NATO’s 2024 exercise calendar made one technical truth harder to ignore. Large scale drills that once focused primarily on tanks, ships, and fighter sorties are now routinely built around complex uncrewed systems operations. The alliance’s Steadfast Defender series was explicit about scale. Organizers publicly described an exercise package involving roughly 90,000 personnel, more than 50 ships and over 80 aircraft, helicopters and drones — a footprint that turned multi-domain integration from theory into practice on a continental stage.
That change is not merely cosmetic. Several participating nations used the 2024 drills to experiment with coordinated, multi-vehicle UAS tactics and multisensor data fusion intended to behave like classic swarm concepts. In one field experiment highlighted during the winter and spring phases, Norwegian and Swedish teams linked multiple small UAS into a common data feed to correct artillery fire in near real time. The experiment placed the drone aggregation under a single tactical command node and ran targeting feeds into an artillery fire control loop from a CV90 platform acting as a mobile command post. That is a practical example of a small, task-oriented swarm improving the kill chain rather than an abstract research demo.
Parallel to operational experimentation, doctrine and procurement moves have pushed the envelope on numbers and autonomy. The U.S. Replicator initiative, announced in 2023, explicitly frames a path toward fielding large quantities of affordable, attritable autonomous systems across domains. The program is designed to change the calculus from expensive single-platform dominance to distributable mass advantages achieved by many simpler systems operating cooperatively. That policy signal reverberates through allied planning because NATO operations depend on interoperable effects, not national stovepipes.
Not every commander or analyst is ready to accept swarm mythology wholesale. Practical limits still matter: communications fragility in contested electromagnetic environments, limited endurance and degraded sensors when GNSS is denied, and the human workload required to supervise large numbers of autonomous actors. As one senior regional officer noted during early 2024 maneuvers, small UAS are highly useful for reconnaissance and localized tasks but are not a universal substitute for conventional capabilities. Those operational cautions should temper expectations even as the experiments scale.
Taken together the exercises expose a clear pattern. First, alliances are shifting from isolated platform testing to integrated mission rehearsals where uncrewed systems sit alongside ground maneuver, electronic warfare and fires. Second, experiments are emphasizing connective tissue: shared data links, rapid sensor-to-shooter chains, and mobile command posts that can orchestrate dozens of unmanned platforms. Third, the technical emphasis is moving from single high-end drones to heterogeneous fleets where dozens of small systems provide an aperture and redundancy that larger assets cannot match. The Norwegian artillery correction trial is emblematic of that third trend because it ties a distributed sensing layer directly into a traditional kinetic effect.
The operational consequences are multi-fold. On the positive side, distributed UAS teams offer faster target discovery, cheaper attritable means to shape the battlefield, and new options for distributed denial and area surveillance. From a resilience perspective, mission success no longer depends on a single platform surviving long enough to complete its task. On the risk side, the rise of massed UAS operations raises hard questions about command and control, rules of engagement, and allied interoperability. A single swarm-like mission requires standardized messaging, common position and identification protocols, and agreed fallback modes for GNSS or datalink losses. Without those shared standards, massing numbers can amplify fragility rather than provide robustness.
Logistics and sustainment are rarely sexy but they will decide whether mass UAS concepts transition from demonstration to doctrine. Tens or hundreds of small drones flying in a coordinated fashion create demands for launch, recovery, battery or spare motor stocks, and rapid software updates. They also demand training pipelines that produce personnel who can plan, supervise and rapidly reprogram autonomous behaviors under stress. Exercises in 2024 began to expose these constraints by embedding UAS tasks into sustained brigade and joint timelines rather than treating them as isolated trials.
Finally there is the deterrence and escalation calculus. Swarm-capable UAS change the cost curve: cheap systems can impose disproportionate operational friction on an adversary and complicate target prioritization. That is exactly the strategic attraction driving programs that emphasize numbers and distributability. Allies must balance those operational advantages against the political and legal questions of delegating effects to autonomous systems in contested environments. Exercise planners in 2024 began to confront these issues by limiting autonomy levels during live maneuvers and keeping a human supervisor in the loop for lethal or high consequence decisions, but the policy debate will need to accelerate to match the tempo of technical progress.
What should military planners and policymakers take away from the 2024 exercise season? First, accelerate investment in common standards for C2 and resilient networking so allied swarms can interoperate. Second, prioritize realistic sustainment and training models that treat large UAS formations as logistics problems as much as software problems. Third, invest in layered counter-UAS and electromagnetic resilience to ensure massed friendly systems do not become single points of failure under electronic attack. Fourth, fast track doctrine work that defines human oversight, ROE and escalation thresholds for cooperative unmanned effects. These are engineering, organizational and legal problems in roughly equal measure. The exercises of 2024 show that NATO has moved past debating whether swarms matter. The alliance is now confronting the tougher question of how to make many small systems fight as a single reliable instrument of allied power without creating new vulnerabilities.
In short, 2024’s exercises did not produce a single revolutionary weapon. They did something more consequential. They normalized the idea that complex, many-platform unmanned operations belong at the heart of 21st century joint maneuver. Turning those demonstrations into persistent capability will be a programmatic and doctrinal challenge, but it is now an operational imperative.