Drone sightings over critical infrastructure and barracks are increasing. There is no concept of defense. How can that be?
Recently in Schleswig-Holstein: The Brunsbüttel industrial park site was flown over by larger drones several times in August, sometimes in the middle of the night. There is an LNG terminal nearby that supplies liquefied natural gas for the German gas network. A few hundred meters further are the locks to the Kiel Canal. And the Brunsbüttel nuclear power plant, which was on the grid until 2007, is not far either. A suspicion quickly arises: spying on Russian services. The public prosecutor’s office is investigating.
Brunsbüttel is not the only place in Germany where drones are not supposed to fly, and yet some are spotted again and again. At military training areas where Ukrainian soldiers are trained. At airports and other critical infrastructure. The cases are increasing and are becoming an increasingly political problem because they reflect poorly on Germany’s drone defense system. Are we sufficiently prepared?
“In Germany, we are almost bare-bones when it comes to drones of all kinds and effective drone defense capabilities, as well as electronic warfare,” warns Roderich Kiesewetter. The ability is “underdeveloped,” says the CDU member of the Bundestag and former Bundeswehr colonel star. And Germany therefore sees massive problems.
The Greens are also alarmed. “There are two gaps: A capability gap, quite real. Obviously, there are currently no sufficient systems to fend off such military drones,” says Schleswig-Holstein Green MP Jan Kürschner. “Secondly, it is a problem of dealing with responsibilities.” Drone defense is initially an original police task, says Kürschner. “But the police are simply overwhelmed by it at the moment. We need to urgently address this issue.”
Confusion of responsibilities: When the Bundeswehr calls the police
The confusion of responsibilities is developing into a security risk. The Bundeswehr has the most precise air surveillance capabilities. According to a spokesman for the Federal Ministry of Defense, if a drone is spotted near a German military location, it may only intervene in exceptional cases: if there is immediate danger to the location or the soldiers.
In all other cases, the Bundeswehr’s responsibility ends at the barracks fence. Outside of that, said the spokesman, “we have to coordinate with the civil authorities responsible for this area, and they must then act.”
Operators of critical infrastructure such as the LNG terminal or the chemical park in Brunsbüttel must protect themselves from incidents. One reason why company fire departments and factory security are standard. “The large chemical parks, substations, wind farms with their data centers, all of this is regulated by private security services,” says Martin Maslaton, representative of the Civil Drones industry association (BVZD). “But legally there is no permission to fend off drones.” Some of the options are even expressly forbidden: “Some of the effective measures would take place outside of one’s own property.”
What Maslaton means: Drones are usually brought to land by jamming the radio signal between the drone and the pilot. The aircraft should then automatically land or return to the takeoff point. In order to enforce this, however, a powerful radio transmitter must be used in a targeted manner – the so-called jamming. But this can also disrupt all other radio networks in the area. Its use is therefore almost always prohibited for private companies. Like the Bundeswehr, you have to call the police if drones are outside your own premises.
A drone is used by soldiers of the Russian UAV unit in the military special operations zone
© Alexei Konovalov / TASS / Picture Alliance
Drone defense: upgrading against hobby drones
After all: Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania have procured drone defense systems for the police in recent months. Officials are currently being trained on the systems.
The federal police at Frankfurt Airport will receive a drone defense system from Securiton for “detection, verification and intervention” — recognition, checking, interception. Securiton, a subsidiary of the Swiss company Securitas, has already developed drone defense solutions for the World Economic Forum. It can detect drones, force them to land and determine the location of the pilots. The target group here too: small and micro drones.
A project was carried out at the Bundeswehr University in Hamburg to combat drones. Good drones are supposed to fish unwanted drones out of the sky – with shot nets in which the attacked drone gets stuck. “Project Falke” promises a “dynamic dogfight” – i.e. the fully automatic interception of the other drone. The system was first tested at Hamburg Airport – and it works. But this is also only aimed against small drones; the hunter drones fly at a maximum speed of 100 kilometers per hour for a small area.
The Falcon is also likely to be helpless against drones of military quality. What civilian drone defense systems can hardly do: intercept spy drones like the Russian Orlan or even combat drones. They fly largely autonomously, significantly faster and sometimes over hundreds of kilometers. They are the much greater danger.
For the CDU Bundestag member Roderich Kiesewetter it is clear: such drones will hardly be able to be managed with the equipment now available. “There are no artificial intelligence modules for automatic target detection,” is how he describes the situation. “The drone defense on our frigates, for example, is not sufficient for the threat situation, which is why our military capability in the Red Sea, for example, is more than limited.” The Hesse frigate has already shot down Houthi militia drones there – and once almost accidentally US drone.
Will Ukraine, of all places, help us?
And at home in Germany? The Bundeswehr is currently purchasing the Skyranger, a cannon wheel tank that can shoot down drones. 19 units were ordered for the successor to the decommissioned Gepard tank. That is three more than the Bundeswehr has airfields and air bases: 16 in Germany.
This compares to more than 2,000 facilities in Germany that are considered critical infrastructure, such as waterworks or power plants. Depending on how you count, there are probably tens of thousands of sensitive systems whose failure would cause Germany a lot of trouble.
Anti-aircraft missiles such as Iris-T-SLS are also in short supply and expensive. In addition, they are actually intended for even more dangerous offensive weapons, aircraft, cruise missiles and missiles. Weapons manufacturers such as Rheinmetall or KNDS are currently developing smaller systems for launching weapons – often also in autonomous operation. Raytheon and Diehl Defense have even developed cannons that are intended to clear the sky from drones with targeted energy shots. But their use in the densely populated Federal Republic outside of a war seems hardly conceivable.
Could our own armed drones be the solution to knocking spy drones out of the sky? Not yet. For years, federal governments had argued about the purchase of weapon-capable drones for Bundeswehr missions. The Bundeswehr leased five drones of the Israeli type HeronTP, and they have been available to the Bundeswehr since May. They were intended for foreign missions such as Mali or Afghanistan, where opponents were primarily armed with rifles, grenade launchers, pickup trucks and rocket-propelled grenades. For a scenario with an enemy like Russia and its military capabilities, they are largely useless, lame ducks: They would have quickly been shot out of the sky, according to military circles. But the Bundeswehr does not yet have any other combat drones – including none that could take other drones out of the sky.
CDU man Kiesewetter is therefore relying on closer cooperation with Ukraine: “Major developments ignore the reality of the discussion in Germany, let alone that we are investing in development with relevant partners.” The Ukrainian arms companies are currently the largest experts in this field and Germany can only benefit from this.
However, a problem would remain even if the missing technology were procured: shooting down a drone over critical infrastructure such as chemical plants, LNG terminals or power plants poses high risks. Debris could have devastating consequences there. “You can’t shoot down the drones over Brunsbüttel,” says Jan Kürschner, member of the Green Party.
The excitement is over there for now. There has been peace in the Brunsbüttel night sky for a few weeks now. But no one knows for how long. “No, citizens don’t have to worry,” says Mayor Martin Schmedtje star. But an uneasy feeling remains: “Personally, the drone flights made me think, as they bring the conflict in Ukraine right to our doorstep.” Schmedtje will not be the last German mayor to have to think about this.
There are currently no changes planned to the legal requirements for drone flights. And a law to better protect critical infrastructure has been stuck in the federal government for over a year. It was actually supposed to come into force in October.