SELIJA MILITARY BASE, Latvia, May 27 (Reuters) - Latvia is increasing anti-drone defences on its borders with Russia and Moscow-allied Belarus in response to drones flying into the NATO country, an army official told Reuters.
Ukrainian drones have strayed into NATO Baltic countries' airspace in recent weeks, sowing confusion and raising tensions with Russia at a time when U.S. commitment to NATO's collective security is in question.
Ukraine, which has been targeting Russia's Baltic oil loading ports, has said Russian jamming of its drones' signals had caused them to veer off course.
Two such drones exploded at an empty oil storage facility in Latvia on May 7. Another exploded into a lake on Saturday after flying into the country undetected, witnessed by a fisherman.
An approaching drone forced lawmakers in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius to take shelter underground on May 20, and a NATO military jet shot down another drone over Estonia on May 19.
"We plan to deploy (drone) interceptor teams over the next two weeks", Modris Kairiss, head of the Latvian Army Autonomous Systems Competence Centre, told Reuters at a side event of the Drone Summit conference in Latvia.
The teams will consist of up to four soldiers in a rugged terrain vehicle operating killer drones, which can destroy incoming military drones in a 10-km (6-mile) radius, he said.
The number of such teams patrolling the 400-km Latvian border with Russia and its ally Belarus is classified.
"We do need to increase the number of such teams, but we need to balance this against other army needs. If we put them on every kilometer of the border, we will quickly burn all army resources", he said.
DRONES PRESENT CHALLENGES TO NATO
Speaking to Reuters at a military testing range where Latvia is trying out the newest drone technologies in a NATO programme, Kairiss said taking down military drones in peacetime is complicated, because radar data in NATO countries is classified and sharing it with soldiers tasked with destroying drones is cumbersome.
"It's not enough to engage with anything you notice. We need to identify it first," to avoid hitting a civilian airplane, Kairiss said.
Another looming challenge for the Latvian military, and NATO in general, is the growing use of small drones, Kairiss said.
"They are several steps ahead of the anti-drone systems... Detection and interception of the small targets is hard, and it's the big challenge that soon we will all face," he said.
GOOD, FAST, CHEAP, ENOUGH
Ukraine is on track to out-produce Russia in number of drones, with both countries producing millions of units per year, Air Marshal Johnny Stringer, the British officer serving as NATO's deputy air commander, told Reuters on the sidelines of the Drone Summit.
NATO cannot match this at the moment, but it needs to have the industry able to replenish the drones at the same rate as they are consumed, he said.
"The answer is not to procure lots of things and then have them in hangars and warehouses... They will be overtaken by the sheer pace and technology", he said.
"To me this comes down to stuff which is good enough, it is cheap enough, it's delivered fast enough and there is enough", he added.
Militaries could look beyond the "traditionally understood defence industrial base" for that, said Stringer. He said the innovative drone companies in Ukraine are often less than four years old, and were started by people outside the defence industry or military.
"The alliance will need to be able to produce in very large numbers based on the concepts of how we envision fighting", said Scott Boston, senior defence analyst at RAND Corporation.
"Partnership with Ukraine is the only short-term way" to increase the production capacity, he added.
(Reporting by Andrius Sytas; Editing by Philippa Fletcher and Andrea Ricci )
