain height and arriving en masse, tightly packed – in the end, it’s not a question of whether helicopters still have their place, it’s how we use them,” Meyer told the audience at the Paris Air Forum last month.

“Had we acted like the Russian helicopters, with the mode of action I’m talking about, we would’ve had exactly the same losses,” he said.

Meyer said there is utility in teaming helicopters with drones, as many Western armed forces are already doing, with unmanned aerial vehicles providing additional “aero-combat action and maneuver” to military choppers.

According to Kuzan, the former Ukrainian defense adviser, helicopters could soon become integrated with unmanned forces, “using their command control points, powerful communication relays or as a mobile means of radio-electronic warfare and intelligence.”

Bruno Even, the CEO of Airbus Helicopters, said rotary aviation can still play its trump card of all-around utility.

“Depending on the conflict, the attack helicopter has its rightful place and role to play – their use may have to evolve towards stand-off weapons that allow the aircraft to intervene from a greater distance,” he said at the Paris Air Forum.

Rudy Ruitenberg in Paris contributed to this report.

The platform is the THeMIS 4.5, and it belongs to Milrem Robotics, a 10-year-old company founded in Estonia and bought by the United Arab Emirates’ Edge Group this year that now competes with big players in the unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) market. Standing at a population of just 1.3 million inhabitants, the Baltic nation has become a hub of innovation for UGV technology over the last few years.

Today, Estonia is one of the many nations looking to gradually make ground robots an important part of their military structure and doctrine as a complement to — or outright replacement of — existing capabilities. In this context, the Estonian Defense Forces (EDF) invited vendors here for a two-day trial on June 28 and 29 to show off their vehicles’ abilities.

The objective was for them to finish three daily scenarios, which ranged from easy to challenging, in a time slot of 20 minutes, with minimal operator intervention or in autonomous mode. The demonstration took place in front of observers composed of military officials from over 20 countries, mostly from Europe.

Old hands and startups

The development of UGVs has been a slow process and will likely take more time to refine, as militaries continue to assess their requirements and how they plan to field them in conjunction with legacy systems. Still, interest in the technology remains high.

“It is definitely a field that is taking off,” Markus Otsus, project coordinator at the Estonian Military Academy, one of the event’s organizers, told Defense News. “We expected to have five or six platforms present at the trial, but ended up having 11 and interest from more who could not make it.”

Of those present there, more than half are still in a prototype stage, highlighting how the terrestrial domain has lagged behind the faster-moving field of aerial drones.

As a result, the mixed field of contestants included established players such as Rheinmetall and Milrem, whose respective platforms Mission Master and TheMIS, have already been sold to over a dozen countries. On the other end of spectrum was German startup ARX Landsystems whose Gereon RCS vehicle was finished only ten days before the event.

“Many countries have acquired UGVs as testing units, which often means they are treated as something they have to cherish because they can’t just go around throwing money away when not many units have been produced or are available,” Otsus said.

For them to be deployed in operational scenarios or “in a situation like we’re seeing in Ukraine, they need a lot more robustness in terms of being able to take a beating, not many systems have actually been out in the wild for months on end,” he added.

Stubborn challenges

The biggest challenges faced by UGVs had to do with perception and localization. Most vehicles are currently equipped with light detection and ranging (LIDAR) sensors, which provide long-distance vision during the day and night to identify and avoid objects. This is achieved by generating millions of data-points using laser beams, creating a live-3D map of its surroundings.

Drawbacks of the technology include spotty performance in rain, snow, or fog, while laser-spoofing techniques can disrupt its perceptive abilities. It can also be fooled by dust and dense flora, as seen multiple times over the trial.

Company representatives told Defense News about one scenario in particular, which entailed trees and vegetation of plants more than one meter high, that caused problems in their vehicles’ LIDAR sensing. The robots would halt in their tracks, appearing confused by turning left and right, unable to map their surroundings and compute a path forward. In the end, many UGVs had to be tele-operated – remotely driven by an operator – through such rough patches.

“Another risk of LIDAR in military applications is that as an active laser sensor, it emits pulsed light waves into the environment that can easily be spotted with goggles by opponents,” a Nexter representative here said. The French company had brought its Ultro-600 vehicle to the trials.

Enemy detection is a problem all makers face.

“Yes we do worry about it — which is why for the last year we have been trialing a few different passive sensing solutions that we hope to integrate into the next product release cycle,” Luc Brunet, vice president of Rheinmetall Provectus, said.

