Allied Command Transformation is leveraging commercial space-based surveillance technology to deliver daily monitoring and intelligence capabilities to warfighters. The Smart Indicators and Warning Broad Area Detection and Maritime Domain Awareness (SINBAD) enables NATO to rapidly observe and monitor the movement of troops, heavy equipment, aircraft and ships.
Real-time Monitoring: Daily imagery from Planet Labs’ satellites enables NATO to observe adversarial activity within the Alliance’s Eastern Flank and other identified areas. Through this partnership, NATO is capable of scanning Ukrainian and Russian territory, as well as international waters. By monitoring changes in activities at garrisons, ports, airfields and logistics facilities, NATO is alert and prepared for future Russian actions. These tools play a key role in ensuring that the Alliance can anticipate, pre-empt and respond to Russian provocations.
Common-Funded and Reliable Intelligence: By working with industry partners to deliver SINBAD, NATO provides transparent and independently verified information to Allies. It eliminates information asymmetry by ensuring all Allies have a common operating picture. As a Common-Funded experimental capability, SINBAD is fostering collective decision-making within the Alliance. SINBAD provides an additional information source to Allies, augmenting existing Allied and NATO intelligence-gathering tools. Through a variety of space-based detectors, including electro-optical sensors and synthetic-aperture radars, NATO collects diversified data through a variety of weather conditions. In addition, SINBAD’s artificial intelligence-enabled analytics can detect changes or trends in areas of interest, freeing analysts to transform raw information into actionable intelligence. SINBAD is closely integrated with AI tools that detect irregularities and movements and alert stakeholders in real time, and it holds over nine years of historical data across the globe.
Rapid Adoption of Commercial Partnerships: SINBAD proves that NATO is capable of rapidly identifying, adopting and integrating commercial capabilities into the NATO Command Structure. As space becomes increasingly commercialized and contested, the Alliance needs to understand how it can leverage industry for unique advantage. From idea to implementation, SINBAD took only two months, showcasing that NATO can navigate and collaborate with the evolving space-based economy.