EU plans to develop a so-called “drone wall” across NATO’s eastern flank were recently thrown into doubt due to an on-going power struggle between national governments, the NATO alliance and the European Commission. Though such efforts can only be lauded, they must not be advanced so much as to ignore the development of offensive capabilities.
With Russian sabre-rattling continuing along NATO’s eastern flank, the European Union had begun developing a “drone wall” along the borders of members facing Russia (Finland, Estonia and Latvia).
Part of the Eastern Flank Coalition (which includes Baltic States and Poland), the Drone Defence Initiative has been conceived to provide defensive weapons to destroy drones as well as a new command-and-control network. “We do not have the capability to detect [drones], or it is very limited. Our radars see aircraft, they see missiles, but they do not see very precisely drones that fly very, very low,” explained Andrius Kubilius, commissioner of defence and space for the European Commission. Indeed, the EU appeared ready to commit significant communication and financial resources to these efforts.
But the initiative has exposed tensions over who should lead, fund and control Europe’s next line of defence. The strategic question raised by this renewed focus is not whether such defensive systems are useful—they are—but whether Europe is again at risk of mistaking visible fortifications for a comprehensive military posture. The debate echoes a familiar historical warning: the Maginot Line was not a failure because it was poorly designed, but because it became a substitute for a balanced strategy.
A politically attractive shield
The appeal of the drone wall is easy to understand. Persistent surveillance drones, low-cost interceptors and layered air defence systems respond directly to lessons drawn from Ukraine, where cheap drones and missiles have transformed the battlefield. They are comparatively affordable, highly visible to voters, and politically easier to justify as “defensive” investments. According to the European Commission’s own overview of future defence initiatives, “air and missile defence, drones, and space systems” are at the forefront of Europe’s industrial push in the framework of the Readiness 2030 programme.
In this regard, a joint declaration issued at the Eastern Flank Summit in Helsinki in December 2025 called for accelerated work on shared surveillance, early warning and drone defence capabilities, framing them as urgent responses to an increasingly hostile security environment, and calls for “immediate prioritisation of the EU’s Eastern Flank through a coordinated and multi-domain operational approach.”
It is also, in political terms, a “good” kind of spending. It promises protection of territory and critical infrastructure, it is easier to present as a European public good, and it is comparatively legible to voters. Kubilius even emphasised the manageable headline cost, with preliminary estimates indicating that it would cost one billion euros for a drone wall covering Poland and the Baltic states—“It’s not tens of billions or hundreds of billions.”
A modern Maginot Line?
Historical analogies are often misused in defence debates, but the Maginot Line remains instructive when treated with nuance. France’s interwar fortifications performed their intended task: German forces largely avoided frontal assaults in the sectors they covered. The strategic failure lay elsewhere, notably in the lack of sufficient investment in mobile armoured forces, air power and operational concepts capable of taking the fight to the enemy.
A recent War on the Rocks analysis explicitly warned against drawing simplistic conclusions, arguing that Europe’s emerging lines of defence are not “Maginot 2.0” in technical terms, but could become strategically equivalent if they crowd out investment in offensive capabilities. It describes the Eastern Flank initiative at looking to create a “digital shield” designed to limit the human cost, but outlines how some critics see this as “technological fantasy”.
The risk is increasingly visible in current budgetary choices. Germany’s decision to invest heavily in US-made Patriot systems and Israeli Arrow 3 interceptors—alongside IRIS-T—strengthens short-term protection but does little to advance Europe’s defensive base. These purchases amount to billions of euros flowing outside the EU while European manufacturers struggle to secure comparable political backing.
Does Europe have a DPS blind spot?
The imbalance becomes most visible in the field of deep precision strike (DPS). Long-range conventional strike capabilities are a central component of modern deterrence, allowing states to hold adversary logistics, command centres and critical infrastructure at risk well beyond the frontline. They complicate adversary planning, provide escalation control options, and reduce reliance on allies by offering sovereign response capabilities. Yet compared with the political momentum behind drone defence and air shields, DPS remains largely absent from EU-level narratives.
At the political level, awareness is nevertheless clearly present. Andrius Kubilius draws on the “Ukrainian experience” to argue that any Eastern European defence initiative must include deep-strike capabilities “in order to be ready to carry out deep-strikes into enemy territory in the case of enemy invasion.” In other words, even within the “wall” narrative, the logic is not purely defensive: it assumes that denying and neutralising drones is only one layer of a wider posture that must also include the capacity to impose costs at distance.
A collective response to this concern has moreover been sought through the European Long-Range Strike Approach (ELSA), but progress has been slow and timelines extend well into the 2030s. Political ownership remains diffuse, and the project has not been elevated to flagship status, with the unexpected exception of President Macron’s address to the French armed forces on January 15.
The Land Cruise Missile (LCM) is one of the projects identified under ELSA, carried by a European manufacturer, MBDA, and technologically mature, which could offer Europe a sovereign alternative to US-supplied cruise missiles. In capability terms, it directly addresses the gap Kubilius identifies. Politically, however, it remains discreet, lacking any sort of prioritization. The same goes for other, less advanced, ELSA initiatives, such as hypersonic missile being developed by the UK and Germany. Similarly, while competing systems such as the US ERAM might be acquired by European states for Ukraine, promising European initiatives like the Franco-Italian-British Stratus programme seem absent from ELSA, without clear support from its sponsoring governments, despite the urgency of the needs. This raises questions about the coherence of the policies pursued by the participating countries.
The imbalance of having a shield without a sword
However, Eastern European member states have become more and more vocal as they urge Brussels to increase defence spending. Back on December 16, 2025, heads of state and governments from the Eastern flank called for what Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo described as “concrete measures”, with the group announcing a “coordinated operational approach” in areas such as “ground combat capabilities, drone defence, air and missile defence, border and critical infrastructure protection, military mobility and counter mobility as well as strategic enablers.”
The persistent problem is that debates over EU defence funding are unfolding under ever tightening fiscal constraints. Defensive systems, with their visible protective logic, fit that profile. Analytical commentary from the European Leadership Network reflects the same logic. In arguing for scaling low-cost defensive technologies such as counter-drone systems, the piece frames them as a rational response to lessons from Ukraine; effective, affordable and rapidly deployable.
Indeed, deterrence rests on the adversary’s belief that aggression will impose unacceptable costs. Europe faces a problem of balance. Today, offensive strike capabilities remain fragmented and politically uneasy. History’s lesson is clear: defence alone is never enough. Europe’s security depends on convincing adversaries that aggression will cost more than they can bear.
