Octopus Adds an Additional Layer to Ukraine’s Air Defences

When Russia set up production of a licensed copy of Iran’s Shahed-136 – calling it the Geran-2 – two things became clear. First, the Shahed-136 strikes were absorbing expensive air defence missiles at an unsustainable rate. Second, the use of these weapons would go up dramatically as Russia inevitably scaled production. This set off a scramble to find cheap ways of defeating Russia’s strike drones.

Tracking Innovations

The initial challenge was to track them as the Gerans flew low, beneath the radar horizon of most defence sites. This allowed more Gerans to arrive at an eventual target than the local air defences could handle. The first loss of a Patriot system in Ukraine was as a result of it simply being overwhelmed by 75 successive Gerans. 73 were shot down. The Patriot was damaged.

The tracking problem was solved with a dense laydown of cheap acoustic sensors, along with mobile spotting teams and a digital map that allowed all air defence units to retain a common air picture. Using mobile fire teams with heavy machine guns and search lights, the Ukrainians would move their vehicles onto the projected path of incoming Gerans and shoot them down. This was initially effective but absorbed some 50,000 personnel.

The Russians responded by flying high – up to 13,000 feet – above the engagement ceiling of mobile machine guns. In addition, intelligence in early 2024 indicated that the number of Gerans being used would rise dramatically the following year. Several organisations therefore began to design cheap drone interceptors.

Drone-to-Drone Combat

Intercepting drones with drones was first validated as a scalable and effective tactic in the summer of 2024 using first person view drones to hunt slow flying Russian reconnaissance UAVs, operating below the cloud base. These FPVs, however, could not climb to the necessary altitude quickly enough to reliably intercept Gerans.

The UK – working closely with the Ukrainians – initiated Project Octopus to build an effective and scalable interceptor. The Octopus is a cylindrical drone with four, tail mounted propellors and a sensor in its nose. It also uses image recognition to autonomously guide itself to target in the terminal phase, significantly improving its probability of hit. The system is much better than many of its competitors on the market. Other systems either have an engagement ceiling that Gerans can – though they do not always – fly above, require complex launch equipment including vehicle mounted catapults – limiting the speed of launch – or rely throughout an engagement on ground-based guidance.

Reusable Solutions for Scale

The Octopus design was tested and refined in the summer and autumn of 2024 and was technologically ready for mass production by the beginning of 2025. Industrial capacity was available for its production from February 2025. Unfortunately, legal and bureaucratic issues within the Ukrainian government over Intellectual Property delayed production until the autumn of 2025. There are two ways of viewing this. The first is that despite intelligence driving technological innovation and industrial readiness at the speed of relevance, bureaucracy prevented the capability being fielded in time to meet the threat. The scale of Russian Geran strikes over the summer of 2025 has been severe. On the other hand, the project has allowed a range of legal issues with joint partnerships between Ukrainian and European companies to be resolved and may, therefore, enable future projects to succeed much more quickly. Despite the delays, in combination with other UAV interceptors, Ukraine does now have a scalable solution to the Geran threat.

Those looking to Octopus as a one-shot solution for protecting NATO from UAVs, however, need to bear several additional factors in mind. First, cheap interceptors are very short ranged. If one concentrates enough interceptors in one place to defeat an entire salvo of UAVs then there is the risk the enemy will simply bypass the position. If enough UAVs are concentrated along the entire potential frontage of attack then it stops being a cheap solution because this would require thousands and thousands of systems. In Ukraine, this problem is resolved by thinning salvos over a significant distance as the Gerans transit hundreds of kilometres of Ukrainian territory to reach their targets. For NATO – in the Baltic for instance – such operational depth may not be available.

Another consideration is that Russia has continued to adapt and has responded to the emergence of interceptor UAVs, combined with Ukraine’s reduction in machine gun based mobile fire teams, by returning to low altitude flying. Guiding a UAV to intercept at low level is much more complicated than at high altitude because of background clutter, and connection issues between supporting radar. The Russians are also experimenting with jet powered Gerans that will move across the interception window for drone interceptors too quickly for them to reach the necessary altitude. This increases the cost of the munitions for the Russians but adds additional complexity for the defence.

Threat Hierarchies

Most importantly, although the Gerans complicate the air defence situation and strike targets that would not merit the allocation of missiles, it is Russia’s cruise and ballistic missiles that reliably break through the air defences and inflict heavy damage. The Gerans help scout and open the path, but the damage comes from exquisite weapons. This is an important reminder that air defence is about appropriately intersecting layers to maximise the efficiency of intercept at each altitude, speed and trajectory of target. Europe may add Octopus to its arsenal, but it needs other layers as well and, ultimately, the munitions to strike the production facilities that allow Russia to keep up such a tempo of strikes if it finds itself at war.

The real value of Octopus is not in the specific characteristics of the system, but rather in the process, which saw the UK respond in anticipation of a scaling threat to produce a technological countermeasure that was price competitive with what it was designed to defeat, and to align the industrial capacity to scale production. It is this process that must be protected and indeed expanded to be applied to other emerging tactical problems for Ukraine and potentially for Europe in the future.

© RUSI, 2025.

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