IN Brief:
- Aneli Capital argues that low-cost aerial threats are becoming a board-level risk for operators of critical infrastructure.
- Recent incidents in Bahrain and Lithuania have sharpened attention on data centres, chemical sites, and other exposed assets.
- The industrial opportunity now extends from military counter-UAS into civilian-grade protection, integration, and resilience tooling.
Counter-drone demand is beginning to move beyond defence ministries and into the private infrastructure sector, as operators of data centres, chemical sites, logistics hubs, and other critical assets take a closer look at low-cost aerial threats. Recent incidents in the Middle East and renewed concern along NATO’s eastern flank have sharpened attention on how exposed fixed commercial sites can be to relatively cheap, disruptive systems.
The argument is gaining traction alongside a broader rise in defence and resilience investment. European defence, security, and resilience startups raised $8.7 billion last year, while venture activity across defence technology more broadly has continued to climb. That capital has largely followed military demand so far, but the market now appears to be widening toward civil infrastructure operators that have begun to reassess physical protection, business continuity, and response planning.
The shift matters because private operators are not looking for the same procurement model as armed forces. They are more likely to focus on layered detection, airspace awareness, hardening of vulnerable sites, and integrated response systems that can fit into existing security and resilience frameworks. That creates a different industrial demand pattern, but it is one that still depends on much of the same enabling technology stack.
Recent exercises in Lithuania, including a drone-attack scenario at the Achema industrial site, have underlined how quickly this concern is moving from abstract risk into practical contingency planning. Once energy, data, logistics, or chemicals infrastructure starts treating low-cost air threats as an operational problem, the market for counter-UAS systems becomes larger and more commercially varied.
Critical infrastructure is becoming a defence-adjacent customer
For manufacturers, this opens a new route to demand. Private-sector buyers are unlikely to procure military air-defence architectures, but they may increasingly invest in radar, RF detection, acoustic sensing, edge compute, hardened communications, and site integration services. In many cases, the requirement will be for systems that can deliver enough detection and response capability without imposing heavy operating complexity on the customer.
That creates a dual-use production challenge. Equipment has to be robust enough for credible threat conditions while also being packaged for customers that think in terms of insurance exposure, uptime, compliance, and continuity rather than battlefield doctrine.
The production burden sits deeper in the stack
As the market expands, the main bottlenecks may not sit with a single prime contractor. They are more likely to appear in sensors, software, integration platforms, and the specialist engineering needed to make layered site protection work reliably across multiple operating environments.
For Europe’s newer resilience and defence technology businesses, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, that may create a meaningful opening. The strongest opportunity is not only in selling hardware, but in turning military-grade counter-drone learning into supportable industrial products for infrastructure operators now being pulled into the same threat landscape.
