NATO innovation exercise puts emerging defence technologies to the test in Nova Scotia

A year-long exercise to solve NATO’s most pressing defence-innovation issues has just concluded, with its final event in Dartmouth, where dozens of senior military personnel from across the alliance gathered to assess the requirements for developing military technologies.

Called the NATO Innovation Continuum, the four-day initiative entered its third edition earlier this year after being set up by the Allied Command Transformation (ACT), a NATO strategic agency that helps to bridge the gap between technology development and adoption.

As part of the command’s mandate to ensure that the alliance maintains relevance and interoperability in a rapidly modernizing and dangerous world, the continuum brings together stakeholders from industry, academia, the investment community, military and government throughout the year.

The goal is to marry what’s required in the field with what’s being worked on by companies, and ultimately move valuable products closer to commercialization, said Brigadier Sandris Gaudier, assistant chief of staff at ACT’s multidomain foreign-development directorate.

“Getting those companies together, giving them a challenge and letting them solve the problem amongst themselves,” he said. “That eventually drives not just the answer to the problem, but also collaboration between all the competing companies out there.”

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This collaboration was on full display on Wednesday, when an airship flying near Dartmouth Cove stayed aloft for most of the day, drawing people’s attention across the harbour from the Halifax Convention Centre, where a major defence-industry tradeshow was taking place.

The blimp-like aircraft, a Finnish invention typically used for surveillance and data collection, was operating in tandem with Canadian and Icelandic technologies in the waters below to demonstrate their surveying and target-detection capabilities.

All these companies are part of a group working on Arctic surveillance. Other priorities identified by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for the continuum to work on include counterdrone technologies, electronic warfare, cognitive warfare and cyber resilience, among others.

The innovation initiative’s event in Darmouth in early October was its fourth and final in-person working period for this year’s cohort. The first was held in Bulgaria in February, the second in Poland in May, and the final two in the Nova Scotia city at COVE, an accelerator for companies working on technologies with defence and commercial applications.

Of the 100 companies participating in the October exercise, 30 per cent were Canadian, said Melanie Nadeau, CEO of COVE. This year was also the first time that the innovation continuum was held in Canada.

“Cove’s real mission is focused on commercialization,” she said.

“As these innovators work, they’re really understanding what are the true operational challenges on the front line. And working with those that are the real operators, being involved, it generates a whole awareness and understanding of how they can shape their technology.”

In tandem with the technology demonstrations going on throughout the day Thursday, a war-game exercise was taking place simultaneously in an adjacent building.

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One room in the building sported a bold “do not disturb” sign as participants deliberated on their next move. Not far away, a map was spread atop a gargantuan table, depicting part of what’s known as the GIUK (Greenland, Iceland, United Kingdom) gap, a naval chokepoint in the North Atlantic. Red and blue team pieces were scattered across the metaphorical waters.

The goal of the war game was to theorize the limits of some of the technologies being developed by the participating companies in areas such as cyber resilience, uncrewed systems and artificial-intelligence training.

Nick Price, a scientist at NATO and project lead for the war game, said that through much discussion and some arguing, the military members and veterans around the table were quickly learning their boundaries in terms of trusting the autonomous technologies.

Ms. Nadeau said the significance of the NATO event being held in Canada was not to be underestimated. “The world is coming here, as you can see with this exercise.”

Kelluu, the Finnish airship-maker, not only travelled to Dartmouth for the continuum event but it also recently opened an office in Ottawa, where it aims to scale for adoption in the Canadian Arctic.

As Onni Paivinen, operations lead for defence at Kelluu, put it in an interview: “We are expanding. It’s nice to be in Canada.”