Daily Briefing: Europe's Drone Gap and the Race to Catch Up

During the early stages of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, drones played a more limited role than they do today. However, as Ukraine defied expectations and remained independent, its military leadership increasingly viewed drones as the solution to its manpower shortages and ammunition deficit in comparison to Russia. This expectation has been proven true; at present, Ukrainian officials estimate drones are responsible for 70-80% of frontline casualties. As a result of their high capacity to hit targets, production has expanded as militaries increasingly rely on drone capabilities.

This has, according to Davyd Aloian, the Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine, resulted in a situation where “we have a kill zone in some of the areas, which is 50 kilometres” – a kill zone so effective that “any vehicles there, they will be demolished and destroyed in several minutes.” Illustrating the depth of change in modern warfare, traditional large weapons of artillery, tanks, and other large land-based military equipment are being forced to withdraw several kilometres from frontline positions, creating a new combat dynamic where post-Second World War mechanisms of combat can no longer operate in an area with drone coverage – redefining locations where military equipment can successfully be utilised.

In reaction to the rising global threats, NATO pledged that 5% of GDP would be spent on defence by 2035 at the annual summit in The Hague. This compares to the current EU spending levels of approximately €381 billion (£325 billion), or 2.1% of GDP. Furthermore, most countries as yet have no reliable or stated plan to meet the target on time unless large borrowing is planned.

Ukraine offers the clearest picture yet of what fighting a drone-saturated war actually costs, given roughly a third of its weapons acquisition budget now goes towards drones alone. This spend translated into close to four million drones produced across 2025, with the army presently burning through 270,000 to 300,000 a month just to sustain the front. It is against this benchmark, rather than any European stockpile figure, that the real scale of what a modern war demands becomes clear.

Set against Ukraine’s monthly burn rate, Europe’s current drone inventories remain small relative to Ukraine’s wartime consumption. France has announced ambitions to significantly expand its drone fleet, with Army officials stating they aim to field around 20,000 military drones by 2030 and eventually train every soldier to operate one. Even at that scale, however, France’s planned inventory would be small compared with Ukraine’s wartime drone consumption, which is measured in tens of thousands of drones per month.

Russia’s own trajectory makes the comparison starker still. Ukraine’s former Commander-in-Chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, has estimated that Russia aims to manufacture 7.3 million FPV drones in 2026 – equivalent to roughly 20,000 drones every day. Such an output would far exceed the annual inventories or procurement plans announced by most European militaries, underscoring the industrial scale at which drone warfare is now being pursued.

For European readers, the drone gap represents an industrial and military shortfall. Meeting anything close to Ukraine’s burn rate would mean Europe’s defence sector moving away from the slow, expensive, small-batch model it has relied on for decades, and towards the kind of rapid, disposable, mass-manufactured production Ukraine has been forced into out of necessity. That shift carries consequences for jobs, for domestic supply chains, and for how much of Europe’s future defence capability actually depends on manufacturers outside the continent.

For readers elsewhere, a more heavily armed and drone-focused Europe reshapes the wider picture. It changes the terms of NATO burden-sharing, as member states are pushed to demonstrate that spending commitments translate into deployable capability. It also feeds into global defence markets more broadly, as governments outside Europe watch Ukraine’s experience and draw their own conclusions about what future wars will require. Set against Russia’s own drone ambitions, the comparison illustrates the scale of the capability gap many Western countries are seeking to address.

The likely near-term development is slow: fragmented procurement and coordination between member states, but in larger orders yet not at a pace that would prompt the development of an industrial base which could support a modern war’s demands. Many analysts consider the target highly ambitious given current industrial capacity. Industrial capacity of the kind Ukraine has built cannot be developed rapidly without solid action taken collectively and seriously, yet Russia’s own production shows no sign of slowing in the meantime. Unless European governments treat drone manufacturing as a long-term industrial priority rather than solely as a defence procurement issue, the gap this briefing has laid out is likely to remain closer to where it stands today than where the pledges say it should be by 2035.

Best wishes,  

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