The opening day of Future Land Forces 2025 sought to provide a wide-level overview of both the evolving threats in our geopolitical landscape and the ways in which NATO forces and allied friendly nations are transforming to counter them.
The day was ably chaired by Lt. General (Ret.d) Andreas Marlow, Former Vice Chief of the German Army and Commander, Basic Military Organisation. Remarking “we all know who the most likely enemy will be,” he added: “This conference is taking place in the right place at the right time… Poland knows the threat and is a front-runner in setting up first-class forces… to signal that any aggressor will have a high price to pay if he does something stupid.”
Indeed, during the opening day’s plenary session the assembled delegates heard a presentation focusing precisely on the land forces modernisation programme of the Polish Armed Forces.
This touched on everything from its plans for a centre for AI that will support defence projects across all aspects of modernisation, to the “huge challenge” of integrating its plethora of new kit — tanks, artillery, air defence systems and more — in a coherent and efficient manner.
And as one speaker noted: “In the next war or armed conflict the winner will not be the one with the biggest army, but the one who implements changes first.”
There was also a general consensus that we should not be relying too heavily on support from further afield to ensure readiness. As one presenter put it: “There is no doubt that the U.S. has its main focus on its own security, and we have to do our best to build our capabilities in Europe to defend ourselves.”
Of course, the need to balance transformation and readiness comes with its own challenges, as a talk on developing NATO brigade, divisional and corps-wide operations for deterrence on Europe’s eastern flank made clear.
Coordinating no fewer than 21 different nations’ approaches to C2 into a cohesive whole presents both difficulties and a continuing opportunity to absorb best practice.
Delegates were told: “The battlefield of tomorrow will be defined not only by kinetic superiority, but also the quality and speed of decision-making in complex and contested environments.”
One of the keys was to anticipate adversaries’ actions, rather than just react to them. And this message dovetailed well with a separate presentation which focused on the make-up and operations of the 10th Panzer Division of the German Army.
This force has a forward-deployed element in Lithuania, the 45th Brigade. This is in its build-up phase at present, with the rest of its constituent parts set to move permanently to Lithuania in 2027-28.
The speaker noted: “Our biggest problem is mass: Russia has a lot of mass, and as Stalin once remarked, quantity has a quality all of its own. We have to counter that.”
Related issues included finding ways of helping industry to increase its production capacity to provide the systems and spares ordered and needed. He admitted: “There’s not enough spare parts, because at the moment industry cannot keep up with all the orders we are giving it.”
Large-scale manoeuvre operations were “definitely not” an obsolete concept, he stated, but he acknowledged their reliance on effective air defence, drawing an analogy with aircraft carriers in the naval domain: vital to operations, but unable to operate on their own.
Another element touched upon in this wide-ranging presentation was the emerging concept of the Eastern Flank Defensive Line (EFDL), an American-led idea of a multinational disruption zone of uncrewed systems sitting inside or perhaps even straddling the border.
The idea of the EFDL would be to provide a kind of buffer as the first line of defence to engage and slow any kind of enemy incursion, and allow defensive forces more time to organise themselves and mount a counteroffensive.
The potential utility of the putative EFDL was echoed by another speaker, this time from the Estonian Defence Forces, when questioned about continual sub-threshold provocations from Russian forces.
He said he felt instigating such a capability would have a positive effect, along with continuing capability testing such as the EDF’s initial HIMARS trials this summer.
“These actions [the provocations] are meant to test us, to take us off balance, and to paralyse us with fear,” he said. “We have to keep calm — it’s a very British phrase — and we have to be resolved… that will be noticed, because we are watched, without any doubt.”
He said of the tests: “They understand that the capability is there, and it is real.”
Explaining the Estonian Defence Force’s core principles of deterrence, the conference heard the EDF was resolved to fight “no matter what”, and to begin combat immediately and inflict losses on an adversary immediately in any conflict.
Expanding on the EDF’s fight the deep, resource the close and protect the rear credo, he said strikes would be carried out in the deep as well as in close combat right from the beginning. Again, as was noted by a separate speaker: “The focus should be on the deep; if you can’t kill what’s killing you, you won’t have any close forces to support, because they won’t be there any more.”
The afternoon’s presentations began with a High North theme, with delegates hearing a Saab presentation sandwiched between talks on Norwegian and Canadian modernisation plans.
The Norwegian presentation noted how climate change was increasing the strategic importance of the Arctic and High North areas of operation generally, and the proximity of Norway’s northern reaches on the Kola Peninsula to Russia’s Northern Fleet and the base of operations for its nuclear submarines.
