Money with a plan¶

Four boxes, each built for one war and sold on what it can hear, are one thing. Put enough of them into the same network and the box becomes part of a picture: the drone is identified, its operator named, and its take-off made conditional on that name.

On 11 February 2026 the European Commission published an action plan on drone and counter-drone security, and three commissioners presented it in Strasbourg. It is the document that would turn the devices in the other cases into infrastructure, and it is where the operator’s identification becomes a proposed condition of flight.

Three commissioners¶

Virkkunen, Brunner and Tzitzikostas split the plan three ways: detection, money, rules. Virkkunen’s line on the 5G sensing is “I am describing existing technology that we need now to deploy”. Brunner’s is €400 million this year and nine airports in three months. Tzitzikostas’s is the package, with “ technical safeguards, ensuring that drones cannot leave the ground unless the operator is identified”. The Dutch release adds the airspace picture “to identify legitimate drones”, the incident platform, and a tender to test 5G detection live.

Twenty-three measures¶

Twenty of the twenty-three measures will, aim to, or want to explore. Three of them use the present tense. Those are the ones with a bank account.

Virkkunen said it herself: “I am describing existing technology that we need now to deploy.” And it does exist, in Ukraine, in a war, where nobody in range is carrying the sort of phone that counts as an interesting part of the problem.

Switching it on across a continent full of people whose phones do count was the small detail nobody at the podium mentioned. It may have been an oversight. It may have been policy. Bureaucracy has always been admirably flexible about the distinction.

Until further notice¶

Every sensor in the other cases is one node; the plan is the grid. It would connect 5G base stations, incident reports and whatever else counts as relevant data into one picture whose purpose is to tell legitimate drones from the rest. It proposes to make a camera drone’s take-off conditional on its operator being identified. Attack D8 is the take-off it would withhold.

The reasons given are airports, smuggling, a utility with 1,300 overflights and drugs by the hundredweight. The plan, the speech and the press release have no sentence on retention: whether the picture keeps a track and for how long, whether it keeps the phones the base stations sensed alongside the drone, or who may ask it a question later. Attack D7 is the record kept in the meantime.

Last reviewed: 2026-09-25.