The move came ahead of a silent march that will take place here on Jan. 31 to pay respect and show solidarity to the veterans following remarks made by U.S. President Donald Trump, which discredited the role NATO allied troops played during the war.

In a recent interview with Fox News, the president claimed that while allies sent soldiers to help U.S. troops, they “stayed a little back and a little off the frontlines.” Trump added that the U.S. “never really needed them” in the conflict.

The comments sparked a significant wave of anger among Danish leaders and veterans, who stated that such remarks were disrespectful and insulting to the sacrifices made by Danish troops and those of other countries.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Washington invoked NATO’s Article 5 for the first and only time in history. Denmark was among the first countries to respond to the call for collective defense and deployed troops, as well as military equipment, which played an important part in supporting U.S. operations during the war in Afghanistan in 2002.

A total of 44 Danish soldiers were killed before the Scandinavian country officially pulled out all of its personnel in 2021. The flags placed in flower boxes at the U.S. building in Copenhagen had their names on them before they were removed by embassy staff.

Danish media TV2 reported that they were taken down “as part of the building’s security measures.” Following widespread outrage, the flags were reinstalled and authorized to remain in place.

Residents told Defense News that the tensions between the two countries in recent weeks, centered on a threat made by the Trump administration to use military force to seize control over Greenland, have caused a major loss of confidence in Washington as a credible ally.

“It really hurts to hear those comments and erodes trust. … They were a friend, a big brother for us. It’s been hard to grasp everything that has unfolded,” said Hans Peter H. Michaelsen, a defense analyst who served for over 40 years in the Royal Danish Air Force.

One American citizen who has been residing in Copenhagen for over a year said that he and his family also plan to attend the Jan 31. demonstration to show support.

The collaboration comes in response to a call by global navies for more armed naval drones, according to Saildrone.

The 20-meter Saildrone Surveyor vessel will boast the Joint Air-to-Ground Missile (JAGM) launcher manufactured by the U.S. defense giant.

“We expect this work to attract interest from customers who already depend upon Saildrone and are now thinking about layered maritime defense – for some navies, awareness alone is no longer sufficient, and they’re asking how unmanned systems can also contribute to deterrence and if necessary a response,” ret. Vice-Adm. John Mustin, Saildrone’s president, told Defense News.

Larger Saildrone USVs are also under consideration to carry Lockheed Martin weaponry, such as the Mk 70 Vertical Launching System, a containerized missile launcher, per a company press release.

The new partnership will entail enhanced naval capabilities, including the use of artificial intelligence, which is part of Lockheed Martin’s $50 million investment in Saildrone.

According to Mustin, while the company strives to integrate greater autonomy across its USVs to increase sensing and data processing abilities, it is not pursuing fully autonomous weapons. “Any strike capability would have a human firmly in the loop,” he added.

Many global navies have envisioned a manned-unmanned hybrid fleet for their future requirements, including the United States. Former U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday said the service’s ambition is to build up to 500 vessels, including 350 crewed ships and 150 large uncrewed surface vessels.

Last year’s reconciliation bill known as the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act,’ passed by Congress, included investments of over $3 billion for the procurement of surface vessels: $1.5 billion for the expansion of small USV production and $2.1 for the development and procurement of medium ones.

A report from the U.S.-based Center for Maritime Strategy published in September noted that lawmakers were reluctant to approve the planned funding until the Navy was able to produce a concept of operations for their use.

Saildrone has already planned proof-of-concept integrations and a live-fire demonstration to take place next summer.

Arming naval drones was not a widely implemented practice a few years ago, primarily due to technological and political hurdles, which limited their use largely to surveillance missions.

The Ukraine war has changed this, as the country’s naval forces demonstrated their ability to attack much larger targets using cheaper weaponized USVs.

However, the Saildrone executive warned that the success may not replicate across different conflict zones.

“What the Ukrainians have shown is their incredible ability to inflict a cost curve on their adversaries, striking capital assets with significantly less expensive means – but different theaters around the world present different challenges over much larger distances and threats,” Mustin said.

Over the last year, Saildrone platforms have totaled over 10,000 cumulative days on the water, covering more than 380,000 nautical miles and detecting 2,376,583 vessels, according to the company.

