Iran's drones highlight infrastructure vulnerability: researcher

European countries ought to have discussions on whether private actors should help defend critical infrastructure, a researcher told AFP, noting that Iran's use of cheap long-range drones has illustrated shortcomings of air defence systems.

Fabian Hoffmann, a doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, told AFP that especially in places like northern Europe with its wide expanses, protecting critical infrastructure like oil platforms and data centres in remote places could be challenging.

Iran has vowed to strike non-military sites in the Gulf, including economic centres and banks, while the country's Tasnim news agency cited American tech giants such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Nvidia as "future targets".

On Thursday, a drone fell near the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), and on Friday a building in the district was hit by debris from an intercepted attack.

"How are we going to defend every critical infrastructure target against a potential long-range drone attack?" Hoffmann asked.

He cited Norway's extensive oil and gas infrastructure in the North Sea as an example.

Hoffmann said there needed to be a discussion about whether companies like Norwegian energy giant Equinor may "have to deploy some type of long-range drone defence system".

"Because the Norwegian navy just can't be everywhere at once," he said.

Hoffmann noted there had already been talks about granting powers to airports to shoot down drones after a spate of drone sightings led to airport closures across Europe, and said he believed there would be need for wider discussion on other infrastructure.

- Not optimal -

Hoffmann explained that in the Gulf region, most of the air defence systems were developed to primarily counter ballistic missiles travelling at high altitude.

But Tehran's strikes have relied on the use of relatively cheap long-range drones, such as the Iranian-designed Shahed, which can fly at lower altitude and for which the Gulf region's air defences are not optimised.

"It's not that they were completely ignorant of the threat, they were not, they just were not fast enough" in acquiring systems to counter the drones, Hoffmann explained.

According to the researcher, most drones are now countered by a "first barrier" of manned aircraft -- both fighter jets and helicopters -- that shoot down the drones.

While most are intercepted, they are downed at a higher financial cost than that of the drone, and "some slip through".

"When they slip through you have the issue that these states, including the United States around its military bases, often do not have the right types of missile defence systems in place to deal with this long-range drone threat appropriately," Hoffmann said.

The geography of the Gulf region also makes it more difficult, as Iran is close to many of the states and there are many potential targets, meaning attack vectors are unpredictable.

"The same rules of geography apply to Europe," Hoffmann explained. "You have to cover a lot of trajectories."

"There's a lot of potential targets, whether it's military infrastructure or critical civilian infrastructure," he added.

Many European militaries are also relatively small compared to those in the Middle East, which can be especially problematic in countries with large territories and smaller populations, such as Norway and Sweden.

Some countries are developing defensive capabilities for long-range drones, but the only country in Europe currently fielding the type of optimised drone defences that would be necessary is Ukraine, Hoffmann explained.

Ukraine has to fend off nightly barrages of Shahed attack drones launched by Russia, an ally of Tehran.

On Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that 11 countries, including ones neighbouring Iran and European states, had already reached out to Ukraine for help on how to counter such attacks.

Ukrainian anti-drone experts are already working in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.