Secretary General Mark Rutte uses NATO’s C-UAS Industry Day to underline lessons from Ukraine and recent drone incursions into Allied airspace.

NATO is putting counter-drone technology and industry partnerships at the center of its capability agenda, hosting a dedicated Counter-Uncrewed Autonomous Systems (C-UAS) Week at Alliance headquarters in Brussels.

On January 28, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte joined an Industry Day during C-UAS Week, bringing together more than 100 representatives from NATO bodies, Allied nations and industry to discuss how best to counter the growing threat from small drones. The event follows an October 2025 decision by NATO defence ministers to expand counter-drone capabilities across the Alliance. 

“Drones are here to stay. Growing in quantity, growing in quality,” Rutte told participants, pointing to the war in Ukraine and recent incursions into Allied airspace as proof that NATO has to move faster on detection, tracking and defeat options. “We need to be able to respond to this threat and we must be prepared,” he said. 

C-UAS Week and the Layered C-UAS Initiative

The Brussels C-UAS Week sits against a broader modernization push inside NATO. Allied Command Transformation (ACT) has designated the Layered Counter-UAS Initiative (LCI-X) as one of its 2026 “Beacon Projects,” intended to accelerate how threat-informed C-UAS concepts move from experimentation into deployable capability. 

LCI-X focuses on layered defence architectures—integrating sensors, command-and-control and effectors across air bases, deployed formations and critical infrastructure—and relies heavily on industry input through RFIs and live demonstrations. 

This week’s industry day is a visible opportunity for NATO to brief companies on those requirements, while giving vendors a venue to highlight systems that can plug into a multi-layer, multi-domain architecture rather than operate as standalone point solutions.

From TIE Exercises to Rapid Fielding

The Brussels event also builds on a series of technical interoperability exercises where NATO has already been testing commercial and military C-UAS systems in the field. In 2023 and 2024, NATO’s Counter-UAS Technical Interoperability Exercises (TIE) brought together more than 60 systems—sensors, jammers, effectors and threat drones—to evaluate how they detect, identify, track and defeat small UAS under common standards. 

Those events, hosted by the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA) and national hosts, have been used to stress-test radar, RF-sensing, EO/IR, command-and-control and effectors in live scenarios, feeding directly into NATO’s evolving C-UAS reference architectures and data-sharing requirements. 

At the same time, ACT and NCIA are running parallel market surveys and RFIs. One recent Invitation for International Bidding seeks “red force” support for the Layered Counter-UAS Initiative through 2026, while an NCIA multi-award framework is pre-qualifying mobile, transportable and static C-UAS systems for rapid fielding in 2026. 

Ukraine, Airspace Incursions and NATO’s C-UAS Demand Signal

Operationally, NATO’s demand signal is being shaped by two trends: intensive drone use over Ukraine and an uptick in drone incidents near Allied territory.

Since 2022, NATO has expanded a major anti-drone exercise in the Netherlands into an 11-day event with more than 20 nations and 50 companies, testing jamming, hacking and layered defensive tactics. Ukraine joined the exercise in 2024, bringing first-hand combat experience as both Russian and Ukrainian forces have dramatically scaled use of small UAS, loitering munitions and FPV drones. 

Closer to NATO borders, Allies have reported multiple incursions by suspected Russian drones and debris into Polish and Romanian airspace, while Spain recently deployed a fighter wing to the Baltic Air Policing mission with an organic counter-drone system for the first time—an indicator that base defense and air policing are now being planned with small UAS in mind. 

For Alliance planners and industry alike, those operational realities are driving an emphasis on scalable, interoperable C-UAS systems that can be fielded quickly and integrated into existing air and missile defence constructs rather than treated as one-off gadgets. External analyses of NATO’s C-UAS posture have emphasized the need for clear capability requirements, scale and interoperability, and multidomain integration—points the Brussels C-UAS Week appears designed to reinforce. 

What It Means for C-UAS Vendors

For companies in the counter-UAS space, NATO’s C-UAS Week and Industry Day signal several practical priorities:

• Mature systems that already meet, or can be engineered to meet, NATO data-link and interoperability standards are likely to see more interest than closed, proprietary solutions. 
• The Alliance is focused on layered coverage—from tactical edge to fixed sites—creating demand for everything from man-portable sensors and effectors to base-defence “sets” that can cover large airfields or critical infrastructure. 
• Lessons from Ukraine and NATO exercises are pushing requirements toward rapid setup, mobility, and the ability to deal with swarms and FPV-style threats, not just traditional quadcopters.