ADAZI, Latvia – The quiet forest outside of Riga erupted with tank, mortar, machine gun and the buzzing of “enemy” drones as NATO ran a demonstration intended to show how 5G networks could be used to thwart an attack on Latvia’s capital.

Shipping containers standing in for enemy tanks were hammered by NATO fire, stopping their approach to Riga International Airport. NATO forces scattered a menacing group of attacking drones, destroying one. NATO resources quickly picked up the enemy launch site, but failed in its destruction attempts as the system blinked offline. 

A mixed result for the hundreds of soldiers and nearly 100 tech companies from more than 20 countries behind Operation NATO DiBaX. But, in a way, that was the point: industry and NATO working together with Latvian telecom provider LMT Defence to tie systems together using technologies that were never meant to be interoperable.

“It’s not an achievement today; it’s the beginning of a new story,” said Adm. Pierre Vandier, NATO’s supreme allied commander transformation. “We must accept risks. We must expose imperfections. We need to be blunt and be honest, and that is really the change. We are not making some glossy presentations for journalists where everything works.”

It’s a new approach, he said, to invite failure. The lessons of the Russian war on Ukraine are being learned rapidly, and having the technology to use and protect networked devices will be table stakes for any Baltic confrontation. 

“We took the risk today, even to fail,” he said. “This is new. It’s not a show. It’s not something with the blue sky and all the things that work. I can tell you that the team preparing this had a terrible night, because they really feared to show you something that didn’t work.”

While the live-fire exercise was taking place at the Adazi Military Base, some Canadian troops were deploying to the country’s eastern border for exercises close to Russia that generated irritated headlines in Russian media. 

"The aim of the drill is to test the brigade's ability to move, supply, and guide units at long distances in cooperation with the National Armed Forces," the Latvian army said.

Canada commands NATO’s multinational Latvian brigade and has 2,000 soldiers in the country and another 2,000 earmarked as deployable in Canada. Col. David Brassard, commander of NATO Multinational Brigade underlined that Canadian soldiers aren’t in Latvia to train - they are there to “rehearse.”

Lt.-Gen Kaspars Pudans, commander of the Latvian Armed Forces, said NATO’s enemies may feel they have a technological advantage at the moment, but exercises such as NATO DiBaX, regardless of the results, will even the technological battlefield quickly.

“The war in Ukraine has significantly sped up changes in the character of war, in technologies. But it’s not only for the Ukrainian military, and it’s not only for us; it’s also for our adversaries,” he said. “They are also learning from the battlefield, and they might assume they currently have the advantage. For us, it’s something to bring and demonstrate that we will re-establish this advantage, and we will have the advantage on the edge of technology.”