The reliability of UGVs’ communication systems is key in any scenario, according to Otsus.

“If you’re in the middle of an operation and urgently need situational awareness but the UGV loses connection or sends an error signal back, then the use-cases in which they can be operated are limited,” he said.

Although in open-road scenarios, most systems performed relatively well and completed them without relying excessively on manual options, the situation grew more complex in forested areas.

For example, Rheinmetall and a Czech University of Defence team reported on both days that the GPS signal was weaker in wooded settings, even though participants were allowed pre-load ten waypoints in their vehicles’ navigation software ahead of time.

“The trees, especially on the second day, were acting as a sort of wall for the platforms’ sensors, making it more difficult for them to find the best route,” Etienne Rancourt, business development manager at Rheinmetall Canada explained.

Upping the autonomy

Although robotic combat is far from achieving full autonomy, gradual progress is still being made. Several armies are upping their combat training with UGVs, including German forces, which practiced with the tracked Ziesel and TheMIS vehicles in February.

British forces tested heavy UGVs — weighing over five tons — in April for the first time, including Milrem’s Type X and Rheinmetall’s Wiesel. In May, the United States, Britain and Australia carried out an artificial intelligence and autonomy exercise involving drones, tanks and the Viking UGV, produced by Iveco-owned subsidiary Horiba Mira. Many countries are also looking to develop their own systems, including the Czech Republic and Spain, which respectively showcased the Taros and SR-0001 medium-sized platforms in Estonia.

According to Ivo Peets, chief of the Estonian Defense Forces’ long-term planning staff, UGVs are best employed in well-defined roles with clear objectives, something that many countries are still defining.

“UGVs have thus far made important advancements primarily in non-kinetic tasks such as mine-clearing, explosive ordnance disposal and evacuation,” he told Defense News.

The current appetite appears to be in operating these platforms in logistics and surveillance roles, according to one Polish official here who said he was seeking smaller-sized UGVs for reconnaissance missions.

That is not to say that countries are giving up on armed versions. Rheinmetall Canada, which spearheads the German company’s ground robot business segment, confirmed to Defense News that the company had been approached by several European countries interested in weaponized platforms.

According to Peets, for that trend to become reality is only a matter of time, though more safety testing and procedure standardization will be required.

The roadmap to UGVs becoming fully integrated into national fighting forces remains blurry. Most country representatives here were going by an assumption of 2040 as the year when the technology will be ready for prime time. For now, that objective entails troops gaining more experience operating and maintaining these systems while also learning how to make them cost effective.

For smaller nations like Estonia, Peets points out that UGVs are not viable in large quantities for the kinds of robot battles that have captured the imagination or armchair generals. However, for countries with specialized infantry units, larger armed forces and longer borders, hundreds would be needed to make a difference, according to German and Finnish officials.

The growth of the UGV industry has been a slow burn, but it finally looks like it is heating up.

The sea ice covering the Arctic ocean is melting at an alarming rate of 13% per decade due to climate change, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This has created for Arctic states – the United States, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia and Sweden – as well as non-Arctic countries a renewed land of opportunity to assert military and commercial control over this recently accessible territory as greater natural resource extraction and new shipping lanes have emerged.

The only issue? The West is fairly late to the game against Russia’s long-standing presence in the region, where experts agree it has succeeded in maintaining military superiority over the last decade.

“Moscow considers the Arctic key to its national security and economic development – this was enshrined in its government statements, policies and especially in its Maritime Doctrines since the early 1990s,” said Samuel Bendett, research analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses’ Russian Studies Program. “Its overall approach to the development of the region today builds on its Cold War legacy, when the country inherited massive technical and knowledge base after 1992 and extended it.”

The Kremlin has secured its Arctic military capability primarily by banking on a “superior number of ice-breakers, its pioneering of Arctic-capable military drones, upgrading off-shore bases, missiles, runways and radar systems,” says James Rogers, associate professor in war studies at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study. It is important to note that the region is also an integral part of Russia’s Northern Fleet operational environment, which houses the country’s most powerful nuclear submarines.

According to data from the American Security Project, in 2020 the number of Russian military bases in use or being modernized in the Arctic was at least 16, of which 12 are air bases, three submarine bases and one drone-aerial reconnaissance base.

