NATO Unveils Office to Naturalize Drones Before Shooting Them Down
Officials say granting each intruding drone honorary citizenship first will make attributing blame afterward much tidier.
Following the downing of a drone that entered Lithuanian airspace from what authorities believe was Belarusian territory, alliance planners have quietly stood up a new body: the Rapid Attribution and Naturalization Office. Its sole function is to process each unidentified aerial object's paperwork before an interceptor is scrambled.
Under the new procedure, a drone judged likely to have crossed from a particular country is issued a provisional certificate of honorary citizenship, stamped, laminated, and affixed to its fuselage moments before it is shot down. The idea, according to internal planning documents, is that a drone destroyed as a citizen of somewhere is administratively cleaner than one destroyed as a citizen of nowhere.
"We came together as one office, divided by airspace," said a spokesperson for the drone-naturalization desk, before excusing himself to laminate another certificate. He added that the office was already drafting a points-based system in case two countries claim the same drone.
Critics within the alliance have asked whether shooting down a newly naturalized drone constitutes an act against the very nation it was just declared to belong to, a question the office says is being referred to a subcommittee for further study. In the meantime, the laminator has reportedly not been switched off since the program began.
Officials in Lithuania say they support the initiative in principle but would prefer the paperwork be completed after interception rather than during it, citing concerns about drones drifting off course mid-ceremony.