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Dear Members and Friends,
This past Monday we held our 88th Virtual Congressional Roundtable, Deterrence at the Edge: Innovation and Acquisition on the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line. From the entirety of this virtual roundtable discussion we have generated an executive summary: Deterrence at the Edge. The executive summary can be found below.
I was joined in the roundtable by COL Christopher Hill (Army PEO, Missiles and Space; Director, Global Tactical Edge Acquisitions Directorate; Project Manager, Integrated Fires Mission Command), Tom Goffus (NATO Assistant Secretary General for Operations), and RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery (Former Deputy Director for Plans, Policy, and Strategy, U.S. European Command). We had an excellent conversation about the state of innovation and acquisition reform in Europe, of which the executive summary provides a great overview.
Additionally, the U.S. Department of State posted a digital press briefing yesterday with COL Hill and BG Curtis King (Commanding General, 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command) on the same topic. In the briefing the two discussed how the U.S. Army and NATO allies are rapidly fielding and iterating low-cost counter-drone systems like MEROPS on NATO’s eastern flank—drawing on lessons from Ukraine, soldier-led experimentation, and close industry cooperation—with plans to scale these innovations across Europe and the Indo-Pacific.
The State Department digital press briefing can be found here.
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Deterrence at the Edge
Executive Summary
A Strategic Overview of Innovation, Data, and Acquisition Reform on the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line
OVERVIEW
The Virtual CRT on “Deterrence at the Edge” examined how NATO and the United States can build an Eastern Flank Deterrence Line (EFDL) capable of defeating massed Russian drones and missiles at sustainable cost. The discussion focused on innovation at the tactical edge, open-architecture command and control, and acquisition reform to move from demonstrations to rapidly fielded, combat-relevant capability across nine frontline nations.
Using lessons from Ukraine, recent Russian drone incursions into Poland and Romania, and early EFDL pilot efforts in Poland and Germany, participants argued that the center of gravity is no longer a single exquisite system, but the ability to sense, share, and kill at scale—quickly, cheaply, and jointly.
KEY INSIGHTS
1. Defeating “mass” is the new standard for deterrence. Russia’s nightly employment of hundreds of Shahed drones and missiles against Ukraine has reset the bar for what credible deterrence looks like in Europe. NATO currently has no deployed architecture in Europe that can reliably defeat that level of volume. The emerging EFDL seeks to protect maneuver forces first—enabling “overwhelming violence on the backside”—by building a layered, affordable defense against mass raids, starting in Poland and Romania.
2. A new acquisition model at the tactical edge is already working. The Global Tactical Edge Acquisition Directorate (GTEAD) has demonstrated a 90–120 day pipeline from commander demand signal to capability in soldiers’ hands. Recent events in Nowa Dęba (Poland) and Putlos (Germany) fielded Merops drone-on-drone systems, Hornet one-way attack drones, “Bumblebee” quadcopters, and soldier-operated C-UAS solutions, all selected and fired by troops rather than vendors. A battalion-level 3D printer produced drone-killer bodies on site, shrinking timelines and costs. This “soldier-first” approach—industry trains, soldiers operate and assess—compresses years of traditional testing into weeks, allowing program offices to buy proven capability instead of endless demonstrations.
3. Data sharing and open architecture are the decisive terrain. Panelists agreed that “if you can’t integrate, you’re not a player.” The primary constraint is not sensors or shooters but the ability to move, fuse, and share data at speed across nations, domains, and classification levels. The envisioned EFDL backbone is a cloud-based, open-architecture common data layer—“greenfield,” government-defined and owned—where legacy and new systems publish and pull data via user-defined apps with data-centric security. Experiments like Flytrap and Latvian acoustic sensor networks show it is technically feasible to move unclassified sensor data into multi-national, multi-security-level clouds and then up-classify as needed. The remaining barriers are culture, process, and accreditation policy—not technology.
