Thales to Enhance NATO’s Missile Defense with Advanced Situational Awareness Capabilities in NCOP Phase 3

Thales has been awarded a critical new contract by NATO to deliver the third phase of its long-running NATO Common Operational Picture (NCOP) programme. This phase, officially titled “NCOP-BMD”, introduces enhanced Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) features aimed at countering the increasing threat posed by ballistic missiles to European and allied territories. It marks a major step forward in how NATO commanders will view, understand, and respond to complex threats on the battlefield.

For over a decade, Thales has worked closely with NATO on developing and evolving the NCOP system, which has already been rolled out to around 30 command centres across member nations through previous phases—Increment-1 and Increment-2. These systems provided a standardized operational picture across all participating units, enabling joint operations involving land, sea, and air forces to work from a single, shared perspective. Now, with Phase 3, the programme is entering a new level of strategic capability.

What makes this phase especially significant is the introduction of advanced BMD tools. These will give NATO commanders an enhanced understanding of missile threats in real time, including detection, tracking, and potential response options. As ballistic missile risks have grown in recent years—both from rogue state actors and potential regional conflicts—this capability is seen as essential to ensuring Europe's defense posture remains strong and proactive.

Thales has engineered a secure and flexible software architecture for NCOP-BMD, allowing different layers of military operations to tap into a dynamic and comprehensive Common Operational Picture (COP). These COPs gather data from numerous tactical systems used by NATO’s member states, integrating information such as troop positions, equipment readiness, air and naval movement, and now—ballistic missile tracking—into a single view.

This unified picture enables better coordination, quicker decision-making, and a more efficient deployment of NATO’s collective response. Importantly, it also accounts for interoperability among NATO’s diverse systems, a challenge that Thales has spent years mastering.

Each real-time COP generated by NCOP-BMD includes detailed insights on ongoing missions, logistics chains, the status of friendly and opposing forces, and recommended coordinated action plans. For commanders, this means the ability to respond rapidly not just to traditional military threats, but also to time-sensitive missile attacks where every second matters.

According to Gérard Herby, Vice President of Protection Systems at Thales, the third phase is built on lessons learned from the previous phases and is designed to address NATO’s evolving operational needs. “Thales will be providing new functionalities for ballistic missile defence in order to improve the situational awareness of NATO Commanders,” he stated. “This third contract will draw on our deep expertise in NATO interoperability developed since 2015.”

This project forms part of NATO’s broader digital transformation and modernization of its command-and-control capabilities. As security environments grow more complex—with hybrid warfare, cyber threats, and missile risks converging—systems like NCOP-BMD will be central to NATO’s efforts to maintain strategic awareness and ensure collective defense across the alliance.

In essence, Thales’ continued role in delivering this technology ensures that NATO will have the tools it needs to detect, assess, and act against missile threats in real time—making European skies and battlefields safer, smarter, and more secure.