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NATO and member states need to do more to integrate their airspace and missile defense capabilities, including by setting in place a new generation of the missile defense architecture to allow them to respond in real time to any challenge, NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoana said on Wednesday evening with regard to last week's incident in Croatia that saw a Russian-made drone crash in an urban zone of Zagreb after crossing Romania and Hungary's airspace.
"The latest incidents - a very old generation drone that reached Zagreb (...), the drone incident in Romania's Bistrita-Nasaud County, and others - they are being monitored by the NATO missile defense system, but it is clear that we need to do more to integrate our airspace and missile defense capabilities," Geoana said in an online briefing for Romanian journalists.
"And that's what we decided today: to also move forward with the physical posture - land, sea and air - but also with a new generation of missile defense architecture that would really step up the national capability to deal with any object coming from any direction and allow NATO to respond in real time to any challenge," the senior NATO official said.
He brought to mind that Romania has its own Patriot system, "the best in terms of missile defense", but which is not fully operational.
"We will come up with a new missile defense architecture that on the one hand upgrades what the allies have at their disposal, and on the other hand integrates various systems. This will render NATO airspace virtually impenetrable, including to missiles, drones and other elements that could disrupt it," said the NATO Deputy Secretary-General.
A Soviet-made reconnaissance drone crashed on the evening of March 10 in a park some 6 kilometers from the center of Zagreb, near a university campus, and about 200 meters away from a residential neighborhood, causing no casualties. About 40 cars in a nearby parking lot were damaged.
"This is NATO, Romanian, Bulgarian and Croatian airspace, and we can no longer tolerate such a situation. This should never happen again. This was an obvious threat we should have reacted to," Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic said on Saturday, commenting on the incident.
