During the Joint Viking 2025 exercises under the auspices of NATO, held from March 3 to 16 in Norway, in which about 10 thousand soldiers took part, they became a platform for practicing and testing tactics demonstrated by repelling Russian aggression in Ukraine.
In particular, the extremely famous and already widespread use of conventional quadcopters with discharges. But the Norwegians decided to additionally check whether it really works, for which they involved the Combat Lab unit, which specializes in military research.
To do this, during the exercises, tennis balls were dropped from quadcopters on the armored vehicles of a conditional enemy. The purpose of the tests was to test the tactics of using such weapons, as well as to provide participants with the opportunity to feel the threat from this threat. In total, 30 tennis balls were dropped in 10 sorties, which was the largest use of drones with drops in the Norwegian army in all time, writes Defense News.
On the part of News Hub, we add that in the released footage and photos from the exercises, it is also possible to see that the military equipment was not equipped with any protection against drones. Which also directly indicates the lack of implementation by NATO countries and countermeasures, and this is despite the fact that the effectiveness of drones has been proven for many years.
In particular, for the first time, discharges began to be used during the ATO, and such a means of destruction will soon be 10 years old, and in the last three years it has simply become massive. Moreover, it is possible not to nod only to the experience in Ukraine, because the same drops were used by Hamas, which directly says that drops are now an integral part of the battlefield.
Moreover, those decisions that the US Army has already marked as important have not been implemented. In particular, camouflage and dispersal of command posts, which in their original field state are easily fixed and destroyed. The photos below show the deployment of an artillery operations center during Joint Viking 2025.
At the same time, we are talking not only about the fact that it is not a very good idea to accumulate green tents, KShM and communication machines on a small site on a snowy lawn. And about such things as the camouflage of command posts in radio space, which the US armed forces are also already thinking about.
It is also worth noting that while Ukraine has created the Unmanned Systems Forces and deploying entire brigades of strike unmanned aerial systems, the United States and so far only the United States have begun to create UAV platoons.