When NATO leaders gathered in Ankara on July 7–8, they made counterdrone defense the summit’s signature industrial commitment, pledging more than forty billion dollars over five years, a new NATO counterdrone marketplace, and a fivefold increase in drone-operator training by the end of 2027. The commitment is driven by a growing sense of urgency in a Europe that has discovered that the simplest and cheapest weapons can reach deep into allied territory and that it is not ready to defend itself against this latest threat.
Since Russian drones crossed into Poland in September 2025, sightings have closed airports from Copenhagen to Munich, imposing flight cancellation and diversion costs out of all proportion to intruders that often carried no warhead at all. The International Institute for Strategic Studies has counted 144 incidents across thirteen European states in eighteen months. The European Union’s answer is the drone wall, the first flagship of its Defense Readiness Roadmap, with full functionality promised by the end of 2027. There is a pressing question of capacity. Europe builds no combat-proven armed drone at scale, fields no drone exporter of global consequence, and runs a counterdrone sector fragmented across numerous national programs. Its flagship platform, the Eurodrone, has slipped by years and just lost France’s participation. Even Helsing’s CA-1 Europa, one of the most ambitious European combat-drone projects, is not due to fly until 2027, and its electronic-attack variant is not to enter service until 2031, four years after the wall is meant to be finished. Money is arriving, but money is not yet capacity, and the wall’s deadline is eighteen months away.
Europe has three ways to erect a drone wall
Europe has three options to address what is essentially an industrial policy problem. Europe can build its own industry from a low base, which is the right long-run choice, but an implausible one in the short term. It can buy what it needs from the United States and Israel, at the cost of the autonomy its rearmament is meant to purchase and against systems priced backwards for the threat: the interceptor costs far more than the drone it stops. A Patriot missile runs to roughly four million dollars, and even Raytheon’s Coyote, an interceptor purpose-built for downing drones, costs about $100,000, which is why the Pentagon itself has moved to buy Ukrainian interceptors costing about a thousand dollars apiece. Buying Ukrainian, however, has serious limitations: Ukraine’s production is claimed first by its own war, and its factories operate within Russian reach.
Alternatively, Europe can integrate the capacity of the one NATO ally that already builds these systems at scale and under fire: Turkey. The Turkish option is not free of autonomy costs either. The difference is that Turkish capacity can be integrated rather than merely imported. This is particularly true if the systems are produced through joint ventures with European firms and carry European engines and optics, which makes the relationship one of interdependence rather than one-way dependence.
Dollars and sense
The options come with different price tags. Ukraine now builds interceptor drones costing between 1,000 and 4,000 euros ($1,142 and $4,567) against Shahed-class weapons costing tens of thousands of euros, and it produced roughly 100,000 of them in 2025. The systems that win this fight are cheap, iterated at speed, and built at volume, which is precisely the profile of the Turkish and Ukrainian industries and precisely not that of Europe’s deliberate, slow-moving procurement.
The track record of Turkey’s defense industry is impressive. Turkey’s arms exports grew 122 percent between 2016–20 and 2021–25, and it is now one of a handful of states that dominate the global market for combat drones. Its uncrewed combat aircraft have reached more than thirty countries, including six NATO allies; Poland was the first, followed by Romania. Baykar reportedly earned roughly $1.9 billion in 2024, almost all of it from exports. The company produces combat-proven, NATO-interoperable systems—priced at a fraction of Western equivalents.
The counterdrone portfolio the EU’s drone wall most needs also comes from Turkey: Aselsan’s layered detection, jamming, and laser systems, which have matured alongside Baykar’s drones.
In terms of capability, cost, and speed, the Turkish option has clear advantages. Its drawback is political rather than financial: Turkey stands outside the EU’s defense-industrial architecture and is excluded from the SAFE procurement instrument, at least for now. So bringing its capacity in requires terms the EU has yet to set.
