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RIGA, Latvia — In a nondescript factory on the edge of Latvia’s capital, a small team is trying to solve a continental-sized problem: How can Europe protect itself from swarms of Russian attack drones? Used on an almost nightly basis in the war in Ukraine, a spate of mysterious drone incursions above airports and sensitive sites has also highlighted Europe’s vulnerability to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and sparked alarm that NATO nations are unprepared to defend themselves from the cheap but effective weaponry. As a result, European leaders have backed plans for a “drone wall,” a network of sensors and weapons to detect, track and neutralize intruding UAVs, and in Riga, the team at a small tech company called Origin is on the forefront of this new, high-tech battleground. Its solution, a 3-foot-tall interceptor drone named “Blaze.” Powered by an artificial intelligence system, it has been trained to recognize a hostile target and navigate close to it. It will then alert a human operator, who will make a decision on whether to intercept and push a button which explodes a 28-ounce warhead, self-destructing the drone and hopefully bringing down its target too. “We don’t fly these systems. These systems fly themselves,” Origin CEO Agris Kipurs told NBC News last week in an interview outside the factory, adding that Blaze addressed “the problem of relatively cheap, low-flying threats that are deployed in volumes.” Kipurs, who previously developed drones to follow and film extreme sports athletes, said he pivoted to focus on defense technology after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Ukrainian government estimates Russia is now making more than 300 drones a day at the cost of just a few thousand dollars — each enough to pound the capital, Kyiv, and other cities with massive aerial attacks every night. Ukraine has also turned to relatively cheap drone technologies in a bid to offset Russia numerical advantages on the battlefield; last year, it became the first country to establish a separate branch of the military dedicated to drones. But the flurry of mysterious drone sightings over Europe in recent months has raised hackles among the continent’s leaders. Earlier this month, Belgium said UAVs were seen for three nights in a row over a military air base, while reported sightings above civilian airports in Germany, Sweden and Denmark earlier this year have forced them to temporarily halt flights. Perhaps the most serious wake-up call came on the night of Sept. 9, when multiple Russian drones crossed into Poland in what European officials described as a deliberate provocation. NATO said it shot down seven of them using F-35 fighter jets and interceptor missiles, during a seven-hour aerial battle — the first time that its forces had opened fire on Russian aircraft since the start of the war in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin, “has put us on notice that we need to quickly build those steps of the ladder of the defense of our outer perimeter,” Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said in an interview in London last month. Most of the downed drones were found to be unarmed decoys made of polystyrene and estimated to cost Russia only around $10,000 each. NATO’s response involved $80 million F-35s launching missiles that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece. It’s an imbalance in cost which Sikorski acknowledged was “not the most economical way of dealing with such a threat,” while the European Union has said cheaper, more agile technology must be a key part of the so-called “drone wall.” “It’s just very hard to make any sense of firing a precision-guided missile towards a target that is at least 10 times cheaper than the means you intercept it with,” Kipurs said. “You have to turn it upside down. You have to be 10 times cheaper than the target you are intercepting.” While his company would not reveal the cost of each interceptor, he said it was confident it could produce them cheaply enough to deal with large volumes of Russian drones. In the event that an operator aborts an interception, the drone will fly back to base ready to be used again — a potential major cost-saver. Origin is one of a growing number of defense technology firms that have sprung up in the Nordic and Baltic nations, where proximity to Russia is a spark for innovation and most focus on lessons learned from the battlefields of Ukraine. Dominic Surano, a director of special projects at Nordic Air Defence, a Sweden-based company said the mission was, “How can we thread that needle and drive down the cost per kill while still making something that is very functional?” His firm is developing lightweight missiles to target drones, small enough to be mounted on a vehicle or fired from a handheld launcher by a soldier or a law enforcement officer protecting civilian infrastructure, like an airport. It is also testing its own autonomously guided interceptor drone. Surano, a U.S. citizen, who previously worked at Anduril, an American defense firm that focuses on drone warfare and valued at more than $30 billion, added that it was exciting to work in the European defense field where budgets are tighter and companies are smaller. “There’s just different energy in an office that has 25 people than a company that has over 5,000,” he said. But while small may be beautiful in terms of development, scaling up production remains a challenge, according to Kipurs of Origin, where drones are assembled by hand by technicians at the factory in Riga. “The scale is the challenge in Europe. Europe has to make its mind up and place bets on the champions so that champions get to produce at large scale,” he said, adding that production could be ramped up quickly if governments decided to aggressively invest in interceptors. Latvia has already begun buying Blaze drones to supplement its missile defense systems, according to Maj. Modris Kairiss, one of the country’s foremost military UAV specialists. One major draw for a country like Latvia, which has a population of less than 2 million, is that large numbers of AI-powered drones could be controlled by a small number of human operators,” he said, adding, “We are a small country, we need to look for technologies which save on manpower.”
