UK soldiers are experimenting with new battlefield technologies in Latvia as part of “Exercise Forest Guardian,” a NATO-linked deployment near the Russian border.
The goal: test whether a wired-up battlefield, where drones, robots, and artillery share a common picture, can speed up targeting and keep troops safer.
At the heart of the trials is Arondite Ltd.’s Cobalt battlefield management system, which links unmanned systems and fire support assets into a shared network.
Troops ran Cobalt on handheld devices and screens in a makeshift command hub, tracking friendly units, monitoring targets, and coordinating movement without paper maps.
Several defense firms embedded engineers with soldiers to iterate kits in real time. Participating companies included Arondite, ARX Robotics, Anduril Industries, Iveco Defence Vehicles (IDV), and L3Harris.
Ambush With Uncrewed Support
During the exercise, British troops used Anduril’s Ghost X drone to locate a simulated high-value enemy asset.
A camouflaged Gereon unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) from ARX Robotics, concealed in the vegetation, then provided close visual confirmation.
With the target identified, troops executed an ambush using conventional artillery. A larger Viking uncrewed vehicle from IDV then moved in to recover captured equipment.
The sequence — locate with a drone, confirm with an uncrewed vehicle, strike with artillery, and recover with a larger UGV — showed how Cobalt can orchestrate mixed teams of humans and machines in a single kill-chain.
Future Investment
The UK Ministry of Defence plans to invest more than 4 billion pounds ($5.3 billion) in autonomous systems by 2029, plus over 1 billion pounds ($1.3 billion) to build a nationwide “digital targeting web” by 2027.
Officials expect long-term contracts with companies involved in the Latvia exercise.
“NATO is thinking about how it can spread finite resources across a hugely extended new frontier,” Brigadier Matt Lewis, commander of the 11th Brigade, told Bloomberg.
“One of the compulsions now that UK defense has to really grapple with is how we make a smaller army more effective over a larger geographic mass.”