Jussi Kangasoja, unmanned aircraft specialist at the Arctic Drone Labs collective in Finland, explains that Moscow has been known to have several operational Arctic-capable drones for years.

“In 2018, Kalashnikov presented the dual-purpose Zala Arctic drone series [including the Zala 421-08M and Zala 421-16E] suited for the region’s conditions,” he said. “In 2019, state sources announced the existence of another UAV able to remain in-flight for four days in the Arctic without the need to rely on jammable satellite-based navigation. In 2021, Radar MMS introduced a heavy lift cargo drone capable of working at -70 degree celsius. It is also documented that Russia is using underwater unmanned drones (UUVs), with some, such as the nuclear-powered Poseidon, developed particularly for Arctic waters.”

To this list, Bendett adds that the following are reported to be in development for the region: tiltrotor and helicopter type drones (VRT-300), the Sarma deep-water autonomous UUV undergoing final tests, and the Shadow-2 UUV. Russia has also initiated its “Project Iceberg” consisting of deep-water drilling and maintenance stations that involve robotic and autonomous UUVs, which he says is “likely the country’s largest and most ambitious project of its kind.”

War in Ukraine

Experts have mixed reviews about whether Russia’s war on Ukraine is detracting attention from Arctic expansion. While Rogers and Kangasoja are of the similar view that Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine “has taken a toll on both Russian Arctic readiness and its deployable assets,” Bendett states that he has not necessarily seen it lessen the pace of its regional development.

On the contrary, he says, “the Russian government kept announcing more resources for the Arctic in 2022, such as the construction of more icebreakers and military submarines, as well as calling for greater attention there in 2023.”

Nonetheless, specialists warn that although the Kremlin appears to have highly advanced Arctic technology, the equipment has yet to see much real use. Kangasoja said that “Russia’s military capabilities, including the performance of its equipment, have been quite generally overestimated prior to the war.” In his opinion, it is clear that the conflict has pulled plenty, if not the majority, of Russian resources in terms of manpower and weapons from Arctic bases, leaving behind minimum crew. “It is also a fact that its production has slowed down because of international sanctions and that the war is consuming its supplies heavily,” he said.

Rogers concurs that in the past Moscow has been known to embellish and overstate the capacity and readiness of its military weapons. However, he emphasizes that he would not “conclude in any way that Russia is weak when it comes to Arctic defense.” In fact, Moscow could very well “be holding back some of its more high-tech systems or Arctic ready drones.”

Where the West stands

The U.S. and Western allies have a number of operational Arctic capabilities gaps to close if they want to catch up or outpace Russian development in the region. Washington currently struggles with many of its drones losing network and communication capabilities when operating above the 77th parallel north, which U.S. Northern Command chief Gen. Glen VanHerck has said hinders the military’s “day-to-day” competitiveness in the region. Additionally, the country lacks sufficient functional infrastructure to support the operation of such systems. Its primary Arctic territory is concentrated along Alaska’s 34,000 miles coastline, where it has five military bases with only one other, Thule Air Base, located in Greenland.

Kangasoja is optimistic that the current state of Russian forces in Ukraine is giving “an almost unprecedented opportunity for the West to not only catch up but also take a strong lead with unmanned technologies within the Arctic context.”

Several Western countries seem to be prioritizing the development of Arctic-capable drones. An example of this is the IDG consortium, a multinational cooperation project among six Arctic-Antarctic nations consisting of Andøya Space Center (Norway), Boeing’s drone company Insitu, C-Core (Canada), Karl Osen (Switzerland), MDSI (Denmark), Scott Polar Research Institute (UK), Viasat (US) and VTT (Finland). Together they have created the Integrated Remote Sensing for the Arctic (IRSA) architecture, a system for monitoring and reconnaissance with four different types of drones, satellites, aircraft and underwater vehicles. The system was first showcased in 2021 in Denmark.

The U.S. possesses the Arctic Shark, designed for beyond-line-of-sight operations in polar regions, which can carry a payload up to 70 pounds (32kg). The U.S. Navy has also been developing a wide-area underwater surveillance system including UUVs, while General Atomics successfully tested the MQ-9A Reaper in the Canadian Arctic in 2021.

“We demonstrated a new capability for effective ISR operations by performing a loiter at 78.31° North (using Inmarsat’s L-band Airborne ISR Service) during a 25.5 hours flight that covered 4,550 miles and reached temperatures at times below -50 degrees Celsius,” General Atomics spokesman Mark Brinkley wrote in an email to Defense News. He added that in recent months, the company has been operating the MQ-9B from snow-covered runways in northern Japan in significantly cold conditions as well.