Following President Donald Trump’s expressed interest in January of acquiring 40 new icebreakers for the U.S. Coast Guard, Helsinki has set its sights on scoring what could be a major deal with Washington.

Before his visit to meet with the American leader in Florida last month, Finnish President Alexander Stubb said that he hoped “icebreaker diplomacy would help Finland maintain good relations with the U.S. and Trump.”

However, the country is not the only one in line, as a major Canadian shipbuilder specialized in the construction of such vessels wants a piece of the business.

“Finland is most definitely trying to build the U.S. icebreakers in Finland. … The discussions we’ve been having with the U.S. is around whether they could take our design and use it to build their icebreakers domestically in their own shipyards,” David Hargreaves, senior vice president of business development at Seaspan, told Defense News.

“That concept seems to be getting a fair level of traction both in Washington at a political level,” he added. “We had last week a visit of a U.S. congressman, and we’ve been having various conversations with U.S. yards who are in a position to build these types of vessels,” he added.

Under U.S. law most Coast Guard vessels and their major components must be constructed in American shipyards to support national industries and enhance national security. However, exceptions may be authorized by the president.

Trump has been adamant that he wants the vessels to be delivered quickly, as the ones operated by the country’s Coast Guard are approaching retirement age, but he also wants to rejuvenate national shipbuilding capabilities.

“It really depends where America puts its priority – if it’s on schedule, then Finland is probably the right answer. If they continue to put priority, which they have, on having their own sovereign shipbuilding capability, then Finland is not the right answer,” Hargreaves said.

Another possibility, he noted, may be that Washington opts for a hybrid strategy, where they could buy one or several icebreakers from Finland to get those faster while simultaneously having a program to build the rest in the United States.

While Trump’s has been talking about 40 new vessels, a 2023 Coast Guard fleet mix analysis concluded that the service would need between 8 to 9 polar icebreakers, including four to five heavy ones as well as medium ones, to conduct its Arctic missions effectively in the future.

Trade relations between Canada and the U.S. have been significantly strained over the last few months due to a series of tariffs and retaliatory actions. On April 9, Ottawa extended the rates placed on U.S. automobiles and parts, as Washington announced a 90-day pause on certain tariffs, but the 10% standard on most Canadian imports remained.

The shipbuilding industry has somehow largely been spared from such economic strains, with joint work between the two neighbors persisting, said Hargreaves.

“We are a business, we are looking at opportunities. Selling our design to them or our services around helping them to build icebreakers is a business opportunity – we are not going to get caught up in some of the current fuss and have a longer outlook,” he said, referring to Trump government.

Meanwhile, all three countries are still respectively trying to figure out how to implement the trilateral Icebreaker Collaboration Effort, or ICE Pact, aimed at combining Finnish, Canadian. and American expertise on the Arctic.

Country representatives are set to meet again in May to discuss more concrete steps on icebreaker design and production, shipyard workforce development and research related to polar regions.

In a Jan. 24 press briefing, Trump announced a target of acquiring roughly 40 icebreakers for the U.S. Coast Guard.

“We’re going to order about 40 Coast Guard big icebreakers – big ones – and all of a sudden, Canada wants a piece of the deal. … I say, ‘Why are we doing that,’” he told reporters.

On March 4, the U.S. government reinstated an executive order that hit its northern neighbor with 25% across-the-board tariffs and 10% on Canadian energy, triggering a continental trade war. Ottawa has responded with its retaliatory tariffs at the same rate but placed on a smaller basket of American goods.

According to Canadian shipbuilder Seaspan, in charge of building two new heavy polar icebreakers for the country’s Coast Guard, the Canadian naval industry already possesses the requisite know-how for Trump’s plan.

“40 icebreakers are fantastic, but that is pretty aggressive – I don’t want to go against what Mr. Trump said, but I would say that the U.S. shipbuilding industry capability is pretty stressed and busy right now. … I think it’s fair to say that it is not [currently] capable of doing that,” David Hargreaves, senior vice president of business development at Seaspan, told Defense News.

“He also said that Canada is trying to get a part of it – what we are trying to do is be a contributor to our neighbors and help them,” he added.

The economic rift between the two nations does not appear to have negatively impacted the shipbuilding industry so far. On the contrary, companies from both sides of the border continue to engage in dialogue and appear determined to carry out business as usual.

