For two weeks this month, a stretch of military range in southern Latvia has become one of NATO's busiest counter-drone laboratories. Baltic Trust, designated BATT26, is running August 3-14 at the Sēlija military range, bringing together roughly 650 personnel — soldiers and technical specialists from Latvia, other NATO member states and partner nations — plus industry representatives from several European Union countries, to work through the messy, unglamorous problem of finding, identifying and stopping drones before they do damage.
The exercise is jointly organized by the Latvian National Armed Forces (NBS) and the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA), according to Latvian public broadcaster LSM, and draws participants not just from NATO member states but from partner nations Ukraine, Australia and Japan. That guest list is notable on its own: Ukraine brings more than four years of front-line experience against mass drone attacks since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022, while Australia and Japan's presence signals that the alliance's counter-UAS problem set is being treated as a shared, not purely European, concern.
What's Actually Happening at Sēlija
Per NATO's own event listing, BATT26 is built around combining real-time operation of both uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) and counter-UAS (C-UAS) systems with field exercises and command-level coordination. The stated goals are threefold: test interoperability between different nations' detection, tracking and suppression systems; validate suppression tactics against realistic threat profiles; and standardize training approaches so allied forces can plug into a shared counter-drone playbook rather than improvising national solutions in isolation.
LSM reports that the drills center on staged operations pitting reconnaissance and attack drones against NATO detection, classification and suppression systems, with signal jamming and other counter-drone defenses tested throughout. Per a Latvian National Armed Forces release cited by LSM, the aim is to strengthen the integration of unmanned and anti-drone systems in combat operations and improve operational interoperability between different systems. In practice, that means Latvian and allied C-UAS crews are being tested against realistic attack-drone profiles rather than a canned, predictable target track.
The event is invitation-only, with [email protected] listed on NATO's site as the exercise's coordination point of contact.
The Framework: LCI-X
BATT26 doesn't stand alone. NATO's event page places it under Allied Command Transformation's Layered Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems Initiative, or LCI-X — an ACT-run effort to build a tiered, multi-layer approach to defeating drone threats rather than relying on any single detection or interception method. The "layered" framing matters: a single radar, a single jammer or a single interceptor type tends to have exploitable blind spots against drones flying low, slow and small. Layering — combining radar, RF detection, electro-optical/infrared tracking, and both hard-kill and soft-kill effectors — is the doctrine NATO has been building toward across the alliance, and Baltic Trust functions as one of the field tests for that doctrine.
Trade outlet Unmanned Airspace reported that NATO tested C-UAS technology and operational concepts in the run-up to the August exercise. Roughly 300 participants — 40 companies from 11 Allied nations, alongside partner countries Ukraine and Australia — put more than 60 commercial C-UAS systems and 40 command-and-control software applications through NATO's Technical Interoperability Exercise (TIE26) in the Netherlands from May 11-22, 2026. Per Unmanned Airspace, technologies that demonstrated technical and operational interoperability during TIE26 became eligible to take part in Baltic Trust — a sign the alliance is treating BATT26 less as a one-off demonstration and more as a checkpoint in an ongoing technology and doctrine development cycle.
Q&A: Why Latvia, Why Now
Why run this in Latvia specifically?
The Sēlija range is where Latvia's National Armed Forces conduct this class of live, unmanned-systems training, and the equipment and technologies being exercised at BATT26 were vetted beforehand: per Unmanned Airspace, systems that proved interoperable during TIE26 in the Netherlands earned eligibility to participate in Baltic Trust. That sequencing — validate technology in a controlled, multi-vendor environment first, then run a live, multi-nation field exercise — tracks with how NATO's Allied Command Transformation has been building out its LCI-X counter-drone doctrine.
Why does the participant list matter?
Roughly 650 personnel drawn from Latvia, other NATO states, and partners Ukraine, Australia and Japan, plus industry representatives from several EU countries, is a broad bench for what is fundamentally a technical interoperability exercise. Ukraine's inclusion brings direct combat experience against massed drone raids; Australia and Japan's involvement extends the exercise's relevance beyond the European theater, suggesting NATO is treating counter-UAS standards as something worth aligning with partners who face their own drone threats in the Indo-Pacific.
What does "kill-chain" mean in this context?
The exercise description — combining real-time UAS and C-UAS operation with field exercises and command coordination — points at the full sequence an operator needs to execute against an incoming drone: detect it, classify it (is it a threat, a friendly asset, or civilian traffic), decide on a response, and engage. NATO's stated aim of testing system interoperability and validating suppression tactics is effectively an exercise of that full chain end to end, not just the final "shoot it down" step.
Why It Matters
Baltic Trust is a concrete, dated data point in NATO's still-developing counter-drone posture: a two-week, invitation-only exercise explicitly designed, per the Latvian National Armed Forces' own stated goals, to close training gaps in detecting, classifying and suppressing reconnaissance and attack-drone incursions and to strengthen the integration of unmanned and anti-drone defense systems into combat operations.
The exercise's placement under ACT's LCI-X initiative signals that NATO is trying to move past isolated national counter-drone purchases and toward a standardized, layered doctrine that multiple allies can execute together — a prerequisite if the alliance ever needs to respond collectively to a coordinated, cross-border drone incursion rather than leaving each member state to handle its own airspace. The presence of Ukrainian participants running realistic attack-drone tactics against NATO defenses, alongside Australian and Japanese participants, further suggests the alliance is trying to fold hard-won front-line lessons and out-of-theater perspectives into its own doctrine before — not after — a similar mass-drone incident forces the issue on NATO territory.
