NATO simulates war with a million troops on each side

NATO commanders spent 10 days in October rehearsing how they would fight a war against an enemy army of one million soldiers, running the alliance’s Avenger Triad 26 computer-assisted exercise from a command center in Wiesbaden, Germany, where about 150 officers from several countries tracked a simulated attack on alliance territory around the clock on a live map of Europe.

The exercise ran from Oct. 6 through Oct. 15, 2026, at headquarters in Germany, France, Poland and the Netherlands, with Wiesbaden, home of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, coordinating the effort, and the simulated scenario pitted one million soldiers on each side against each other, local news outlet Merkurist reported after a press tour that gave it rare access to the command center.

Merkurist reported that about 20,000 troops took part in the field, including 4,000 U.S. soldiers, although Avenger Triad 26 was mainly a simulation for command staffs and not a traditional field training exercise, with headquarters from NATO’s 32 member countries practicing how to run joint operations in a crisis, share information and make decisions quickly.

U.S. Army Europe and Africa and NATO’s Allied Land Command worked as a single integrated headquarters during the exercise, which brought in U.S. Army V Corps, the 2nd Polish Corps, the 1st French Corps and the 1st German-Netherlands Corps under an Article 5 collective defense scenario, in which an attack on one ally is treated as an attack on all.

All incoming information was pulled together in Wiesbaden, where a map of Europe showed NATO bases and enemy positions in real time, and one of the main goals of the exercise was to cut the time it takes commanders to react to an attack, partly by using artificial intelligence, so that in a real emergency they could see a complete picture of the battlefield within seconds.

“We must connect the information technology of the 21st century with the military capabilities of the 20th century,” said British Army Lt. Gen. Jez Bennett, acting commander of NATO’s Allied Land Command.

The central system tested in Wiesbaden was the Maven Smart System, the data and targeting platform built by U.S. company Palantir, which uses artificial intelligence to sort through large amounts of data quickly, and the plan is to eventually feed information from reconnaissance drones, ground sensors, radars and cameras into one common network. The U.S. military is also building new tools on the same platform, with U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps developers demonstrating a Maven-based air-defense dashboard at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Arizona, in October.

“In the past, a military commander had to wait for a messenger on horseback. Now information reaches us at lightning speed,” said German Army Maj. Gen. Björn Schulz.

Lessons from the war in Ukraine were also built into the exercise, and U.S. Army Maj. Ben Schiff said that Ukraine, which was invaded by Russia, has advanced military drone technology faster than any other country.

During a preliminary exercise in Wiesbaden the week before Avenger Triad 26 began, soldiers were shown several new systems, including unmanned vehicles built to search for mines and drones meant to defend against enemy aerial weapons, and some of that technology is being researched and developed in laboratories at the Wiesbaden-Erbenheim installation.