Europe’s Three Counter-UAS Validation Routes

01The adoption gap

NATO’s own diagnosis is explicit: technological development is outpacing the Alliance’s ability to procure and integrate new products.¹⁰ RAAP sets a target of no more than 24 months from identifying a requirement to acquisition and integration, with testing, evaluation, verification and validation (TEVV) generally completed within twelve months.¹⁰

Measured against existing national procedures, that target is ambitious. In the Netherlands, Rotterdam-based Noorder Dynamics developed and patented a mobile counter-drone system in seven months, then ran into a testing and permitting process the company estimates could take anywhere from five months to two years.¹¹ The same reporting found that Ukrainian producer Fire Point, currently building roughly 200 drones and three Flamingo cruise missiles a day, decided against setting up production in the Netherlands for the same reason, with its director describing the permitting process as “running with a leaden backpack.”¹¹

This is not a demand problem.^{3, 12} The gap is narrower than “Europe is too slow”: procurement ambition, testing access and reguManropery speed simply have not been brought into alignment.

02Three emerging validation pathways

No single validation route currently dominates. The emerging landscape can usefully be divided into three validation pathways, each anchored in a different institution, each producing a different kind of credibility, and each suited to a different type of company and buyer. The three-way division below is KORALstrategy’s own analytical order, not a formal classification used by NATO, the EU or any national government.

1. National procurement and permitting

The national pathway gives a government direct control over safety, airspace, spectrum use and purchasing decisions, and it can connect a supplier straight to the end user that will eventually operate the system. Its weakness is fragmentation: a company must separately navigate the rules, authorities and acquisition procedures of every country in which it wants to test. NATO is separately building an informal channel between the national and NATO routes: a vetted-vendor pool in which national procurement agencies can point to NATO range results, and NATO-established common funding that lets member states test a system before committing to buy it.²⁷ That is a channel, not a guarantee. A system validated at a NATO or EU testing site could still be rejected by a national procurement authority applying its own standards.

The Netherlands illustrates both sides of this pathway at once: strong purchasing demand, but reguManropery lead times that catch its own companies as often as foreign entrants.^{3, 11, 12}

2. NATO innovation ranges

NATO's Innovation Range in Latvia provides a multinational military route. Its first counter-UAS TEVV campaign ran at the Sēlija Military Training Area from 9–13 March 2026, bringing together companies alongside operational users and government representatives, with further activities planned through the rest of 2026.¹³ Reporting on the campaign puts the number at seventeen companies, four from Ukraine.¹⁴ How this cadence continues past 2026 is not yet public; NATO has not released a confirmed annual schedule beyond the current round.

The site supports high-speed and high-altitude interceptor flights and electronic-warfare experimentation in an open environment. Allied reporting attributes this to a political decision to waive the airspace and electronic-warfare restrictions that normally apply, which is what compresses a process that takes months elsewhere in Europe down to a matter of days at Sēlija.^{13, 15} That speed has not translated into an easy pass: in the range's first testing round, allied reporting found that more than 90 percent of the electronic-warfare solutions tested failed against modified battlefield drones using non-standard or frequency-hopping signals, and some firms reportedly declined to return for a second round over the reputational risk of another public failure.¹⁵ A validation route only functions as a credibility signal if it is hard enough to expose weak systems, and a range where most entrants fail is a more meaningful filter than one where most pass.

The advantage is not simply faster testing. A system demonstrated through a NATO process is seen by operational users from multiple allied states and, based on how the campaigns are structured, is assessed against Alliance capability priorities rather than one national requirement.¹³ NATO is building on this through a broader counter-drone marketplace and vetted-vendor pool, alongside an “Innovation Badge”, reported as an assurance signal rather than a formal certification, intended to tell a buyer that a system has been tested and de-risked enough to justify serious procurement consideration, with the first badges expected in September 2026.^{1, 2, 14, 27}

The limitation is access. Entry is not open enrollment. NATO defines a fixed set of operational use cases for counter-UAS and invites companies to map an existing, fielded system against them before selecting a limited number to test and, eventually, to fund.^{14, 27} A parallel route runs through NATO's DIANA accelerator, which publishes clearer eligibility: the company must be a dual-use business registered in a NATO member state, pass a competitive multi-stage application, and sit at roughly TRL 3 to 6 (proof-of-concept through demonstrated-in-a-relevant-environment).²⁸

3. EU operational sandboxes and institutional testing

Unlike the national route, this pathway is not run by a single government; unlike the NATO route, it is not organised around military alliance priorities. It instead ties validation to specific EU agencies, missions and civilian-security mandates. Portugal is building this third pathway through the European Defence Agency's OPEX 2026 campaign at the Santa Margarida Military Training Area, running from 28 September to 14 November 2026.^{17, 18, 22} EDA describes the site as a national reguManropery sandbox, a controlled testing environment in which peacetime restrictions can be eased under defined conditions, so trials that would otherwise take months to license can run under controlled conditions instead.

