Since October 2026, the service has been contributing to strengthening the Navy’s ability to maintain situational awareness at sea and to NATO’s investment in unmanned maritime surveillance, known as Task Force X Baltic.
Every day, about 4500 ships move into the Baltic Sea. One of the Navy’s most important tasks is to monitor these ships to assert Sweden’s territorial integrity against foreign powers, if necessary. The situational picture is built by collecting information with fixed and mobile sensors, all year round and around the clock. Since October 2026, the Navy has an agreement with the company Saildrone for four unmanned saildrones that will contribute to situational awareness.
“These are completely unmanned sea drones that move out in the Baltic Sea and are equipped with, among other things, cameras and radar that collect information that we use in our command center. This complements and relieves our manned ships, which can instead devote themselves to more qualified tasks that require a greater legal or ethical perspective with human analysis,” says Commander Paula Wallenburg, Chief of Operations at the Royal Swedish Navy.
Operated on behalf of the Swedish Armed Forces
The new drones are about ten meters long sailing craft that are constantly operated and monitored by the company’s own personnel. The Navy assigns missions to the drones and receives information from them around the clock. With the help of various sensors, the drones can collect valuable information and contribute to the Navy’s situational picture of what is moving in the Baltic Sea. This also creates greater endurance for the navy at sea by, among other things, identifying ships moving in the immediate area.
“The vessels have already contributed valuable information to us. It is not that we now see things that we have not done before, but that we create better endurance at sea in a resource-efficient way,” says Paula Wallenburg.
Part of NATO investment
The fact that the agreement has been signed within the NORDEFCO collaboration enables more nations in the Nordic region to sign agreements based on each nation’s needs. The vessels also contribute to NATO’s Task Force X Baltic initiative, which is a project to accelerate the development of unmanned surveillance within the alliance. The initiative started as part of Operation Baltic Sentry with the aim of creating better monitoring of critical underwater infrastructure in the Baltic Sea region after several cable breaks occurred in 2024 and 2025.
“This is an example of how the Navy contributes to NATO’s development in unmanned maritime surveillance,” says Paula Wallenburg.
