A detailed look at NATO's Locked Shields, the largest cyber defense exercise in the world
Steve Ranger / TechRepublic :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2016 TechRepublic deep dive is the baseline portrait of Locked Shields, the exercise where NATO has national teams defend simulated critical infrastructure against a red-cell attack rather than run tabletop discussions. A year later the format had scaled to 19 teams defending national infrastructure, confirming the live-fire blueprint held.
What makes the piece worth revisiting is where the exercise went next: by 2021 NATO was adding scenarios on widespread attacks against financial infrastructure for the first time, and the networks built through these games surfaced again in the quiet partnership between US tech firms, NATO intelligence, and Ukrainian hackers that blunted Russian offensive cyber operations.
First-order effects
- Participating national teams get hands-on practice defending power grids, water systems, and other critical infrastructure under attack conditions — capability that exists only because the exercise forces defenders to operate their own networks under pressure.
Second-order effects
- Other high-consequence sectors copy the model: governments and the nuclear energy industry adopted hands-on exercises and training laboratories of their own, as covered in related reporting on cyber preparedness in the nuclear sector.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, these exercises function less as drills than as standing coalitions — the same defender networks and public-private relationships rehearsed at Locked Shields became operational during the Ukraine conflict, and expanding scenarios into finance signals the exercise becoming a general-purpose rehearsal for systemic cyber disruption.
The trend: National cyber defense is consolidating around recurring large-scale live exercises that double as alliance-building mechanisms, with NATO's Locked Shields as the template other sectors and governments are replicating.