NATO’s Heimdall exercise in northern Norway tested whether modern digital technologies – including AI, cloud-to-edge platforms, unmanned systems, and zero trust architectures – can operate in Arctic conditions where connectivity, infrastructure, and equipment resilience cannot be assumed.
The exercise, held in February above the Arctic Circle, brought together industry, academia, and defense participants to test capabilities in an environment marked by extreme temperatures, long periods of darkness or continuous daylight, heavy icing on equipment, and challenging communications, said Karl Magnus Bergh, senior integration architect at IBM.
“Will the technology actually work in the Arctic?” Bergh said, describing the central question behind the NATO experimentation arena.
Bergh was joined at the Red Hat Government Symposium by Sam Richman, principal chief architect for global defense at Red Hat, and Christopher Yates, principal chief architect at Red Hat, to discuss how the Heimdall exercise is reshaping thinking about cloud-to-edge architecture, AI, and multi-vendor collaboration – not only for defense, but for any organization facing austere, rapidly changing conditions.
Testing technology in the Arctic
Heimdall focused on three primary areas: testing unmanned vehicles in the Arctic, exploring manned-unmanned teaming including AI, and enabling NATO-standard information sharing through data-centric and zero trust architectures.
Bergh coordinated IBM’s participation in the exercise, bringing together IBM Consulting, IBM Technology, and Red Hat to address the problem sets as one team.
Sustaining missions without connectivity
In defense environments, fixed infrastructure may not exist – and when it does, adversaries will try to disrupt it, Richman said.
“For a mission to work, connectivity cannot be assumed,” he said.
Platforms such as IBM Fusion and Red Hat OpenShift are being used to support AI models and mission applications across small form-factor deployed devices, forward operating bases, cloud environments, and core infrastructure – even when connectivity is absent, Richman said.
Reducing risk from cloud to edge
A consistent cloud-to-core-to-edge architecture can reduce risk when agencies or defense organizations need to move applications, models, and data across fragmented environments, Richman said.
When applications and the underlying platform both change at the same time, risk increases, he said. A stable infrastructure layer can make it easier to move workloads without adding operational uncertainty.
Sorting sensor data with AI
At Heimdall, IBM and Red Hat demonstrated how AI can help human operators cope with the deluge of sensor data. During the exercise, more than 15 diverse sensor platforms fed data into CX Edge, a lightweight, AI-enabled platform originally developed for U.S. Special Forces by Octo, which is now part of IBM.
“The real challenge is making sense of it all, right? And that quickly becomes a human capacity problem,” Bergh said.
CX Edge uses AI to sort, filter, and prioritize information so operators spend less time searching across data streams and more time acting on relevant information, Bergh said.
Managing attritable device fleets
Modern warfare is increasingly defined by “large numbers of small things” that serve as the eyes and ears of the battlefield, Richman said.
That creates a challenge of scale for defense organizations managing attritable devices across domains. Richman noted one nation’s deployment of 300,000 assets a month as an example of the volume that defense organizations may need to manage.
Red Hat Device Edge with Red Hat Edge Manager serves as a force multiplier for scaling, enabling a single operator to manage thousands of all-domain devices. These tools are designed to handle the technical heavy lifting, ensuring that personnel keep their focus on the mission rather than the maintenance, Richman noted.
Building trust through zero trust
Resilience is not purely technical, Bergh and Richman emphasized. In the Heimdall exercise, 13 military departments and 26 industry partners worked side by side without prescriptive orchestration from NATO. Participants had to test ideas, fail safely, learn, and try again, building mutual understanding and trust in the process, Bergh noted.
Zero trust is a foundational aspect of trust across organizations, Richman noted, because security controls give organizations more confidence to share data. Combined with multi-vendor, software-defined operations, technology can adapt to mission needs, rather than forcing missions to conform to rigid technical constraints, he added.
Applying Heimdall lessons beyond defense
For commercial and federal civilian IT leaders, Heimdall’s broader lesson is that resilience depends on trust, adaptability, and speed, Bergh said.
Whether in a remote mining facility, a global supply chain, or a defense environment, organizations need data-driven architectures that can support faster decision cycles and continue operating when conditions become unpredictable, he observed.
Watch the Red Hat Government Symposium session: “The Arctic Edge: Lessons from Exercise HEIMDALL,” and explore more sessions from the Red Hat Government Symposium.