The NATO is moving to expand the use of unmanned systems to protect the Baltic Sea, revealed the website UK Defence Journal.
According to the report, the next phase of the Task Force X Baltic initiative 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 NATO Summit in 2025, allied governments agreed to a substantial increase in our defense spending to meet a new and ambitious set of defense goals,” said Nikolaos Loutas, Director of NATO’s Defence Industry, Innovation, and Armaments Division, at NATO Headquarters in Brussels.
He added that they also endorsed “a rapid adoption action plan to accelerate the pace of technology adoption to meet these goals.”
The action plan was described as a mechanism to incorporate innovation into defense planning, aimed at addressing what he called the urgent operational need for new effective technology.
“The action plan integrates NATO’s innovation efforts into defense planning and capability development to address the urgent need of our Armed Forces for innovative and effective technological products,” Loutas said.
He said that Allies committed to measures aimed at accelerating acquisition and integration, including shared best practices, new adoption pathways, and increased experimentation to reduce the risks of new products.
Loutas also pointed to the Task Force X Baltic initiative as one of the practical mechanisms enabling this. “One measure in this direction is the structure of the Task Force X Baltic, which is reaching a very important second milestone today, with the signing of a letter of intent for the second phase of Task Force X Baltic.”
“The first phase of Task Force X Baltic demonstrated that allied navies and army forces, by closely collaborating with industry, can provide persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance from the seabed to space at speed, scale, and in a more affordable manner,” Loutas further stated.
NATO officials said that the second phase will see eight allies reaffirm cooperation in the rapid acquisition of multidomain capabilities enabled by technology for naval operations. These countries are: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Sweden.
With the second phase of the Task Force X Baltic now being formalized, NATO is positioning the program as a model for broader adoption, with lessons from the Baltic cable incidents driving momentum to incorporate unmanned commercial capability into NATO’s overall capacity.
Photos: NATO / Saildrone. This content was created with the help of AI and reviewed by the editorial team.
