AA.VV. Stability Policing and the Drones' War: New Challenges for NATO Countries' Law Enforcement Agencies and Internal Security Architectures

NATO STABILITY POLICING CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE

STABILITY POLICING AND THE DRONES’ WAR: NEW CHALLENGES FOR NATO COUNTRIES’ LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES AND INTERNAL SECURITY ARCHITECTURES

FINAL REPORT

AA.VV. Stability Policing and the Drones’ War: New Challenges for NATO Countries’ Law Enforcement Agencies and Internal Security Architectures Stability Policing and the Drones’ War: New Challenges for NATO Countries’ Law Enforcement Agencies and Internal Security Architectures. AA.VV. Copyright NATO SPCoE © Anno 2024. ISBN Tecnografica di Rossi Franco & C. Sas Via 1° Maggio, 6 36066 Sandrigo (Vicenza) L'opera, comprese tutte le sue parti, è tutelata dalla legge sui diritti d'autore. 1 In September 2023, aside a meeting to which I had participated in Bucharest (RO), as Director of the NATO Stability Policing Centre of Excellence, I was admitted to an office call with the Romanian Jandarmeria Leadership. That was the ideal occasion, as newly appointed Director (I had been on the job only for a couple of months), to introduce myself to one of the most active and robust contributor to the Centre’s activities, and to present my “Lines of Effort” (LoEs) for the upcoming triennium. Included in my LoEs, there was the list of the potential research areas for the year 2025, that included the general theme “drones”. I clearly recall that my formal presentation – which until then had flown without any particular incident – had suffered an abrupt stop when I presented the slide mentioning the focus of our research for 2025: the high-ranked Official to whom I was presenting, without even waiting for me to start reading the list of activities, stopped my presentation and abruptly asked “Drones: why 2025? We need them now”. For me – apart from an initial embarrassment for having underestimated a topic that would have revealed itself to be so 2 relevant and challenging – that episode was an epiphany of the diversity of perspectives existing not just across the Alliance, but even within the small community of the NATO SP COE. Thanks to that episode, I was able to perceive how extended and different might be the relevance assigned to a topic – or a threat, like in this case – based on the geographical area of provenance of the interlocutor, and how much strength and richness might come precisely from this diversity of perspectives, if adequately and timely intercepted. So, as Director of a NATO-accredited “think-tank”, I accepted the challenge posed by the “observation” of my Romanian counterpart, that day in Bucharest, 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). I reckon now, after almost a year of research and commitment of my excellent personnel – and particularly of the NSPCOE Lessons Learned Branch – that the choice made was the correct one, that the topic deserved – and still deser