As well as going into detail about its strategy for potential future land operations, which the speaker described more of an adaptable “conceptual handrail” than a cast-iron prescription, the presentation talked about its experimentation with uncrewed systems, characterised as “obviously of utmost importance.”
The Norwegian Armed Forces are in the early stages of standing up two or three major experimental programmes, including UGVs potentially for both logistics and combat missions.
But it was conceded that the rigours of the climactic conditions were a significant obstacle, with low temperatures causing icing issues for UAS and depleting battery power for all UxVs.
It was noted, too, that warm summers meant uncrewed systems had to contend with a wide range of different conditions; as the speaker put it “We have to cope with all four seasons.”
He also emphasised the importance of regular and wide-ranging operational exercises alongside allied partners to bolster interoperability and ensure partner forces were acclimatised to fighting in the High North.
The Canadian presentation was brutally blunt in its assessment of its army’s current capabilities: “The army that we have in Canada is not the army that we need, and it’s embarrassing to admit that. But the good news is that the conditions are set at every level to bounce back.”
The speaker described the Canadian Armed Forces’ (CAF’s) plans to shift from what he described as a current model of “contribution warfare” back to a division-level operating model that included a continued and recently renewed commitment to remaining the framework nation for NATO in Latvia.
From summer 2026 the Canadian Army will be reorganised away from its current geographical lines into four distinct purpose-defined strands: home defence, manoeuvre, support, and training.
This will take in a recruitment drive seeking to welcome 10,000 new soldiers to the CAF — backed by an enhanced wages and benefits package — and a recapitalisation programme that will see some CA$50bn-worth of new equipment procured across the next five to six years.
The speaker admitted: “We need to find a way to streamline procurement: right now it takes ten years to buy a truck. This is unacceptable.”
But he also sounded a note of optimism: “It will be difficult, it will be challenging… but we have everything in place.”
This was followed by an illuminating panel discussion on multidomain drone operations involving speakers from Red Cat, Edge Autonomy and Doodle Labs.
It took in how the uncrewed landscape was shifting towards controlling swarms of more than 100 drones at a time, including mothership drones hosting and deploying assets with a variety of different missions at once.
The sheer number of drones involved has increased cognitive load on operators by a factor of 20 or more, delegates heard. Challenges include segregating those different data streams and C2 communications, increasing data communication capacity, and utilising AI edge processing to reduce the amount of real-time data which needs to be sent and received.
In the coming years, it was suggested, we might see whether AI capabilities can advance to the point where people are comfortable with the idea of removing the human-in-the-loop element for certain types of kinetic strike missions. On the other hand, concepts such as counter-AI and AI spoofing might form arguments against this particular future.
An engrossing first day was rounded off with a talk on Ukraine’s battle-proven Delta digital combat management system, developed from scratch since 2016, which enables unified real-time battlefield awareness and data exchange at all levels.
By Ukrainian estimates Delta has enabled battle damage to enemy assets valued at $22 billion and climbing: the Magura maritime drones which have wreaked such havoc on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet are just one of the platforms integrated into the Delta system.
Delegates heard how Delta issues online alerts to front-line forces when enemy artillery positions are identified; on average 200,000 firings are detected each month, and the time between detection and alert is roughly 60 seconds.
Delta’s innovative “Uber Targets” system for units to share and book strikes was described, too: essentially the system works in the same manner as the Uber platform does from a taxi driver’s point of view. Once a target is identified from an alert, individual units can choose whether to prosecute it themselves, or leave it to another unit.
Each unit wins “E-points” for confirmed kills, also logged on the Delta system, and these points can be redeemed for items such as drones, EW capabilities and so on via Ukraine’s Brave1 online marketplace.
Delegates also heard about the “Avengers” AI system integrated into Delta that uses computer vision to automatically detect and classify enemy targets in video feeds from drones and cameras in near real-time.
The system is programmed to request additional human verification where visual data is unclear; at present it reportedly achieves about 70% enemy asset detection in real time, with an average reaction time in the order of 2.2 seconds.
As the Russians continue to change the way they attempt to disguise their platforms on the battlefield, so the AI algorithm is constantly trained on that data to counter it in, a kind of ongoing informational arms race.
And asked what single measure NATO allies should adopt to enhance their deterrence, the speaker’s advice was clear: essentially, make your operational exercises more realistic, with more drones, and comms that use LTE and Starlink in GPS-denied environments.
This insight-packed talk brought a fitting end to a memorable first day at FLF25: bring on Day Two!
