NATO needs to rethink how it defends its eastern flank against Russian aerial threats, with industry leaders warning that existing air defence systems are too expensive to protect thousands of potential targets.
Speaking at the Resilience Conference in London, Kusti Salm, CEO of Estonian missile manufacturer Frankenburg Technologies and former permanent secretary of Estonia’s Ministry of Defence, said the scale of the threat demanded a different approach.
Frankenburg has identified approximately 5,000 potential targets across Finland, the Baltic states and Poland based on Russia’s targeting practices in Ukraine, said Salm. He added that NATO lacks the resources to provide even a fraction of these sites with conventional air defence protection. Frankenburg and others believe that the solution is affordable, short-range interceptors that can be deployed locally and manufactured in large quantities.
“Spot defence is the only way I can affordably do it at scale,” Salm said, explaining why Frankenburg had prioritised developing its short-range Mark I missile.
The company is also developing its longer-range Mark II interceptor to counter emerging threats from low-cost cruise missiles.
Salm warned that Russia’s approach to warfare is driven by the economic imbalance between relatively inexpensive weapons and the far more valuable infrastructure they can destroy. Defending against such attacks with costly conventional systems risks becoming unsustainable.
Janne Hietala, CEO of Finnish autonomous airship manufacturer Kelluu, argued that NATO must also reconsider how it monitors and detects threats.
Kelluu’s hydrogen-powered airships provide persistent surveillance across remote areas, including Finland’s 1,300-kilometre border with Russia. Its current systems can remain airborne for more than 12 hours, while a second generation being tested this year is designed to operate for several days.
Hietala said future surveillance networks should be distributed across numerous inexpensive platforms rather than concentrated in a handful of costly systems that could be destroyed in an attack.
Both executives argued that adopting new technology would require changes to military doctrine and force structures, rather than simply purchasing additional equipment.
Hietala called for a “complete force redesign,” with autonomous and distributed capabilities integrated into existing military operations, while Salm also questioned whether Western defence priorities adequately reflected the scale of the threat.
“If in our defence tech conferences, the main answer in the future is AI and autonomy,” he said, Russia’s focus remains on “more and bigger bombs.”
The challenge for NATO, the panel suggested, is not simply developing cheaper defensive technology, but deploying enough of it to make large-scale attacks less attractive in the first place.
