NATO is planning to expand the use of unmanned systems to protect the Baltic Sea, the site has revealed UK Defence Journal.
According to the report, the next phase of the initiative Task Force X Baltic will be formalized through a new letter of intent signed by eight participating allies. According to NATO, the program represents a practical shift from innovation testing to real operational adoption.
“At the 2025 NATO Summit, Allied governments agreed to a significant increase in our defense spending to achieve a new and ambitious set of defense objectives,” he said Nikolaos LoutasDirector of NATO’s Defense Industry, Innovation and Weapons Division, at NATO Headquarters in Brussels.
According to him, they also supported “a rapid adoption action plan to accelerate the pace of technology adoption to achieve these goals”.
The action plan was described as a mechanism to integrate innovation into defense planning, aiming to respond to what it called an urgent operational need for effective new technologies.
“The action plan complements NATO’s innovation efforts in defense planning and capability development to meet our armed forces’ urgent need for innovative and effective technological products,” Loutas said.
He added that Allies committed to taking steps to accelerate acquisition and integration, including shared best practices, new avenues of adoption and increased experimentation to de-risk new products.
Loutas also pointed to the initiative Task Force X Baltic as one of the practical mechanisms that enable this. „One measure in this direction is the structure of Task Force X Balticwhich today reaches a second very important milestone, with the signing of a letter of intent for the second phase of the Task Force X Baltic.”
„The first phase of Task Force X Baltic has demonstrated that allied navies and land forces, working closely with industry, can deliver persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance from the seabed to space, with speed, at scale and in a more accessible manner,” Loutas added.
NATO officials said the second phase will lead the eight allies to reaffirm cooperation in rapidly acquiring technology-enabled multi-domain capabilities for naval operations. These countries are: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden.
With the second phase of Task Force X Baltic now formalised, NATO is positioning the program as a model for wider adoption, with lessons learned from the Baltic cable incidents driving efforts to incorporate commercial unmanned capability into NATO’s overall capabilities.
Photo: NATO / Saildrone. This content was created with the help of AI and reviewed by the editorial team.
