Drone warfare at Hedgehog 2025: Ukrainian pilots knock out entire NATO battalions

In the simulated drone warfare of the exercise “Hedgehog 2025” in Estonia, NATO troops were pushed dramatically to their limits. This emerges from a sensational article in the respected Wall Street Journal (WSJ). According to the report, 16,000 NATO soldiers from 12 nations stood on one side, Ukrainian drone teams on the other. Afterwards, one NATO commander drew a sober conclusion: “We’re screwed.”

The Alliance troops apparently could not cope at all with the Ukrainian way of waging drone warfare. In one scenario, a Ukrainian team of ten people is said to have destroyed 17 NATO armoured vehicles in simulation within half a day and flown 30 additional strikes. Two complete NATO battalions lost their combat capability on a single exercise day.

How the Ukrainians waged drone warfare

The emphasis was on real-time information, rapid target identification, data sharing and short sensor-to-shooter chains. For the NATO soldiers it became clear that there was nowhere to hide – and this at a drone density only half as high as in everyday conditions at the front in Ukraine.

The NATO battlegroup disregarded how transparent small drones make the battlefield. The Ukrainian side set up its equipment and employed various drones using the methods it had acquired over four years of war. It also used Delta, its own battlefield management system: it collects incoming information, analyses large volumes of data in real time with AI support and coordinates strikes on identified targets across the boundaries of commands and units.

Sten Reimann, a reserve major in the Estonian Defence Forces, names the most important lesson in the Estonian outlet err.ee: “The old manoeuvre tactics – advancing in large convoys by day – are simply no longer practicable on the battlefield. In the worst case, we could lose an entire brigade, or at least most of its combat equipment, by the evening.”

That is presumably exactly what the exercise was designed to show. According to Lieutenant Colonel Arbo Probal, who heads the unmanned systems programme of the Estonian Defence Forces, it replicated a “contested and heavily congested” battlefield. The units were to be put under maximum strain and overwhelmed in their cognitive capacities; this was intended to test how well they adapt to constantly changing conditions.

For NATO, the result is a shock. Maria Lemberg of the Ukrainian NGO Aerorozvidka – the heart and brain behind Delta – still sees a “fundamental misunderstanding of the modern battlefield” within the Alliance. In her view, the challenge lies in the speed at which decisions are made; access to sensitive information slows down the strike chain. Delta, by contrast, enables a fast kill chain: only a few minutes pass between detecting the enemy, passing on the information and the strike.

Lemberg hopes the exercise will serve as a wake-up call and can become the basis for a more intensive exchange of knowledge between Kyiv and its Western partners.