Among the European countries leading the way is Denmark with its political prioritization of the region, realizing in 2021 an Arctic capability package. Within this, the country has pledged to spend $108 million on fielding several long-endurance surveillance drones, in line with a NATO request for the Faroe Islands, and $8.6 million on ship-based tactical drones.

Another state making strides is Finland, where Arctic Drone Labs is based.

Kangasoja, the UAS Specialist there, explains “we operate a fleet of 20-plus drones and various sensors in the North and are as we speak in the middle of planning new investments. As we are based just below the Arctic circle, our systems are tested in highly challenging conditions.” He says the fleet acts as a training platform for pilots and researchers and they help manufacturers to trial their vehicles in specific test areas throughout Finland.

For his part, Bendett is not as optimistic that the West can match Russian superiority in the region. He emphasizes that Russia has in its possession a dedicated number of financial, technical and human resources for the continuation of Arctic exploration, which include of developing more uncrewed technologies.

“Even if the West develops more uncrewed systems, that is not enough to have a significant presence in the Arctic, which requires [more] icebreakers and manned stations,” Bendett argues.

One thing is clear, says Rogers: Regardless of the conflict in Ukraine, Moscow’s robust rhetoric about the high-priority defense of the Russian Arctic remains unchanged.

Although authorities claimed the UAVs did not fly near critical security facilities, the systems did operate above the country’s territory for several hours.

Defense forces failed to counter the threat, even after deploying fighter jets, attack helicopters and firing warning shots. The helicopters fired a combined 100 rounds, according to the Defense Ministry.

One fighter jet scrambled that day, a KA-1 light attack plane, crashed during takeoff; its two pilots safely ejected, defense officials said.

One drone returned to the North after three hours in South Korea, while the rest disappeared from South Korean military radars one after another, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

Following the incident, South Korea sent surveillance assets near and across the border to photograph key military facilities in the North, the Joint Chiefs said, without elaborating further.

Incidents like the one in late December present a national security threat to the South, as the drones flew long enough to potentially collect intelligence and take images. More alarming, however, is the fact that “South Korea has suffered similar drone incursions repeatedly — in 2014 and 2017, for example — and each time the military says it will improve its counter-drone systems,” according to David Hambling, a writer of drone warfare and technology topics.

North Korea is reportedly expanding its drone capabilities, with a United Nations report from 2016 estimating the country possessed about 300 drones of various types.

It’s unlikely the South’s military was unaware of those drone development efforts, but the “sophistication of the systems as well as their ability to swarm and evade detection” did come as a surprise, said Ken Gause, a North Korea expert with the U.S.-based Center for Naval Analyses think tank.

This suggests “North Korea has benefitted from outside technology, potentially from Russia or Iran,” Gause told Defense News.

Hambling also noted that Russia’s use of Iranian-made drones against Ukraine “is likely to encourage North Korea to increase efforts in this direction, posing an asymmetric threat which Seoul seems poorly prepared for.”

Failed countermeasures

Some experts agreed that South Korea’s failure to shoot down the drones in December simply comes down to the fact that unmanned aircraft are complex and difficult to counter — something that is especially true for smaller and faster UAVs.

“To begin with, air defenses are naturally designed to deal with threats from aircraft, cruise missiles and helicopters, which are all relatively large and fast,” Hambling said. “Many were previously designed to specifically filter out small, slow, low-flying objects, as there were almost invariably birds which would otherwise create many false alerts.”

Case in point: The morning after the Dec. 26 incident, South Korea preemptively deployed fighter planes to its border in response to what turned out to be a flock of birds.

As drones are typically smaller and generally contain fewer metallic elements than larger aircraft, they are “naturally stealthier with a smaller radar signature than larger aircraft, making them harder to detect,” Hambling explained.

Lt. Gen. Kang Shin Chul, South Korea’s chief director of operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged in a televised statement following the Dec. 26 intrusion that the country lacks the ability to detect and strike small surveillance drones with wingspans less than 3 meters (9.84 feet). However, the South has radars and other assets to spot and shoot down larger combat UAVs.

“We have seen this in Saudi Arabia, Russia and Ukraine, all of which have had high-tech defenses penetrated by small, low-tech drones,” Hambling said. “South Korea is certainly not alone in suffering this kind of breach.”

