Baltic Air Policing is NATO’s standing mission to protect the airspace of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which do not maintain full-time national fighter patrols. Allied aircraft are kept on alert to identify, escort, or intercept unknown aircraft and, in some cases, support responses to drones or other low-altitude threats.
Its cyber-security relevance comes from the systems behind the mission: radar networks, secure communications, command-and-control, sensor fusion, and electronic-warfare awareness. Defenders must quickly decide whether a track is a civilian error, a reconnaissance drone, a spoofed signal, or a more serious intrusion. Attackers can exploit that pressure through GPS jamming, radio-frequency interference, false telemetry, or information operations that slow decisions and confuse attribution. In practice, Baltic Air Policing shows how modern defense depends not only on aircraft, but also on resilient data, trusted communications, and rapid coordination across military and national systems.