Defeating the swarm: Project Flytrap accelerates NATO's counter-drone lethality

PABRADĖ, Lithuania — Above the pine forest of the Pabradė Training Area, roughly 30 kilometers from the Belarusian border, a small quadcopter rises into a sky shared with dozens of other drones. Friendly and adversary, sensor and strike, American and British. Below it, Soldiers are learning, in real time, what it takes to fight as a squadron in three dimensions.

“Right now, we are implementing these systems at the troop level, company level and squadron level,” said U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Mateus Nunes, an infantryman assigned to Echo Troop, 2nd Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment. “We are just seeing how they work.”

This is Project Flytrap 5.0, a U.S. Army V Corps counter-unmanned aerial systems initiative that has spent the past year scaling from the individual Soldier to the squadron level against the same low-cost drones reshaping the modern battlefield. Held from April 30 to May 19 as part of Saber Strike 26, the exercise puts 2nd Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment in the lead, with the 52nd Air Defense Artillery Brigade and the United Kingdom's 3rd Parachute Regiment integrating and testing more than 50 industry-provided technologies, including radars, radio frequency defeat systems, kinetic interceptors, launched effects and unmanned ground vehicles. The systems were networked across a combined U.S.-U.K. tactical data architecture and tested against a live opposing force.

The program’s arc has been deliberate. Iterations 2.0 through 4.0, carried out in Germany and Poland between May and August 2025, tested which counter-UAS equipment belonged at which echelon and developed and standardized initial tactics for fighting drones at the small-unit level. Flytrap 4.5 at Putlos, Germany, last November, tested the next generation of industry technology and sharpened individual operator proficiency. Now, Flytrap 5.0 is the first to integrate these systems at a squadron scale.

"We are transforming to enable offensive maneuver in a drone and electronic-warfare saturated environment, and Flytrap is essential to making that happen,” said Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa. “This effort is about getting technology into the hands of Soldiers, in the field, to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Then we share those lessons across the Army and the joint force, and with our allies.”

Flytrap 5.0 is formally nested inside the Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative, NATO’s warfighting concept in the land domain. EDFI links digital architecture and operating systems across nations to detect and decide faster, leveraging artificial intelligence to process data faster, to connect units and effects to strike faster and at scale. It also means reducing the cost curve in defeating drones and incorporating cheaper attritable systems.

"Success in Flytrap 5.0 is a little different than other exercises — in some ways failure is still success," said Maj. Jared Whitaker, the V Corps technical integration and assessment lead for Project Flytrap. "The industry who creates these systems can get immediate feedback, make hardware and technical changes rapidly — so that when those systems are fielded to Soldiers, they've already got a look by Soldiers and will perform significantly better than in the past."

Flytrap 6.0 will take the program to the brigade level. That is an order of magnitude more platforms, Soldiers, and decisions, and at the level at which V Corps intends to fully validate the capability. Until then, the pine at Pabradė is the proving ground.