Bruce Bennett, a defense researcher at the think tank Rand, said South Korea’s failed counter-drone measures are due to a lack of focus on that capability. Instead, he explained, the country has prioritized combat aircraft and naval programs.

In addition, he told Defense News, the Army has faced “limitations to its military budgets, tremendous demographic problems, and a lack of personnel from 2005 and on, which led to [a downsizing] of the military, and the trade-off was to acquire new, expensive technologies for the manpower they were losing.”

Next steps

Three days after the airspace incursion, the South Korean military staged large-scale drills to simulate shooting down drones. The exercise involved land-based anti-air guns, UAVs playing the role of enemy drones, and a total of 20 fighter jets, attack helicopters and unmanned assets.

While there was no live fire, it was the country’s first set of major counter-drone drills since 2017, according to military authorities.

And following the aerial trespassing, South Korean authorities have promised to increase defense spending, specifically allocating about $440 million for counter-drone efforts, which would include the development of an airborne laser weapon and a jamming system focused on small drones.

In 2021, the Defense Acquisition Program Administration announced a project to develop a laser anti-aircraft system to protect against mini-UAVs, with local firm Hanwha designated as the test product developer.

Hanwha Defense spokesman Jeff Sung told Defense News that the company is scheduled to complete development of this system in 2023, with initial production scheduled for 2024. Hanwha will make the second iterance of what Sung called “a truck-mounted laser anti-aircraft system” over the next couple of years.

The company is currently trying to improve the system’s mobility by developing smaller and lighter platforms as well as diversifying the output power of lasers to address different types of targets, Sung added.

South Korea is also adding a third squadron dedicated to addressing UAV threats, and the country is now accepting bids for a portable anti-drone jammer for deployment next year.

But experts say more must be done to ensure drone incursions are stopped. Bennett said South Korea must be prepared to not only jam drones but also target their GPS systems with enough electrical power to make the system fail.

North Korea has years of experience developing jamming capabilities to counter GPS-guided weapons that the South and its American allies might deploy in the event of a conflict on the Korean Peninsula. The North reportedly maintains a regiment-sized unit focused on GPS jamming near its capital, and the country previously used Russian-made equipment and satellite navigation technology to jam signals near border regions.

“The experience North Korea has built over the last 20 years in doing this likely makes its drones harder to jam,” Bennett said.

Meanwhile, Hambling recommends South Korea carry out a complete assessment of its air defense systems to identify shortcomings. This could also answer questions about the Dec. 26 incident, he added. “Were the UAVs misidentified? Or were they correctly identified, but did the rules of engagement not allow them to be tackled? Were no suitable assets available for the interception? Or were they simply not detected?”

Gause agreed, noting the importance of identifying where the drones launched from and maintaining an ongoing list of possible future launch sites.

However, he warned, “North Korea does have the ability to pop up from underground facilities to launch things like missiles and drones, which gives the U.S. and Korea very little warning.”

Hyung-Jin Kim with The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Work on the base near the eastern shores of the Aegean Sea proceeded during much of 2022. It was slated to include new maintenance shelters, ramps and taxiway extensions, with a local construction contract for $21 million due to finish in recent weeks.

This modernization tallied with the arrival of a number of Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles at the Greek airfield, as reported by the Greek Reporter in late November. A spokesman for the U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Africa confirmed the arrival to Defense News, saying”the U.S. and Greece worked together to ensure the Larissa base had the capabilities” to support the MQ-9s.

“Larissa Air Base is a strategic location, allowing the MQ-9s to easily support both the eastern and southern flanks of NATO,” the spokesman said. “The move [to place them there] is not in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but this placement does support deterring and avoiding conflict with Russia.”

Officials declined to specify the number of drones based at the installation, citing operational security, though local reports have described eight.

Their deployment was authorized under amendments made to the U.S.-Greek Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement (MDCA) going back to 1990. Among the changes, most recently agreed in 2021, Washington is now allowed to carry out at both Larissa Air Base and Stefanovikio Army Aviation Base the following missions: operation, maintenance and support of U.S. maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft, some technical ground processing, as well as sustainment and support of airlift and logistics support, including tanker aircraft.

The Greek military itself also is trying to get its hands on MQ-9 drones. Athens submitted a program for the acquisition of three of these systems to its Parliamentary Arms Committee, which was approved in July 2022.