The Turkish option is the one that European policy has yet to discuss openly. Yet interfirm cooperation is already underway. Baykar has acquired Italy’s Piaggio Aerospace, which means that its Bayraktar TB2 and Akinci can conceivably be built on EU territory. In June 2026, Rome cleared a joint venture between Baykar and Leonardo with sales restricted to NATO customers; a month earlier, the two had flown their first crewed-uncrewed teaming trial, a Leonardo trainer commanding a Baykar Kizilelma jet drone. Poland and Romania already operate their Turkish fleets inside NATO’s eastern air defenses.
The EU’s local-content rules and its vetoes on Turkish association have not kept Turkish capacity out of Europe. Yet they have kept it ungoverned, integrated case by case through national investment screens and corporate deals, with no common terms. The absence of a cooperative framework benefits neither party. What Europe forgoes by proceeding this way is everything an institutional framework would carry: common end-use and reexport standards, security-of-supply commitments, a forum for disputes, and the leverage that comes from bargaining as a bloc rather than a sequence of national regulators. What Ankara would gain from a more institutionalized cooperative framework is predictability and sustainability, since every transaction remains exposed to the politics of its host country and geopolitical uncertainty.
The counterdrone commitments unveiled at the summit are a NATO undertaking, running alongside the EU’s drone wall rather than within it. Leaders went further, endorsing a Strategy for Industry-NATO Cooperation and launching an Innovation Scale-Up Package whose NATO Engine—envisioned as a network of manufacturers, factories, and firms—will pool spare production capacity across the alliance, Ukraine included. Europe is thus building the same capability along two tracks, albeit with different memberships. Turkey is a full participant in the NATO one—in its counterdrone marketplace, its training pools, and its production network—and stands outside the European one.
That asymmetry is a European problem more than a transatlantic one. On the NATO track, Washington and Ankara already sit on the same side, operating in the same marketplace and drawing on the same production network. It is inside the European instruments that Turkey has no settled place. The Turkish defense industry has proven its capability and potential. What is missing is the political decision to set terms for its entry.
What to do now
What are the next steps? A governed version of the Turkish option would not require resolving the political disputes that keep Turkey out of the EU’s instruments or pretending the disputes do not exist. It would require four things:
- Treating drones and counterdrone systems as the pilot sector for third-country access. Rather than settling Turkey’s place in the EU’s defense-industrial architecture wholesale, the EU would negotiate access terms for this one sector first, where the need is most urgent, the Turkish advantage clearest, and the lessons transferable to other sectors if the arrangement holds.
- Turning Italy’s improvisation, the Piaggio acquisition and the Baykar-Leonardo joint venture, into a European template, with capacity admitted, conditions attached, and scaled market access offered to the Turkish partner in return, on the ordinary terms of any allied joint venture.
- Building the counterdrone layer as a triangle of complementary strengths: the EU as market and financier, Ukraine as the combat laboratory where interceptor designs are tested and repriced against live threats, and Turkey as production anchor.
- Stating the bargain plainly, as reciprocity between equals: Turkey accepts the program-level end-use and reporting commitments that govern any allied partnership, and receives in return predictability and a settled standing in the European market, on the same association terms the EU has already extended to another NATO ally, Canada.
The political side of the process will most likely be complicated. The politics that priced Turkey out of the EU’s track have not changed, and they may prove stronger than the procurement arithmetic. But the arithmetic deserves an honest consideration. Europe has committed to fielding a continental counterdrone defense by the end of 2027, on an industrial base that has never built one, while declining to set terms with the one allied industry that has.
The wall will be built, if it is built on time, with the capacity that Europe does not yet possess. The only question within Europe’s control is whether that capacity arrives under rules written in advance or, as now, through a back door with no rules at all.
Tolga Demiryol is a professor of political science and dean of faculty at Altınbaş University. He holds a Ph.D in political science from the University of Virginia.
The views expressed in TURKEYSource are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.
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Image: A service member of Ukraine's 422nd Unmanned Systems Regiment walks next to a heavy strike drone at a training ground, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Zaporizhzhia region. March 23, 2026. (REUTERS/Stringer)