Thousands of NATO soldiers with access to armoured vehicles and heavy weaponry were easily defeated by a handful of Ukrainian drone pilots, the latest episode of the Daily Mail’s War on Tape reveals.

The military exercise, dubbed Hedgehog, showcased the redundancy of conventional military hardware in the face of unmanned aerial vehicles. 

The training drill featured 6,000 NATO troops, including Britons, whose goal was to advance and capture a position in the middle of a pine forest with just a few dirt roads running through it. 

The were handed heavy weapons, like armoured personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles. 

The opposing team of Ukrainians and Estonians, aiming to defend the stronghold, was comprised of only a few hundred men, armed with infantry weapons like rifles and machine guns and a few landmines to lay along the road.  

However, crucially, they were backed by drone pilots, some of whom were drafted for the exercise straight from the Ukrainian frontline of the war with Russia.

The drones they were flying came in four main varieties, War on Tape host Chris Pleasance explained. 

‘First, there were heavy lifting drones that were responsible for taking supplies to the soldiers in the field, this included food, water, eating, sleeping bags for the men to use. Normally, this is done by vehicles, but not in this case,’ he said. 

In the latest episode of War on Tape, foreign correspondent Chris Pleasance explores how a handful of Ukrainian and Estonian soldiers armed with drone pilots were able to outmanoeuvre thousands of NATO troops

A Ukrainian bomber drone drops its mock payload on a NATO vehicle below – in a real world scenario the consequences would be deadly 

The training drill, dubbed Hedgehog, involved NATO forces (marked in blue) armed with armoured vehicles and heavy weaponry, trying to take a position held by Ukrainian and Estonian soldiers armed with drones (marked in red)

‘Next there were reconnaissance drones. These have no weapons, but are armed with sophisticated cameras that include things like night vision. Their job was to hover over the battlefield and feed data into a piece of Ukrainian software called Delta. 

‘This uses clever technology like AI to spot and track the enemy before relaying that to yet more drones which can attack those targets in this drill.’ 

But the real problem for NATO forces came in the form of deadly bomber and FPV (first person view) drones. 

‘Those attack drones included bombers. They can be small, like a quadcopter and carry a single grenade, or they can be much larger, like an octocopter and carry several mortar shells. They hover over their targets before dropping the explosives on them, blowing them to bits,’ Pleasance said. 

‘The Ukrainians also used first person view or FPV drones. These are strapped with an explosive like an anti tank shell, and are flown straight into their targets using a camera for guidance. 

‘Their pilots steer by wearing first person view goggles, hence the name, allowing them to make very precise hits.’ 

The Ukrainian and Estonian drone pilots were able to outmanoeuvre the NATO troops at every turn, ‘destroying’ 17 armored vehicles and rendering two full brigades ineffective – a total of 2,000 men.

The episode reveals how NATO’s armoured vehicles, which were followed by convoys of supply trucks bringing food, ammunition and other equipment along with them, quickly ran into serious problems. 

WATCH THE FULL EPISODE: NATO lost a “battle” with Ukrainian drones – how? | War on Tape

First, soldiers forgot to check the road for landmines, meaning some of them got ‘blown up’ – before their fellow troops were picked up by surveillance drones. 

Advancing in long columns without proper concealment and parking in the staging areas out in the open, the NATO troops were easy pickings for the drone pilots. 

The Ukrainian side also reported that once troops disembarked, they frequently failied to disperse or find cover, not realising the danger they were in. 

Bombers dropped simulated explosives next to vehicles which were parked close together, allowing them to hit multiple in one go, or hitting them while they were on the move. 

Such was the skill of the Ukrainian pilots, troops were also targeted, sometimes failing to scatter, even as the drones hovered overhead, or running for cover too late to stop what was coming. 

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Over the course of the next four days, the drones continued to pick off the stragglers, with such success that the NATO team never managed to mount their attack. 

One NATO commander who watched the drill play out, is said to have remarked: ‘We are f***ed’. 

Assessing the military drill, Daily Mail foreign correspondent Pleasance said: ‘So how did team NATO get it so wrong? Well, first of all, I think it’s worth pointing out that team NATO was kind of set up to fail. 

‘Anyone who has been watching the Ukraine war knows that infantry units advancing en masse in armoured vehicles against drones are in fairly massive trouble. 

‘The Internet is littered with videos of Russian tanks and armoured vehicles doing exactly that and getting blown to smithereens in the process. Did team NATO make mistakes, obviously. 

‘Yes, vehicles should not have advanced in columns. They shouldn’t have stopped so close together, and troops definitely should have dispersed when they were spotted. 

‘That made the drone pilots jobs easier than they would otherwise have been. But even if NATO troops had done all that, I’m still not sure the attack would have succeeded. 

‘It might have taken the drone pilots a little longer to find the vehicles and a little longer to destroy them, but without weapons that could have taken down the drones, it was only a matter of time until the NATO troops were wiped out.’ 

An Estonian pilot in army camoflague looks at his monitor as he steers a drone during the exercise

A drone handler plucks an unmanned aerial vehicles out of the air as it comes in to land

Russian drones such as the own pictured have regularly been used against Ukrainian troops on the battlefield

As Pleasance points out, there were no signs of NATO troops operating drones of their own, which would have enabled them to carry out their own reconaissance. 

The show host also noted that there was evidence of them carrying detection or jamming equipment on top of their vehicles, which would have rendered the drone threat ineffective or at the very least seriously dulled. 

‘I can’t see any obvious evidence of RF boxes, cameras, radar or acoustic sensors,’ Pleasance said.

‘What this equipment does is detect the presence of drones and warn Allied troops where they are and where they’re going. 

‘Jamming equipment could then be used to interrupt the signal between the drone and its pilot, rendering it useless or causing it to crash. 

‘This equipment is now considered essential by troops in Ukraine, for whom drones are the main threat. We know NATO is developing its own versions of this stuff because it frequently hosts exercises to test it. One drill way back in 2024 featured 60 systems specifically designed to take down drones.

‘As far as we know, none of those were being used by the soldiers in Estonia. What this drill seems to have been testing is how NATO’s existing weapons and doctrine deal with the threat of drones. 

‘And surprise, surprise, they fared about as well as the Russians did when they first encountered them. So what this exercise shows us is that if NATO had failed to develop any anti drone measures, it would really have suffered on the battlefield.’

‘What it doesn’t tell us is whether any of the anti drone technologies it has developed would have been effective here, because as far as we can see, they weren’t used.’

Drones are also locked in a rapid arms race as iterations of the aerial technology are quickly combated by opposing powers.   

‘NATO is trying to insert itself into a rapidly cycling loop of innovation, countermeasure and counter countermeasure currently playing out in Ukraine,’ Pleasnace said. 

‘Russia starts using FPVs. Ukraine starts jamming them. Russia attaches fibre optic wires to their drones to defeat the jamming and so on. 

‘Drones that were cutting edge become obsolete in just a matter of weeks. Trying to make sense of and counteract what’s happening on the battlefields of Ukraine is therefore like trying to sketch the shape of water. 

‘The problem keeps changing, and so the solution. Needs to keep changing too.’

Watch the full breakdown of the NATO training exercise by subscribing to the Daily Mail World YouTube channel.