In September 2023, in Bucharest (RO), NSPCoE’s Director Col. (ITA CC) Luigi Bramati had a crucial meeting with the Romanian Jandarmeria Leadership.

That was the proper occasion to present the Lines of Effort for the upcoming triennium. Among them, there was a list of potential research areas for the year 2025, including the topic “drones”. While starting the presentation, the Director was immediately faced with an interesting, game-changing question: “Drones: why 2025? We need them now”.

It was a thought-provoking proposal and a complex challenge, so our Director accepted it and took the responsibility to deep-dive into the issue of the drones’ proliferation and spill-over from conflict zones (and particularly, in the specific case, from the Ukraine-Russia warzone).

As a result, from 6 to 8 March 2024, the NSPCoE hosted a dedicated unclassified workshop aimed to support the Alliance with its specific expertise, in the remit of the civil-military integration of systems, facing new challenges such as non-cooperative, malign and potentially armed drones. The event gathered stakeholders, subject matter experts and practitioners from NATO, NATO Countries, EU and other IOs along with the SP Community, in order to identify how Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) play – or should play – their role in a harmonized “system of systems” landscape.

The attendees were tasked to analyse how the Collective Defence, engaged in its endeavour of facing the dynamically growing threat posed by the proliferation of weaponized drones, is missing a substantial contributor, that happens to be a primary actor in the mitigation of the threat itself under the perspectives of the situation awareness and protection of civilians.

The brilliant outcomes of this amazing challenge were gathered in a dedicated technical report, to be disseminated among relevant stakeholders.

But it was not enough.

One of the lessons learned during the workshop was the crucial lack of awareness about the Drones’ threat, how to recognize it, how to understand it, how to face and defuse it. So, as part of the effort to promote a better understanding, functional to enhance the Collective Defence task, the Centre decided to elaborate further on the topic, editing the first report to draft a book suited for unlimited dissemination.

Thanks to an astounding revising work by our Lessons Learned Branch, in September 2024 the “Drone Book” project was finalized and the report was printed.

The outcome was formally presented on November 2024 in Romania, during a national Workshop in the field of Operational Management, so we are now able to offer You all a digital copy here on our website; You can find it in our online library, at https://www.nspcoe.org/books/

Our deepest gratitude to Romanian Jandarmeria Leadership for driving our attention to such an interesting and crucial topic, and to all the team for the collective effort!