Recent large-scale warfare on NATO's eastern flank has shown that an adversary can seek to offset qualitative disadvantage with sheer mass: numerically overwhelming infantry and armour, cheap and rapidly replaceable drones, saturating artillery fires, and pervasive electronic warfare against GNSS, communications, and command networks. For smaller and medium-sized Allies directly bordering this threat, deterrence and defence "from the first centimetre" cannot rely on matching that mass. It depends instead on autonomy that delivers a faster, more reliable sensing, decision, and effects loop than the adversary, sustained even when communications, navigation, and networks are degraded, jammed, spoofed, or destroyed.
Uncrewed and autonomous systems today still fall short of this bar. Air, land, and maritime platforms are frequently single-domain, dependent on continuous connectivity and GNSS, vulnerable to electronic and cyber-attack, and produced too slowly and at too small a scale to survive wartime attrition. Command and control remain centralised in ways that create single points of failure under contested conditions. Achieving decision and effects superiority - not merely fielding more uncrewed platforms - requires resilient autonomy, decentralised mission management, AI-enabled sensor fusion and targeting, and defence-industrial capacity to produce and repair systems at the pace of combat losses.
The Alliance seeks trusted, interoperable autonomous and semi-autonomous systems - spanning uncrewed aerial, ground, and maritime platforms, AI-enabled decision support, and layered counter-autonomy - that deliver sustained decision and effects superiority in electronically contested, degraded, and denied environments, while being producible, sustainable, and repairable at the scale and tempo that high-intensity conflict demands, and interoperable with national and NATO command structures, including forward-deployed multinational forces.
Illustrative Scenario Along an Allied nation's eastern border, adversary forces mass infantry, artillery, and swarms of low-cost first person-view drones, while jamming GNSS and severing tactical communications ahead of a probing attack. A NATO multinational brigade combat group, integrated with the host nation's mechanized infantry brigade and territorial defence battalions, must hold the line despite denied and degraded networks. National reconnaissance and strike drones, navigating on inertial and visual references rather than jammed GNSS, autonomously cue a layered air-defence network against incoming drones, rockets, and artillery, and feed a shared common operational picture to both national and Allied commanders even as connectivity drops in and out.
An electromagnetic-warfare and cyber-defence battalion degrades the adversary's own drone links and jams its command network, while autonomous ground platforms resupply munitions and evacuate casualties across contested, mined terrain without exposing crews. At sea, uncrewed surface and underwater vessels sweep for mines and protect a key port and its approaches, preserving the sea line of communication that Allied reinforcements depend on. As losses mount on both sides, distributed and additive manufacturing lines – drawn from the national drone-industry base built up through initiatives such as an international drone coalition –repair and replace platforms within days rather than months, sustaining tempo despite attrition. Outnumbered in mass, the defending force retains the initiative through networked, resilient autonomy and superior decision speed.
Exemplar Enabling Technologies
The following list provides illustrative examples of technologies that may contribute to this challenge. The list is not exhaustive, and integrated, novel approaches beyond it are encouraged.
Resilient Autonomy Under Electronic Attack
● Navigation and control that remain effective under GNSS denial, jamming, and spoofing, using inertial, visual, and terrain-relative methods.
● Low-cost, mass-producible uncrewed aerial systems and layered counter-UAS capable of being fielded and replaced at wartime attrition rates.
● Electromagnetically hardened autonomy stacks integrated with electronic-warfare and cyber-defence units to deny the adversary the same advantage.
AI-Enabled Decision and Fires Superiority
● AI and machine learning for predictive analysis, multi-sensor fusion, and autonomous target recognition and designation to compress the sensor-to-shooter timeline.
● Decentralised mission management and command and control that continue to function despite denied, degraded, or intermittent communications.
● Human-machine teaming for indirect-fires correction, counter-battery cueing, and tasking of layered air-defence assets.
Multi-Domain Uncrewed Integration
● Interoperable air, land, and maritime uncrewed systems for ISR, target designation, communications relay, logistics resupply, and mine countermeasures.
● Autonomous logistics and casualty evacuation across contested and mined terrain.
● Persistent maritime autonomy for port protection, seabed and critical undersea infrastructure security.
Scalable, Survivable Production
● Additive, distributed, and adaptive manufacturing enabling rapid replacement and mission-tailored variants under wartime attrition.
● Predictive maintenance and in-situ autonomous repair to sustain tempo despite losses and extended supply lines.
● Secure and diversified supply chains for the critical raw materials and components used in drone and autonomous-systems production.
Regulations Full eligibility criteria, application requirements, and evaluation guidelines for the 2026 Challenge are outlined in the official Programme Regulations. Please note that the regulations document is available in Latvian only.