4. Low-cost effectors and realistic testing are essential to bend the cost curve. Current counter-UAS and missile-defense portfolios remain too expensive and too lightly tested. Law-enforcement experience and international data suggest counter-UAS performance has improved only modestly in recent years because most events are “demonstrations,” not rigorous tests in noisy, realistic environments. Ukraine’s “drone army” model —where operators choose which commercial drones to buy each month—illustrates how operator-driven selection, tight feedback loops, and rapid iteration can force genuine performance improvements and drive down cost. On the missile-defense side, offensive munitions have leveraged additive manufacturing to cut body costs dramatically; defensive interceptors remain expensive because their endgame sensing and maneuvering must be smarter than the threat they are killing. Solving this defensive cost problem will likely come from new, smaller firms and new concepts of layered, multi-shot engagement rather than incremental tweaks to today’s high-end interceptors.
5. Culture, requirements, and IP policy are as decisive as technology. Speakers stressed that risk-averse cultures and rigid requirements often slow progress more than technology limits. GTEAD was explicitly chartered to “challenge all assumptions and bureaucracy” and to accept higher risk in order to deliver capability in months, not years. At scale, acquisition portfolios will need more flexible intellectual property arrangements and looser, more adaptable requirements so portfolio acquisition executives can pull in commercial solutions quickly and reprogram funds without restarting requirements from scratch. Without loosening the “requirements box,” innovation at the edge will stall when it tries to translate into programs of record.
STRATEGIC IMPLICATIONS
- The Eastern Flank Deterrence Line is emerging as a real-world laboratory for how to defeat massed aerial threats and as a prototype for larger efforts like Golden Dome and future homeland defense.
- Success will rest less on any single system and more on NATO’s ability to build a shared, cloud-based, open architecture where many national sensors and effectors can plug in and be orchestrated as one.
- If NATO fails to build affordable, integrated defense of the Eastern flank, allies will remain vulnerable to drone and missile coercion, and the Alliance will struggle to translate Ukraine’s lessons into its own defenses.
- Conversely, a functioning EFDL would provide a transatlantic template that can be shared with Indo-Pacific allies and nested within broader Golden Dome–style architectures, connecting European, Indo-Pacific, and homeland defense into a coherent ecosystem.
RECOMMENDATIONS
1. Designate and empower a single operational integrator for the EFDL. A clearly identified commander or NATO authority should own the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line concept, with the mandate to align national efforts, experiments, and investments into a coherent architecture across the nine frontline states.
2. Make the common data layer a funded program, not a side experiment. NATO should treat the cloud-based, open-architecture data backbone as the primary deliverable of the EFDL—not a supporting afterthought. This includes defining data-centric security, accreditation paths, and governance so nations can plug in their own sensors and shooters at scale.
3. Institutionalize the tactical-edge acquisition model. GTEAD-style 90-day cycles, prize-based competitions, operator-run tests, and forward 3D printing should be institutionalized and expanded, including participation and funding from allied nations, rather than remaining U.S.-only efforts.
4. Drive a transatlantic low-cost effector campaign. NATO, EU states, and the U.S. should jointly sponsor innovation sprints focused on low-cost C-UAS and missile-defense interceptors, with realistic testing standards and operator-selected winners, mirroring Ukraine’s “drone army” model. This should be tied to Golden Dome and similar initiatives to ensure commonality and scale.
5. Reform requirements, IP, and risk incentives. Defense ministries and NATO should revise requirements and intellectual-property policies to ensure governments retain the software and data rights necessary for open architecture, while acquisition leaders are rewarded—not punished—for taking informed risks and rapidly fielding 75–80% solutions that can be iterated in contact.
CONCLUSION
The Virtual CRT underscored that the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line is not simply a European missile defense project; it is a proving ground for whether the transatlantic community can move at wartime speed in defense, match the pace of adversary innovation, and translate Ukraine’s hard-won lessons into a scalable architecture.
As with Guam’s defense, success will depend less on engineering breakthroughs than on leadership, governance, and the courage to embrace open architecture, lower-cost effectors, and operator-driven innovation. If NATO and the United States can deliver a functioning EFDL in the near term, they will both harden the Eastern flank and establish a template for integrated deterrence from Europe to the Indo-Pacific. Failure to do so will leave frontline allies exposed and make future Golden Dome–style homeland defenses harder, slower, and more expensive to build.
Winners Associate with Winners to Win!
Fight on!
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