Greece Rejects Turkey's Inclusion in EU Drone Defense Initiative
Greece has expressed strong opposition to Turkey's potential inclusion in the European Union's drone defense initiative, known as the 'Drone Wall.' This initiative aims to enhance the EU's aerial defense capabilities amid rising security concerns.
Key facts
- Greece opposes Turkey's inclusion in the EU's Drone Wall initiative.
- The initiative aims to bolster the EU's aerial defense capabilities.
- Greece cites ongoing tensions with Turkey as a reason for its opposition.
- Greece advocates for a unified defense strategy without conflicting nations.
2 minute read
Greece’s pushback against inviting Turkey into the EU’s Drone Wall reflects a core tension in European defence — the trade-off between capability gains and the political trust needed to fuse air and counter-drone systems across borders. The project is not just hardware; it implies shared sensor feeds, electronic-warfare libraries, spectrum management, and decision rules that link national command posts. Adding a powerful non-EU actor could expand coverage and expertise, but it would also widen the circle of those able to see, shape, or infer the EU’s force posture.
Athens frames the risk through lived experience in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, where airspace and maritime disputes persist alongside competitive procurement. In that context, data sharing on tracks, signatures, and jamming profiles becomes a strategic vulnerability if interests diverge. EU law allows tight conditions for third-country participation, and recent PESCO practice shows that Brussels can impose strict guardrails on access to data, intellectual property, and governance votes — a principle already visible in Europe’s Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030.
For NATO, excluding a key ally from an EU counter-UAS backbone would not be cost-free. The alliance is trying to integrate layered air and missile defence with tactical counter-UAS systems at speed, and duplication wastes resources. A workable pathway would separate interoperability from membership, align with NATO STANAGs and federated interfaces, but keep sensitive EU data layers, algorithms, and spectrum plans behind firewalls. Limited, project-based cooperation with rigorous auditing and dispute-resolution mechanisms could reduce risk while preserving flexibility — an approach that mirrors lessons from Denmark’s counter-UAS framework.
The industrial dimension matters as much as geopolitics. Turkey’s drone and electronic-warfare ecosystem is competitive, while EU firms are striving to scale under the European Defence Fund (EDF) and urgent procurement schemes. Protecting intellectual property, aligning export controls, and integrating battlefield lessons from Ukraine will shape standards and timelines. Expect Athens to press for trust criteria, transparency, and suspension clauses as prerequisites for any third-country role — issues that sit at the heart of Europe’s rearmament debate.
Europe’s defences are becoming more layered and software-defined, as drones and electronic warfare increasingly shape deterrence and crisis response. How the EU balances openness with control will determine whether the Drone Wall becomes a foundation of European security or another symbol of its internal fault lines.
Source: The AA
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