NATO certifies Dutch drone command system after live exercise

A Netherlands-based command and control platform led one of four competing teams at NATO’s largest counter-drone interoperability exercise in May, fusing sensor data from 13 countries into a single operational picture and receiving an official certification from NATO’s communications agency confirming it successfully connected with 46 separate counter-drone nodes across two tiers of the alliance’s standardized architecture.

Airwayz, the company behind the OVERWATCH airspace governance platform, announced the results of its participation in NATO TIE 2026, the Technical Interoperability Exercise held at NLR Marknesse in the Netherlands from May 11 to 22, where OVERWATCH served as the leading command and control system for Team BRAVO in a live performance challenge against a simulated drone threat.

The scale of the connectivity achievement gives a concrete measure of what the certification represents. OVERWATCH connected with 31 Fusion nodes and 15 Edge nodes under STANREC 4869, NATO’s standardization recommendation for countering Class I unmanned aircraft systems, which covers the small drones that have become the dominant tactical threat in modern conflict. Fusion nodes aggregate sensor data from multiple sources into a combined picture, while Edge nodes represent individual sensors or effectors at the tactical level. Connecting both tiers simultaneously, across systems from 13 different countries that had never been integrated before, through a single command and control governance layer, is the specific technical achievement that the NATO Communications and Information Agency certified with its SAPIENT Interoperability Certificate.

The SAPIENT architecture, formally the Sensing for Asset Protection with Integrated Electronic Networked Technology standard, provides a common data language for counter-drone systems that allows sensors, effectors, and command systems from different manufacturers and nations to exchange information without bespoke integration work for every new combination. Achieving true SAPIENT connectivity is more demanding than it sounds, because the standard encompasses not just data format compliance but the ability to actually command effectors, meaning issue targeting instructions to jamming systems, interceptors, and other response tools, through the same interface that receives sensor data. Airwayz describes OVERWATCH as one of only a handful of command and control systems at TIE26 that achieved direct SAPIENT Tasking of effectors rather than simply receiving sensor feeds, a distinction that separates a monitoring system from a command system with genuine operational authority over the counter-drone response chain.

Thirteen countries contributed counter-drone systems spanning acoustic detection, passive radio frequency sensing, radar, jammers, kinetic interceptors, and remote identification capabilities. Each of those categories involves different detection physics, different data formats, different latency characteristics, and different command interfaces. Fusing all of them into a single Recognised Air Picture, the comprehensive situational awareness display that commanders need to make engagement decisions, while simultaneously maintaining the ability to command specific effectors against specific threats, requires the kind of integration depth that months of bilateral engineering work would normally produce for even a two-system combination. OVERWATCH did it across 46 nodes from 13 nations over the 11-day exercise.

Brigadier General (Res.) Yaron Rosen, Executive Chairman of Airwayz, described what the exercise confirmed about the nature of the problem: “What TIE26 confirmed in the field is something we have known since building OVERWATCH: the scale and speed of coordinated drone threats in a contested airspace exceeds what any human-led C2 can process alone. Connecting with 31 Fusion and 15 Edge nodes, systems from 13 countries, never integrated before, through a single C2 governance layer, under a real commander, against a real threat: that is the standard NATO needs. We are proud to have met it, and ready to work with every nation and system that was part of TIE26.”

The operational deployment record Airwayz cites alongside the TIE26 results places the certification in a broader context of real-world performance rather than exercise-only validation. OVERWATCH has been operating at the Port of Rotterdam for three and a half years, managing airspace governance across more than 80 daily drone vendors without a single shutdown, a sustained operational track record in a complex civilian environment that most defense technology companies cannot match. The system also serves as the system of record for airspace governance in active conflict environments, a description that points toward Israeli deployments given the company’s founders and customer base, and it has been validated through a live performance drill for FIFA World Cup fan zone and venue protection. That breadth of operational experience, from civilian port operations to conflict zone airspace management to major event security, is the kind of real-world resilience testing that laboratory certification alone cannot provide.

TIE26 also carries a direct pathway to operational deployment: the exercise serves as qualification for BATT26, Baltic Trust 2026, a live operational field exercise in Latvia scheduled for August 2026. Latvia’s location as a NATO member bordering Russia makes it one of the alliance’s highest-priority environments for demonstrating real counter-drone capability, and participation in BATT26 with a certified SAPIENT command and control platform positions OVERWATCH in front of the military decision-makers who are closest to the threat and most urgently seeking solutions that work at operational scale.