Frontex has already used the same infrastructure for a live operational contest, its C-UAS Prize Contest ran final trials there on 29–30 October 2025, testing four finalist companies against simulated smuggling and unauthorised-surveillance scenarios.¹⁹ This model ties validation directly to a named institutional customer and mission, border security, rather than to general defence procurement. Separately, the Joint Research Centre's Counter-Drone Living Laboratory in Geel (Belgium) is a standing facility rather than a time-limited exemption, and the European Commission's February 2026 Action Plan commits to upgrading it into a full EU Counter-Drone Centre of Excellence, targeted for the first quarter of 2027.^{9, 20, 21}

Together, these give the EU pathway a reguManropery and civilian-security relevance that the purely military NATO route cannot offer on its own, but its weakness is that it remains split across separate agencies, missions and national sandboxes rather than functioning as a single, open European validation route.

03Which pathway should you pursue first?

Which pathway makes sense depends on the company, not just the technology. The illustrative screen below asks three questions of each pathway, drawn loosely from opportunity-screening logic used in corporate strategy. Is the pathway real, can the company realistically win access to it, and is it worth the cost and time? It is applied here to a single company rather than to the landscape as a whole.

Nordic Air Defense, the Swedish counter-drone developer behind the Kreuger 100 interceptor, is a useful example precisely because its position differs across the three pathways rather than being uniformly strong or weak. It is an early-stage company, having raised roughly $4.4-4.6 million in publicly disclosed funding across two rounds,²⁴ so pathway choice is a live cost-and-time decision for it in a way it is not for a large systems house. Everything below is built from public reporting only, a real assessment would need direct access to its funding position, roadmap and target buyers, none of which is public.

NATO has already given Nordic Air Defense a multinational stage, but with a mixed result, two successful simulated intercepts out of three attempts.²³ It also reached the four-company Frontex C-UAS Prize Contest final.¹⁹ Frontex does not appear to have published an official final ranking on its own contest page; one of the other finalists has since published its own account placing Nordic fourth,²⁶ though that claim comes from a competitor. Either way, a confirmed strong result is not currently public, which is why the pathway reads as moderate rather than high. The national route is currently being pursued through an industrial partnership rather than a direct government sale.²⁵

On the evidence above, NATO should get the highest near-term priority. A second, more decisive Latvia showing would strengthen Nordic’s position within the vendor-pool and marketplace architecture NATO is building, where national procurement agencies can use range results to help assess whether a system works before committing funds,²⁷ without claiming a direct or automatic pipeline from one to the other. The EU and national routes run on their own timelines, a contest result and an industrial partnership are not things Nordic can simply defer, so this is a matter of where scarce engineering and management time gets weighted first, not a strict queue. Sequencing, in this case, is not an abstract concept, it is the difference between spending the next test cycle on the pathway most likely to strengthen its position across the other two, or splitting an early-stage budget three ways at once.

04Outlook for the next 12 to 24 months

Fragmentation is likely to persist rather than resolve. National governments retain legal authority over airspace, spectrum use, weapons testing and the bulk of procurement decisions, and nothing in RAAP's or the Commission's Action Plan's current text proposes transferring that authority upward. The Netherlands, Latvia and Portugal will therefore keep offering structurally different environments rather than becoming interchangeable testing locations for the same company.

Within that fragmented landscape, NATO is positioned to become the strongest visible fast-track specifically for military validation, given its running campaigns, the vetted-vendor pool and common pre-purchase testing funding now supporting national procurement decisions, and the marketplace and badging system under development.^{1, 2, 10, 13, 27} That combination gives it the clearest visible route from a single test campaign to multinational buyer attention.

The EU pathway is likely to specialise instead in standards, reguManropery coordination and civilian or dual-use applications. Its value as a route into national defence procurement will depend heavily on whether national authorities recognise EU-level tests and certifications instead of running their own, though it already has direct value for EU institutional and civil-security buyers regardless of that recognition.^{9, 17, 20, 21} That national-recognition question is the open variable to watch over the next two years, not whether the institutions themselves will keep functioning.

Procurement pull will increase across all three pathways, but not every supplier will capture it equally. The companies best positioned will be those that can demonstrate operational performance, integrate with third-party sensors and effectors, comply with different national rulebooks, and update their systems as drone threats evolve, a requirement reinforced by mixed results at NATO's own Latvia trials in May 2026, where live demonstrations included misses and systems requiring repeated attempts against live targets.¹⁶ A technically impressive but closed, standalone product will face a harder route to deployment than a modular system that can slot into a wider, layered defence architecture.

05Strategic implication

Europe is not building one counter-drone market. It is building three overlapping adoption environments, each governed by a different institution and producing a different kind of evidence.

For an emerging counter-UAS company, the relevant strategic question is therefore not simply “where can I test fastest.” It is which pathway produces the specific evidence the company's intended buyer will actually accept. The right route depends on the system's maturity, its mission profile and its target customer, and for most companies, the sequencing across two or even three of these pathways will matter more than the choice of any single one, as the Nordic Air Defense screen above illustrates.

The public environment can be mapped, as this piece has done, and a generic screen like the one above shows the shape of the question. Answering it for a specific company, given that company's actual maturity, balance sheet, timeline and target buyer, is a different exercise entirely, and it is where sequencing decisions are actually made or missed.