NATO races to build counter-drone marketplace

The alliance is piloting a new approach to C-UAS adoption, testing systems in the field before nations buy them, awarding quality badges, and building a marketplace where allies can shop for vetted solutions. Getting NATO’s own institutions to move at the speed of drone warfare may prove the hardest part.

NATO is building a marketplace for counter-drone systems and plans to award the first “innovation badges” to vetted technologies by September, a senior NATO official has told reporters, as the alliance seeks to fundamentally overhaul how it adopts new military technology.

Speaking at a briefing in Latvia ahead of the International Drone Summit in Riga, the official outlined the full scope of the Rapid Adoption Action Plan (RAAP), approved at last year’s summit in The Hague, and explained how the NATO Innovation Range at Latvia’s Sēlija Military Training Area sits at the heart of that effort.

The briefing came the morning before the second testing, evaluation, verification and validation (TEVV) campaign at the Latvian range this year. The first took place in March, when 17 companies including four from Ukraine tested counter-UAS and drone systems in live conditions.

New procurement model

At its core, RAAP represents a philosophical shift in how NATO procures technology. The traditional model of harmonising requirements across member nations before procuring a single agreed solution is being replaced, at least for counter-UAS, with what the official described as challenge-based procurement built around specific operational use cases.

Working through the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA), NATO constructed nine use cases covering point defence, perimeter defence, border defence, and variations of deployable, static and on-the-move configurations, then invited companies to map their products against them. Rather than nations specifying what they want and waiting for industry to respond, the marketplace inverts the process: solutions exist on the shelf, and when a nation comes with a requirement, NATO checks whether something already tested fits.

“We started, we didn’t start with the requirements from nations. We built nine use cases and let’s try to map company products across these use cases,” the official explained.

The model draws explicit inspiration from Ukraine’s Brave One marketplace, as well as a recently announced US Army counter-drone procurement mechanism. Poland has already committed to buying from the US version. “We see a clear direction going there,” the official said. “We need to see what are the capabilities and what is the role of NATO in this marketplace.”

The badge system

Central to the new framework is the concept of the NATO Innovation Badge, a quality assurance mark for systems tested at one of NATO’s innovation ranges against commonly agreed evaluation procedures. The first pilot badges are expected to be awarded in September, once the governance document underpinning the scheme is finalised with member nations over the summer.

The official drew a distinction between the badge and a formal NATO certification. “It’s not a certification, but it’s an assurance level by a trusted party that this system performs according to this performance,” he said, comparing the model to common criteria frameworks used in information security.

I asked how the badge would handle the reality of constant product iteration. “Drone warfare is additive by its very nature. Systems require frequent updates. Can a company make those changes without having to restart the badge process?”

The official told me that the badge is tied to a specific system configuration at the time of testing, meaning significant changes require retesting. Minor updates may retain validity, but the threshold is still being negotiated with nations. “The maintenance of the badge, and how regularly companies need to be testing in the innovation range, is part of the discussion we are having with nations at the moment,” he said.

Interoperability between the six innovation ranges, in Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands, is built into the quality assurance model. When one range tests a system, observers from another range are expected to participate, ensuring consistent methodology across the network.

Latvia leads

Of the six pilot ranges established under RAAP, Latvia’s is the furthest ahead. The Sēlija site has five testing campaigns planned for 2026, in March, May, July, September and November, making it by far the most active. The official credited Latvia’s Autonomous Systems Competence Centre, headed by Major Modris Kairišs, with moving quickly after the letter of intent was signed in June last year.

The testing methodology at Sēlija is being developed in part by adapting civilian standards. NATO has taken an existing EU standard from CENELAC on how to test counter-UAS solutions and worked with the UK, Netherlands and Latvia to identify which civilian use cases translate to military requirements, and where they need augmenting. “Probably not the full standard, but something that’s a bit more flexible, so that we can evolve this testing methodology as the technology evolves,” the official said.

Non-NATO companies have already participated. Ukrainian firms took part in both the March and May campaigns, and Japanese, Korean and Australian companies have been in contact. The intent is to maintain an overall NATO governance framework across the ranges, tracking which companies and partner nations participate, while leaving individual campaign selection decisions to the host nation.

Internal friction

When asked what success looks like for RAAP, the official was candid about where the real friction lies. Industry, he said, largely gets it. The harder battle is internal. “How the NATO process, NATO stakeholders that work across very different time frames, the NDPP, operational plans, revision of plans, how the rapid adoption of new technology could impact this: this is the big challenge for us. We have a very easy life working with industry. It’s more difficult to work across NATO stakeholders and impact things that have been done like this for many, many years.”

The NATO Defence Planning Process, designed around longer acquisition cycles, sits uneasily alongside a domain where a system can be obsolete within months. On the command and control side, an internal NATO innovation challenge at SHAPE produced a promising concept for transmitting local drone-incursion data into a Maven-type command system, but questions about where tactical C-UAS information should be processed, at local or command level, and where NATO responsibility ends and national responsibility begins, remain unresolved.

Despite those tensions, the official pointed to early signs of progress mentioning Task Force X, which tests how mature technological solutions integrate into NATO operational environments, and the opening of military exercises to technology companies as live observers, are beginning to shift how nations think about procurement. “We see more and more instances where this is understood,” the official said.

On one question, whether a changed US posture under the Trump administration had created difficulties for the innovation agenda, the answer was unequivocal. “Very frankly, on innovation, the US have been very supportive on all the policies that we are doing. Very big supporter of the rapid adoption plan.”

The next testing campaign at Sēlija takes place in July, with further sessions in September and November. The first innovation badges are expected to follow the September campaign. Whether the marketplace, the badge system, and the new procurement philosophy can move fast enough to keep pace with the threat is, as the official acknowledged, still being tested on the range and inside NATO’s own institutions.