The NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training and Education Center (JATEC) in Bydgoszcz, Poland, is working to turn lessons learned from the Russia-Ukraine war into training to strengthen Ukrainian forces and enhance the Alliance’s deterrence efforts.
Since opening in February 2025, the center has been working with Allied Command Transformation to develop capabilities to help meet Ukraine’s battlefield needs. In March 2025, teams competed to develop counter-glide bomb technologies in the Innovation Challenge. Glide bombs are difficult to counter because of their combination of speed, low thermal profile and their ability to saturate defense systems. A French team, chosen out of 40 submissions, submitted a proposal that included an artificial intelligence-enabled solution to counter glide bombs through early detection, rapid identification and decision support, NATO said in a news release.
A June 2025 JATEC challenge conducted in Tallinn, Estonia, saw 162 submissions aiming to counter fiber optic first-person-view drones, which are immune to conventional jamming technologies and more challenging to detect. A jury of experts from NATO and Ukraine chose two teams from the United States and one from Ukraine in a final “hackathon” displaying solutions to counter the drones.
JATEC “is capturing all the lessons from the war,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said during a news conference before the June 2025 NATO summit in The Hague. “We are learning day in, day out from what the Ukrainians are doing. We also are learning and seeing that the Russians are copying what the Ukrainians are doing in two or three weeks … it forces us at NATO and in each Allied country to really reconsider, think through all our basic defense concepts compared to three and a half years ago.”
Also in June 2025, JATEC met for the first time to develop a lessons-learned data exploitation platform (LL DEP) to enhance information sharing between NATO and Ukraine. Attendees included experts from Ukraine’s armed forces and their counterparts from Canada, Czechia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the U.S. The leaders were joined by the Boryviter Center of Excellence, a Ukraine-based nonprofit organization that provides training and support to Ukraine’s armed forces. The conference focused on identifying the functional, technical and organizational parameters of the platform that would integrate data from NATO and Ukraine into a single system. Participants discussed the architecture of the future platform, data-sharing mechanisms and procedures for interaction between key stakeholders in the lessons learned process. Working groups focused on methods of data collection, information exchange processes and methodologies for data analysis.
“Ukraine’s combat experience and NATO’s technological capabilities will create the foundation for a new model of operational learning — one that will enhance Ukraine’s defense posture and contribute to the development of a shared security architecture for the future,” said Col. Valerii Vyshnivskyi, JATEC’s director for program implementation.
“The JATEC lessons learned data platform marks a crucial milestone in the transformation of Ukraine’s defense sector” said Paylo Musiienko, head of analytics for Boryviter. “Prompt operational analysis and adaptive decision-making enhance the effectiveness of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and provide Partners with a model for studying innovation amid wartime.”