LATIKA M BOURKE: DroneShield executive issues warning as Australia unprepared for new age warfare

Australia’s leading counter-drone company has warned that the nation remains drastically unprepared for the next type of warfare, in which adversaries use cheap drones to attack critical infrastructure to degrade morale and overcome Western military advantage.

The warning was made by DroneShield, the company that has become the poster child for Australia’s defence start-up industry.

Chief Product Officer Angus Bean was speaking to The Nightly at the launch of the company’s new headquarters in Amsterdam, marking its expansion into the European market.

The company was singled out for praise by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen during her visit to Australia last week, where she signed a trade and security, defence and science research partnership, aimed at boosting military ties and collaborations between Australia and the EU’s 27 member states.

The Commission has released €150 billion ($A251 billion) in loans to countries to finance their re-armaments and has made creating a drone wall on the Russian border a key priority, following a spate of Russian drones flying above airports, military bases and sensitive infrastructure.

Pointing to the wars in Ukraine and Iran, Mr Bean said Australia needed to urgently start thinking like Europe and protect its airports, data centres, energy plants and ports with counter-drone technology and was currently “absolutely not” ready.

“We look at the situation in Iran. What is Iran threatening? Yes, they’re threatening to strike military bases, but they’re threatening to strike desalination plants — that is the leverage that these types of technologies create because they’re existential and they’re soft targets,” Bean said.

“We need to start thinking about critical infrastructure as the frontlines.

“We still don’t have counter-UAV solutions deployed at any scale at most major airports. To me, that’s a really obvious one; I’m still surprised by that.”

“The interesting one that we are starting to see an uptake in is data centres, as we have larger percentages of our economies running on AI, the data centre becomes the heart of the economy, and those data centres take a long time to build, very hard to maintain so if you can disable or damage a data centre, that’s a huge problem.”

DroneShield is subject to Australian defence export permissions and is a supplier to unnamed countries in the Gulf.

Asked why their technology was not stopping the Iranian regime’s constant drone attacks on Gulf States, particularly targeting their infrastructure, including Dubai Airport, Mr Bean said the challenge was one of scale.

“The Iranians have proven that they’ve managed to stockpile significantly more drones and drone technology than we anticipated, but we should have,” he said.

“The thing that we should have realised, particularly about Iran is that they have obviously watched the Russia-Ukraine conflict and they are intending to play the long game here where they can use relatively low-cost solutions over vast areas of land.

“Now you have to defend everywhere all the time.”

Iran first supplied its Shahed drones to Russia in the early years of the war, beginning a total transformation in the way the war is fought.

Previously, soldiers on both sides were engaged in a First World War-style trench warfare. Now, Ukrainian drone pilots and units pilot drones to attack enemy targets from underground bunkers.

Mr Bean said that the war in Iran had moved into one of attrition, similar to Ukraine.

He said this was in favour of the home side because they could lob cheap drones at non-military targets at any point.

“The mode of the conflict that we’re moving into now, which is that slow attrition, inch-by-inch, where it’s just about can you wear down the adversary’s morale and who wants this more type of warfare, does unfortunately tend to favour the home force and in this case the Iranian force,” he said.

Iran has caused havoc for Qatar and the UAE who want to dominate global aviation as transit hubs. Flight Radar data shows that in the five days leading up to February 28, the day before Israel and the US bombed Tehran, Qatar Airways was flying just short of 600 flights per day.

Emirates was recording around 500, and Etihad around 300. One month later, Qatar’s flights had fallen to just 144 per day. Emirates figures were above normal, and Etihad was recording around 150 per day. The flow on effect has been enormous, with the aviation data firm Cirium reporting more than 60,000 cancelled flights globally.

The war in Iran could start a global recession because of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Mr Bean said the counter-drone market was expected to be worth $60 billion in the next three or four years, and that half would be paid by militaries and the other half funded by civil and law enforcement agencies.

He said DroneShield, which Mr Bean helped kickstart by developing an algorithm in his bedroom in Balmain, Sydney that formed the company’s most famous product, the Drone Gun, wanted to turnover $1 billion in five years. Europe constitutes 70 per cent of DroneShield’s business.

The Netherlands State Secretary of Defence Derk Boswijk welcomed DroneShield’s entry to the European market, saying it was an example of middle powers working together to protect themselves.

“This is a great, pragmatic of how this cooperation looks like,” he said.

“We have to diversify our supply lines; it’s very important to have extra companies from different countries — we cannot do it all ourselves.”

Europe has been racing to down drones believed to be sent by Russia that have flown over airports and bases. This included Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam.

“And still it’s not certain who is behind it, well, we think it’s Russia, they can use useful idiots, give people some money and buy the drone yourself, just to create havoc,” Mr Boswijk said.

“But we also see them on the North Sea over our infrastructure on the seabed. Already we see fishing ships with no clear reason what they are doing there, so our threats are not the same as what we see in Ukraine, but we cannot say we do not see them.

“We are in a kind of rat race to be a little bit faster than our adversaries. Not so long ago, we had weapons only used by state actors; now you have threats that are so very cheap that every idiot or terrorist can use them.”

DroneShield technology was used to help bring down drones around Copenhagen airport in Denmark last year. Mr Bean said that he hoped to sell the Australian products to more European governments as they raced to build a Drone Wall to keep out Russian attacks.

The company staved off its first serious round of bad media when CEO Oleg Vornig sold $50 million in shares which he later revealed was to pay a tax bill half the size.

Droneshield recorded an operating profit in 2025 of $216.5 million, a 277 per cent rise on its $23 million profit the year prior.