Davie, a Quebec shipbuilder, told Defense News earlier this year that it was moving forward with plans to acquire an American shipyard despite the threat of a looming trade war.

Canadian and Finnish government representatives shared similar perspectives in Feb. 4 email statements, stating that the tense climate seen as of late between Canada and the U.S. had not compromised cooperation within the trilateral Icebreaker Collaboration Effort.

While that agreement, signed last summer and known as the ICE Pact, seeks to bring together Finnish, Canadian and U.S. expertise to build best-in-class ice boats and cooperate in other areas, Hargreaves notes that Washington has the most to gain from it when it comes to gaining knowledge.

“I don’t think it explicitly says this, but it is really about helping the U.S. to build their icebreaking capability,” he said.

Whereas Finland and Canada have long histories of manufacturing these vessels, America has lagged behind. For example, the U.S. Coast Guard has not launched a new heavy icebreaker since 1976.

U.S. regulations have previously required that military vessels be built domestically. Two new bills introduced last month by Utah senators Mike Lee and John Curtis, both Republicans, seek to modify these practices, placing greater emphasis on shipyards in NATO countries or in trusted Indo-Pacific nations for getting America’s ship count up quickly.

Regardless of the bills’ prospects for adoption, Canada’s Seaspan is already putting itself in a position to help out.

“We are exploring how a U.S. shipyard(s) could use our existing Canadian Coast Guard Multi-Purpose Vessel design, a polar class 4 icebreaker that could be relatively easily upgraded to class 3,” Hargreaves wrote in an email.

Talks are already underway with the U.S. Coast Guard about cooperating. The Americans are “very interested” in the ship design, according to the company.

The trials took place in waters near Denmark from Feb. 17 to 20 and involved integrating manned and unmanned assets in live-firing events and tactical maneuvers.

Participating drone boats were fielded through the Task Force X initiative established earlier this month by the alliance’s top transformation branch as part of patrolling activities in Baltic waters.

“It provides a framework for all nations to contribute by enabling the deployment of their autonomous capabilities. … This collaborative effort will fill gaps in surveillance, particularly in areas not covered by existing systems like the Automatic Identification System,” Adm. Pierre Vandier, commander of NATO’s Allied Command Transformation, said in a press release.

Additional ships from NATO’s Standing NATO Maritime Group 1, the Royal Danish and German Navies took part in the demonstration.

In a recent interview with Defense News, as Vandier detailed plans for the alliance’s first fleet of naval surveillance drones, he hinted that it was likely to be equipped with proven platforms that would lean on experiments by the U.S. Navy’s Task Force 59.

TF59 is a unit dedicated to integrating unmanned systems and artificial intelligence in the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet area of operations that operates out of Bahrain.

However, according to an Allied Maritime Command press release, Task Force X will also leverage successful campaigns such as the U.S. Navy’s TF66, which experiments with uncrewed systems in the Europe-Africa area of responsibility.

Established in 2023, the group is made up of civilian and military personnel that put a variety of unmanned maritime systems to the test in bodies of water faced with different challenges than in the Gulf region.

Last year, it launched a pilot program centered on boosting maritime domain awareness, during which it tested the autonomous underwater and surface vessels of the Ocean Aero Triton platform, as reported by USNI News.

As part of the expansion, the Canada-based multinational shipbuilder has set out to acquire an American shipyard, which would secure an initial and important footprint in the U.S. for the company.

“Right now it’s business as usual with our U.S. entry plans. … We are also making progress with the acquisition of an established U.S. shipbuilder – if we are successful, we plan to upgrade as we are at the Quebec site,” Davie spokesman Paul Barrett told Defense News.

Davie has envisioned transforming its Lévis, Quebec, shipyard into North America’s largest, most versatile shipbuilding center.

In 2024, it signed two contracts to this end, one with the American firm Pearlson & Pearlson Inc., and another with the Canadian construction leader Dinamo, to modernize the site in order to deliver seven heavy icebreakers and two hybrid ferries under Canada’s National Shipbuilding Strategy.

The project is supported by nearly CAD $519 million in investments from the Quebec government and will deliver in part six new buildings and machinery, a new assembly hall and launch pad, and waterfront upgrades.

