British troops test drone war tactics near Russian border

British troops from the 3rd Battalion, The Rifles have joined Finland’s Kainuu Brigade for Exercise Northern Star, training around 43 miles from the Russian border as the British Army puts its new drone-centric infantry concept through its paces in the Nordic forests, the British Army has said.

The exercise follows the winter Exercise Northern Axe and has drawn in around 4,500 soldiers from NATO countries, including France, Hungary and the United States. For the British battalion, it offers a chance to build closer ties with Finland, which joined the alliance in 2023, and to familiarise its personnel with the Nordic landscape of vast forests and thousands of lakes.

The commanding officer of 3 Rifles, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Redon, said the location was strategically important for NATO and gave his soldiers the chance to develop their tactics in challenging conditions. “The Finns are serious about defence, and learning from each other we can work better together,” he said. What the battalion was working towards, he added, was to “increase our lethality to kill the enemy further away and quicker.”

The exercise is as much about technology as traditional infantry skills as 3 Rifles forms part of 11th Brigade, one of the British Army’s drone-equipped formations specialising in uncrewed aerial systems at low and mid-level altitudes, and has recently been re-designated as one of the new Near Surface Infantry Battalions, a concept built around pairing soldiers on the ground with sensors and strike drones overhead. Northern Star has given the battalion a platform to use those sensors and effectors at range, controlled from a remote command post.

Two systems sit at the heart of the approach, say the Army. The first, called Ghost, is an autonomous uncrewed aircraft resembling a small helicopter, designed for medium-range reconnaissance and surveillance and feeding real-time intelligence and target detection back to the command post. Once a target is identified, that information is passed to the second system, Bolt, a single-use one-way effector carrying onboard munitions that speeds to its target and destroys both the target and itself, the same first-person-view attack profile that has come to dominate the battlefield in Ukraine.

The exercise conducting officer, Major Steve Watts, said the pairing changed what a small unit could do. “With ‘Ghost’ and ‘Bolt,’ you can make a decision faster and you can kill things further away,” he said, which increased both lethality and survivability “because you haven’t got to be there to kill something, you can send a sensor forward, and that’s really critical as we look to the future.”

The soldiers were also equipped with the Android Tactical Assault Kit, known as ATAK or the TAC system, a GPS-enabled device that lets troops see each other’s positions, what is happening around them and where the enemy is. Watts described a lattice network tying everything together, so that troops on the ground wearing a TAC on their chest can see what the drone sees. “It can give instant situational awareness,” he said, “and that’s all key, because once you join together like that, you can pass information, and therefore you can become more lethal.”