alt Hacker NewsAs part of the SAFE EU financial instrument Romania is spending a lot of cash on defense measures for drones and other armament[1]. Currently still relying heavily on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard for anti-air as well as fighter jets with air-to-air missiles, as these recent drones were all brought down by F-16s.
Aside from strategic targets, a lot of the civilian infrastructure is quite vulnerable to drone attacks as there's a huge border to cover and definitely not enough anti-drone tech deployed. An apartment building was hit months ago with no casualties: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/apartment-building-hit-...
[1] https://www.rheinmetall.com/en/media/news-watch/news/2026/06...
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F-16s with human pilots and a2a missiles vs cheap drones? That’s one hell of an asymmetry and doesn’t seem robust enough to handle 100x the scale.
> Romania is spending a lot of cash on defense measures for drones and other armament
Some of this is going to be stalled - Romania was planning on deploying the Iron Dome [0] and Spyder [1] for AD which was going to be co-produced by Volkswagen in their German factories that were on the chopping block, but Qatar (Volkswagen's largest minority shareholder with 17% voting share) blocked that deal [2].
[0] - https://www.jpost.com/international/article-861770
[1] - https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sy1n3pcfzx
[2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-10/qatar-blo...