Davie has positioned itself as a crucial industry partner in the trilateral Icebreaker Collaboration Effort, or ICE Pact. The agreement, signed last summer, seeks to bring together Finnish, Canadian and U.S. know-how, resources and expertise to build best-in-class ice boats capable of operating year-round in the Arctic.

Recent remarks made by U.S. President Donald Trump suggesting that Canada and Greenland could become American states as well as the imposition of 25% tariffs on Canadian imports – tabled, for now – have casted doubts on the future of partnerships like the ICE Pact.

However, both the Canadian and Finnish government have told Defense News that the tense climate witnessed as of late between the two neighboring countries has not compromised cooperation amongst the parties involved.

“We continue implementing it as planned and look forward to cooperating with our allies and partners, the U.S. and Canada – we believe all parties are committed to Ice Pact efforts, as there is a need to strengthen the capabilities,” Reko-Antti Suojanen, senior ministerial adviser and ICE Pact coordinator at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment of Finland, said.

All three countries are in relatively urgent need of bolstering their icebreaker fleets, as many are outdated or will soon be, while China and Russia have ramped up their shipbuilding efforts.

“The West’s competitors and adversaries are rapidly expanding Arctic ice breaking fleets to exert control in the region – despite ambitious shipbuilding programs, the U.S. and its allies remain far behind,” Barrett, the Davie spokesman, said.

Through the acquisition of Helsinki Shipyard in 2023, Davie gained access to Finland’s leading icebreaker intellectual property, having produced much of the world’s ice boat fleet.

It is not yet clear to what extent the knowledge will be shared with the U.S. under the agreement. Barrett noted that Davie company expects to play a lead role in discussions on how their IP will be properly protected and applied within this framework.

Once the Canadian manufacturer finalizes the purchase of the American shipbuilder, which the company declined to name, it will become the only one in the ICE Pact with a footprint in all three member nations.

The majority of critical undersea infrastructure is located in international waters, which means would-be saboteurs can take advantage of oversight gaps.

“If you go outside territorial waters, in principle there’s not much regulation – this makes the area attractive for those who want to operate outside the jurisdiction,” Capt. Niels Markussen, director at NATO’s Maritime Centre for Security of Critical Underwater Infrastructure, said at the recent Arctic Frontiers conference in Norway, as reported by Arctic Today.

Matters become even more complex in having to determine and prove whether damage is accidental or deliberate. In addition, unlike when a crime is committed above the surface, where authorities can rely on fingerprints and DNA as evidence, attributing responsibility under water is tricky.

A recent report by the Atlantic Council highlighted that different laws are applicable to assess who is responsible for sabotage depending on where the severed cables are laid.

For example, it noted that coastal states like Norway or Sweden possess sovereign rights in their territorial waters, according to Article 21 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and may further exercise that authority to repair and maintain submarine cables in their exclusive economic zones.

Things get murky, however, in cases of undersea infrastructure damaged in international waters.

“If cables are willfully or accidentally damaged by a ship or person, the jurisdiction to determine appropriate punishment for the perpetrator lies with the state under whose flag the ship operates or that of a person’s citizenship,” the document said.

Another element to consider is that much of the underwater communication infrastructure is now owned by private firms, including big telecommunication carriers or content-delivery providers, that often band together to operate cables.

According to the network monitoring platform Kentik, companies like Google, Meta and Amazon have increasingly invested in the development and installation of new cables, leaving only about only 1% of submarine cables fully or partly owned by governments.

At a joint press conference in January, Adm. Pierre Vandier, NATO’s Norfolk, Virginia-based commander for concepts and transformation, outlined his plan for the alliance’s unmanned surface vessel initiative – in essence, having drones keep tabs on undersea infrastructure in hard-to-reach places.

The idea will entail deploying a fleet of naval drones as part of NATO’s maritime patrol mission in the Baltic Sea for the constant surveillance of the strategic area. These systems, as noted by the official, will operate alongside other drones to be provided by member states.

“We will bring some new vehicles at the speed of light in less than a few weeks, as well as the eight Baltic Sea states will give to NATO their own drones, and we will federate into a single network all the pictures and videos to spread [information] out to all stakeholders,” Vandier said on Jan 20.

