German police are set to gain powers to shoot down rogue drones, a move prompted by recent airport disruptions across Europe, which some leaders link to Russian hybrid warfare.
The cabinet approved the new legislation on Wednesday, now awaiting parliamentary consent.
It explicitly permits officers to neutralise drones violating German airspace, including using firearms in situations of acute danger or significant harm. Other authorised methods include laser intervention or signal jamming to disrupt control and navigation.
The new law comes after dozens of flights were diverted or cancelled last Friday at Munich Airport, Germany’s second largest, leaving more than 10,000 passengers stranded, after rogue drone sightings.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said he assumed Russia was behind many of the drones flying over Germany last weekend, but none had been armed and were rather on reconnaissance flights.
EU leaders have come to view Russia as a major threat to their continent’s security following Moscow’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine and their support of Kyiv.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called last month for what she described as a drone wall – a network of sensors and weapons to detect, track and neutralise intruding unmanned aircraft – to protect Europe’s eastern flank.
But some say the drones involved in recent incidents could also have been launched from within the EU.
With the new law, Germany joins European countries that have recently given security forces powers to down drones violating their airspace, including Britain, France, Lithuania and Romania.
It states that to avert dangers posed by drones on the land, in the air or on water, police “may employ appropriate technical means against the system, its control unit, or its control link, if averting the danger by other measures would be futile or significantly impeded.”
Germany recorded 172 drone-related disruptions to air traffic between January and the end of September 2025, up from 129 in the same period last year and 121 in 2023, according to data from Deutsche Flugsicherung (DFS).
German military drills last month in the northern port city of Hamburg included a demonstration of how to neutralise a rogue drone.
Like a spider, a large military drone shot a net at a smaller one in mid-flight, entangling its propellers and forcing it to the ground, where a robotic dog trotted over to seek possible explosives.
Shooting down drones could be unsafe in densely populated urban areas, however, and airports do not necessarily have detection systems that can immediately report sightings.
