Outdated laws and lack of equipment leave West vulnerable to mass drone attack, expert warns

Writing exclusively for LBC Opinion, Jan-Hendrik Boelens proclaimed that adversaries are actively testing Western defences and finding them severely lacking.

Boelens, the founder and CEO of counter-drone firm Alpine Eagle, pointed to a disturbing pattern of incursions over highly sensitive military installations, including Ramstein Air Base in Germany, sites across the United Kingdom, and facilities along the US East Coast.

He said that these are not simple hobbyist drones, but more sophisticated, long-range systems potentially gathering intelligence for hostile states.

“The sightings of recent times may have been reconnaissance missions, testing our response times and capabilities,” Boelens wrote in a powerful critique of current defences. “If so, they will have found us wanting.”

The threat extends far beyond the military, with the potential to paralyse civilian life and national economies, he argued. He highlighted the chaotic 2018 shutdown of London's Gatwick Airport as a prime example of this vulnerability.

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The incident, caused by drone sightings, grounded approximately 1,000 flights, stranded 140,000 passengers, and exposed a critical failure in protecting national infrastructure.

According to Boelens, a primary cause for this vulnerability is an outdated legal framework that cripples any effective response.

“The legal framework in most Western countries does not allow for the shooting down of drones,” he wrote, adding that even civilian contractors tasked with protecting critical sites are restricted from bringing down threatening aircraft.

Compounding this legal paralysis is a significant equipment deficit. Boelens charged that law enforcement agencies are “generally not equipped with hard kill measures, or even an adequate number of detection systems.”

Even military operators, he noted, face “significant restrictions on deploying jamming and hard kill measures,” leaving a dangerous gap in the defensive shield of Western nations.

To counter this escalating threat, Boelens urged “decisive action” on two fronts. First, he called for new legal frameworks that explicitly grant authority to security operators to “bring down malicious drones or prevent them from entering restricted areas.”

He also stressed the imperative to equip both police and military forces with robust, modern counter-unmanned aerial system (C-UAS) capabilities, from detection to interception.

Boelens's firm, Alpine Eagle, which he founded in 2023 with a team of machine learning and aeronautical engineers, is racing to provide such a solution.

He described his company's Sentinel system as an “airborne sensor and effector network” of networked drones.

The system is designed not only to detect and engage hostile drones but also to track them to their landing site, a feature crucial for forensic analysis and identifying the operators.

The peacetime challenges, Boelens warned, are dwarfed by the potential for devastation in a real conflict. Citing Russia's deployment of over 1,000 drones a day against Ukraine, he painted a grim picture of what a motivated adversary could do: ground entire air squadrons with a swarm attack, deliver chemical agents, or disrupt critical infrastructure to cause mass panic.

“We must act now to prevent a potential ‘Drone Pearl Harbor’ in the future,” he concluded.