On August 16, a Spanish F-18 flying a NATO air policing mission shot down a drone that had entered Romanian airspace. Four days later, two Romanian F-16s were scrambled after a maritime drone was detected near the Neptun Alpha offshore platform, part of the Neptun Deep natural gas project and a critical asset for Europe’s energy security. Neither incident resulted in loss of life.
That is welcome news, but it should not give us false comfort. What happened in the Black Sea points to a security problem NATO can no longer afford to ignore: How do we act when an unidentified threat approaches allied territory, seconds matter, but attribution may take hours or days? This is the reality of gray-zone warfare.
An adversary no longer needs to launch a conventional, full-scale attack to create disruption. A cheap drone that tests reaction times, approaches an energy installation or creates uncertainty about its origin and intent can already serve a strategic purpose. Making decision-makers hesitate is often the real aim.
That escalation is not theoretical. On September 13, a drone struck the locomotive of a passenger train traveling from Kyiv to Warsaw, just kilometers from the Polish border, minutes after a separate train carrying senior European officials, including former prime ministers of the United Kingdom and Sweden, had passed through the same area. But the incident was not incidental: gray-zone tactics are reaching the transport corridors that connect Ukraine to NATO territory, and the people who depend on them, including senior European officials.
As Romania’s deputy prime minister for strategic partnerships and minister of justice, I worked for years on national security and Black Sea issues, including as co-chair of the U.S.-Romania Strategic Partnership Dialogue in Bucharest. That experience reinforced one non-negotiable lesson: uncertainty must never become an excuse for inaction. NATO cannot afford to wait for definitive attribution before protecting its people.
But speed must not mean improvisation. Commanders need pre-authorized rules based on a threat’s behavior, trajectory, proximity to protected assets and risk to civilians. The goal is to give commanders a lawful basis for proportionate and timely action when a threat presents an imminent risk, not to turn every unidentified object into a target.
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