Ukraine’s drone intercept school goes public with Merops footage

Ukraine’s 190th Training Center of the Unmanned Systems Forces released footage showing personnel being trained to intercept enemy drones using the Merops AS-3 Surveyor system, offering the first detailed public look at how Ukrainian units are institutionalizing interceptor drone tactics developed through two years of active combat against Russia’s Shahed campaign.

The training footage shows operators working through engagement procedures at a dedicated training facility, a signal that Ukraine is not simply fielding the Merops as emergency equipment but building a structured training pipeline to scale the capability across units responsible for drone intercept operations.

The 190th Training Center has a documented track record in this domain. Ukrainian reporting has identified it as the first institution in the world to implement remote destruction of Shaheds using drone interceptors, meaning the operators being trained in this footage are learning procedures refined through thousands of real engagements, not classroom theory. That distinction carries weight: the institutional knowledge concentrated in the center represents a tactical and procedural edge that allied militaries, including those now buying Merops systems, are actively seeking to absorb. Ukraine sent military specialists to the Arabian Gulf in March 2026 specifically to share this battlefield experience with U.S. forces operating against Iranian drone threats, and the procedural knowledge those specialists carried came directly from training programs like the one the 190th Center runs.

The Merops system itself was developed by Perennial Autonomy under Project Eagle, the defense initiative backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, built in large part by Ukrainian engineers responding to the immediate operational pressure of Russia’s Shahed drone campaign. Its core component is the AS-3 Surveyor, a fixed-wing interceptor drone that hunts and destroys enemy drones mid-flight. Each Surveyor costs approximately $15,000, reaches speeds up to 280 kilometers per hour, and can operate autonomously using onboard AI and thermal or radio-frequency sensors when GPS or communications are jammed. The full system includes a ground control station, a pneumatic launcher, and radar and electro-optical sensors. A four-person crew can be trained to operate it in approximately two weeks, a fraction of the time required for conventional air defense platforms. According to Perennial Autonomy, the company now partnering to produce Merops in Germany, the system has already helped destroy more than 4,000 Russian drones in Ukraine.

The Merops system’s journey from Ukrainian front-line improvisation to formalized training program mirrors the broader evolution of drone warfare that Ukraine has driven. When Russia began its Shahed campaign in 2022, no Western military had a cost-effective answer to large-scale one-way attack drone swarms. Expensive missiles could intercept individual threats but could not sustain a defense against hundreds of drones per night at acceptable cost. Electronic warfare jammers offered partial protection but could not guarantee kills. The Merops concept, an interceptor drone that physically destroys the target for $15,000 per shot rather than $100,000-plus per missile, addressed that cost asymmetry directly, and it addressed it first in Ukraine. As The Defence Blog has reported, the system accumulated over 18 months of combat use in Ukraine before U.S., Polish, and Romanian troops began testing it.

That combat validation has driven a procurement cascade that now spans multiple continents. The Polish Armed Forces launched a full training cycle for Merops operators following procurement, with exercises at ranges in Lipa and Ustka. Lithuania purchased 48 Surveyor interceptors on April 22, covering both thermal-seeker and radio-frequency-seeker variants, through an expedited government procurement process. When Iran launched strikes triggering Operation Epic Wrath, Merops was deployed to protect U.S. military positions in the Middle East within approximately two weeks, with the system adapted for the theater through additional radar stations. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll told lawmakers in April that within about eight days of Epic Wrath beginning, the U.S. military purchased 13,000 Surveyor interceptors and deployed 10,000 of them to the Middle East within five days.

Driscoll personally signed one of the drones during an April 30 visit to U.S. Army Garrison Ansbach in Germany, where commanders of the 52nd Air Defense Artillery Brigade briefed him on the system. The Department of War formalized that relationship with a $500 million contract awarded to Perennial Autonomy on May 19, 2026, through the Joint Interagency Task Force 401, covering Merops interceptors alongside the company’s Bumblebee quadcopter interceptors and Hornet midrange strike drones.

To sustain output for that level of demand, Perennial Autonomy announced a manufacturing partnership with Munich-based Twentyfour Industries to produce AS-3 Surveyor interceptors near Munich, as The Wall Street Journal reported. Twentyfour demonstrated the Surveyor at the Tech Show exhibition in Erding, Germany, in May 2026, and stated the company was contributing to Germany’s goal of “combining combat-proven technologies with the country’s new industrial base.” Detailed production volumes and customer commitments for the German line have not been disclosed, but reporting indicates the output is intended for European NATO members rather than direct delivery to Ukraine.