Northern Coasts 2025 exercises full speed ahead
Northern Coasts 2025 will see 40 ships, 14 nations, and nearly 3,000 personnel in the Baltic.
From 1 to 12 September, some 2700 service personnel, around 40 vessels and 14 nations are taking part in the multinational naval exercise to train national & Allied defence capabilities and to demonstrate presence in the Baltic Sea.
From manned to mixed
Exercises like Northern Coasts are no longer about simply aligning procedures across allies. They are becoming living laboratories where navies explore how to blend:
- Traditional platforms — frigates, corvettes, submarines.
- Lean-manned ships — designed with smaller crews and automated systems.
- Uncrewed surface and subsurface craft — from reconnaissance USVs to one-way strike drones.
- AI decision support — software that can sift threat data, predict equipment failure, or even control autonomous swarms.
This progression reflects broader themes in both the UK’s Strategic Defence Review 2025 and Germany’s decision to place Quadriga 2025 under its new Operational Command. The language has shifted from simply “integration” to orchestration — bringing together crewed and uncrewed assets, human judgement and algorithmic speed.
Why AI and drones now?
Three trends explain the urgency:
- Grey-zone disruption: sabotage of pipelines and cables demands persistent surveillance. AI-enabled drones can loiter unseen where a frigate cannot.
- Mass and attrition: no European navy can afford hundreds of new hulls. But dozens of small, cheap, attritable drones can fill gaps in numbers and complicate adversary planning.
- Decision speed: missile engagements and drone swarms unfold in seconds. AI is being trained to handle the “speed and complexity” problems that humans cannot solve within a reasonable timeframe.
