RIGA, Latvia — NATO is setting up a marketplace where alliance members can shop for counter-drone systems — a pilot project within a broader push by the organization to speed up procurement and help countries adopt new technology more quickly.
The alliance has invited companies to pitch counter-unmanned aerial systems, or C-UAS, by mid-May, and will pick 18 systems in the next one to two months, said Claudio Palestini, NATO head of innovation and technology adoption, in a video briefing with reporters on Monday. The goal is to have contracts in place “by the summer” so nations can start to procure via the marketplace.
With the pace of drone innovation in Ukraine measured in weeks, NATO wants to help member countries move on from requirement-based procurement to a mechanism based on challenges and use cases, a methodology Palestini called “very fitting” for some autonomous systems such as aerial drones, unmanned ground vehicles and C-UAS.
“When we buy phones or laptops, we don’t go to the suppliers with the requirements of them, but we go to the market,” Palestini said. “We buy what fits best with our needs. And this is the spirit that we want to do.”
The marketplace pilot comes after NATO members in June 2025 agreed on the Rapid Adoption Action Plan, seeking to shorten the delay getting cutting-edge technology in the hands of troops. In addition to challenge-based procurement, NATO is looking at new ways of buying such as purchasing capability as a service, as well as leasing models, the head of innovation said.
For the C-UAS marketplace, NATO wants solutions for point, area and border defense, with each operational need covered by a static counter system, another that is deployable in for example containers, as well as a fully mobile system, according to Palestini.
For the resulting nine use cases, NATO then plans to sign contracts for the solution that is the best value for money, and for the cheapest technically-compliant solution, to offer a total of 18 C-UAS options, Palestini said. In addition, all contracts will have a purchasing and a lease option, he said.
“Whenever there will be a requirement from one nation, we can take these requirements and try to map it with the one of the nine use cases and going back to the nation, saying, ‘Okay, this is the solution that we have for this use case,’” Palestini said. “You can basically procure immediately, because this already went through a pre-completed process.”
NATO has also established common funding that will allow nations to test C-UAS systems before making a final decision on procuring them, for example by leasing for one or two months, according to the NATO official.
In a next step, NATO is looking at testing the 18 solutions against standardized procedures, “so that not only we have the possibility to do contracts quickly for nations, but also to give them reasonable assurance of the performance of the system in the use case they envisage,” Palestini said. The alliance is aiming for that testing to happen in September, according to the official.
NATO is setting up a number of so-called innovation ranges, including in Latvia, where industry can test products in real-life conditions and where national procurement agencies can confirm that technology works on the firing range, Palestini said. The goal is to organize a testing campaign about every six weeks, testing different aspects such as performance but also interoperability
As part of the Rapid Adoption Action Plan, NATO intends to hand out “innovation badges” for systems tested in standardized procedures, as a way to assure member countries about how a system performs in a given scenario. The idea is that companies will be able to retest whenever they change their systems to receive a new badge, Palestini said.
Drone warfare in Ukraine has shown “increasingly rapid innovation cycles,” with UAS tactics on average evolving every two to three weeks in the 2023-2025 period, according to Palestini. That imposes a need for rapidly adapting both technology and doctrine, and “ensuring that NATO allies are able to meet this speed is of vital consideration for us.”
The NATO official said the urgency of developing C-UAS solutions means that while the alliance will push for challenge-based procurement that favors interoperability, it will leave “space for innovative solutions to be brought to market at speed.”
The alliance announced the UNITE-Brave NATO initiative in November to develop joint products between companies in member states and Ukrainian firms, and Palestini said the goal is to marry Ukraine’s rapid innovation with “long-term predictability, interoperability and NATO planning.”
The NATO Innovation Range in Latvia for now is set to hold five testing sessions for companies in 2026, including the first one held in March that saw 17 companies trial their products, including four from Ukraine. Another 18 companies will test solutions in May, including one Ukrainian firm, according to the alliance’s head of innovation.
Rudy Ruitenberg is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. He started his career at Bloomberg News and has experience reporting on technology, commodity markets and politics.
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