Tying all these elements together is Altra, the company’s so-called “Reiki-Strike Software Platform”, which acts as part of the collective brain in the ASGARD trials. This is the main part. “These kill webs are competitive in attack and defense,” says General Richard Barrons, former commander of the United Kingdom’s Joint Forces Command, who recently co-authored a major Defense Department modernization plan that supports the deterrent effect of the autonomous targeting web. Barrons invited me to imagine that Russian leaders are considering a possible incursion into Narva in eastern Estonia. “If they did the appropriate thing, Russia would Knows he shouldn’t do that… that little intrusion – he’ll never get there. It will be destroyed as soon as it crosses the border.”
With a targeting web in place, a mix of missiles, drones and artillery can coordinate across borders and domains to attack anything that moves. On its product page for Ultra, Helsing notes that the system is capable of conducting “saturation attacks”, a military tactic to break down an opponent’s defenses with a barrage of synchronized weapon attacks. The goal of the technology, Hellsing VP Simon Brunjes explained in a speech at an Israeli defense conference in 2024, is “lethality that effectively prevents.”
To put it a little less delicately, the idea is to show any potential aggressor that Europe is fully capable of doing damage on its own if provoked. The US Navy is working to establish a similar capability to defend Taiwan with hordes of autonomous drones that rain down on Chinese ships in coordinated volleys. The admirals have their own name for the result such swarms are intended to achieve: “hellscape.”
man in the loop
The biggest obstacle to achieving the full impact of saturation attacks is not technology. This is the human element. “A million drones are great, but you’ll need a million people,” says Richard Drake, head of the European branch of Anduril, which makes the same product line as Hellsing and also participates in ASGARD.
Drake says that the kill chain in a system like ASGARD “can all be done autonomously.” But for now, “there’s a human being in the loop making the final decisions.” This is required as per government rules. “We also insist that human control be maintained over decisions related to the use of lethal force,” Estonia’s Tik told me, echoing the stance of most other European states.
Hellsing’s drones in Ukraine use object recognition to locate targets, which the operator reviews before approving a strike. The planes operate without human control only when they enter their “terminal guidance” phase about half a mile from their target. Some locally produced drones use similar “last mile” autonomy. According to research by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the hit rate of this hands-free strike mode is reported to be in the range of 75%. (A spokesperson for Helsing said the company uses “multiple visual aids” to reduce “potential difficulties” in target identification during terminal guidance.)
hellsing
This doesn’t make them killer robots. But it shows that the barriers to full lethal autonomy are no longer necessarily technical. Hellsing’s Brunjes has reportedly said that its strike drones can “technically” carry out missions without human control, although the company does not endorse full autonomy. Bordes declined to say whether the company’s field drones could be switched to fully autonomous mode in the event a government changes its policy in the middle of a conflict.
Either way, the company may loosen the loop in the coming years. Helsing’s AI team in Paris, led by Bordes, is working to enable a single human to simultaneously monitor multiple HX-2 drones in flight. Anduril is developing a similar “one-to-many” system in which a single operator can marshal a fleet of 10 or more drones at a time, Drake says.