The Icebreaker Collaboration Effort, or ICE Pact, was signed in July 2024 on the occasion of NATO’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington. It aims to combine the three nations’ knowledge, resources, and expertise about the Arctic region in general and polar icebreaker construction in particular.

The core ambition of the agreement is to collectively build best-in-class ice boats capable of year-round operations in Arctic waters, plowing pathways for maritime traffic in a region being transformed by climate change. Teaming up in a cluster of countries, the idea goes, will lead to better prices and speedier deliveries for the governments involved.

Officials signed an additional memorandum of understanding last November in Washington to emphasize that the strategic context of polar regions requires deeper economic and security cooperation between the three partners.

The new U.S. president, Donald Trump, who was sworn into office this month, has since made disparaging comments about fellow Arctic players Canada and Greenland, suggesting that both should become part of the United States.

The statement has prompted pushback from leaders in Canada and Denmark, of which Greenland is a district, with neither country prepared to have their territorial integrity challenged by a longstanding ally.

A spokesperson for Public Services and Procurement of Canada, which represents Ottawa’s central purchasing agent in the ICE Pact, said Trump’s combative talk has not affected the spirit of the icebreaker agreement.

“Canada remains steadfast in its commitment to the ICE Pact, our collaboration efforts with the U.S. and Finland continue as planned – there are currently no changes to our agreement or initiatives,” a representative said in a Jan. 22 email to Defense News.

The three nations have each appointed a national coordination team for the ICE Pact, which is working to formulate a plan of action through four working groups, the spokesperson added.

Among the initial priorities outlined by Trump during his first term as president was the need to bolster America’s icebreaker fleet. In 2020, he emphasized that the country needed a “ready, capable, and available fleet of polar security icebreakers that would be operationally tested and fully deployable by fiscal year 2029,” he wrote in a memo.

Washington is far from reaching this goal, then-commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, Adm. Linda Fagan, noted during the Halifax International Security Forum last November.

“So as a nation, we have one heavy icebreaker … [Russia] has way more than one. It’s close to 40,” she said during a panel discussion, as reported by National Defense Magazine.

It is important to distinguish that even as icebreakers are a highly specific type of ship, countries have different ways of classifying them.

While the U.S. and Canada use a classification system of light, medium and heavy ships for different types of ice cover, Russia’s large fleet is typically split into categories based on their mission type and other technical characteristics.

In 2023, the Canadian shipyard Davie took over Finland’s Helsinki Shipyard, which produced over 50% of the global icebreaker fleet. The acquisition entailed a transfer of Finland’s leading expertise, designs and trained personnel into Canadian hands.

The current demand for such specialized ships is at an all-time high, a statement from Davie said, with over 80 open projects among Western countries as of last July.

Experts have argued that the U.S. defense industrial base is set to greatly benefit from the ICE Pact, as America’s naval shipbuilding industry has been beset by schedule delays and cost overruns.

Following a pattern of undersea cable damage across European waters in the last year, with the most recent disruptions happening just weeks ago, top NATO officials have begun envisioning a capability that would allow the alliance to have permanent eyes above and under the waterline.

In an interview with Defense News, Adm. Pierre Vandier, the alliance’s Norfolk, Virginia-based commander for concepts and transformation, likened the idea to police CCTV cameras installed on street lights in urban trouble spots for recording evidence of crimes.

“The technology is there to make this street-lighting with USVs,” he said, using the military’s shorthand for unmanned surface vessel.

Vandier said his team is in the early stages of developing a USV fleet so that “NATO can see and monitor daily its environment.”

The first step would be to achieve this at a surface level, and then later under water.

The new project has already received “great support” from the central command of all NATO maritime forces, known as MARCOM, and the alliance operational headquarters of SACEUR, Vandier added.

While many details still need to be hashed out, officials believe they can equip the drone formation with fielded platforms that are known to work, leaning on experiments done by the U.S. Navy’s Task Force 59.

“There is no name [for now], just USV Fleet,” Vandier told Defense News. “In fact, it already exists, so somehow it’s not very risky. The U.S. has enforced Task Force 59 in the Gulf for years, so everything is known and sold, so it is much more a matter of adoption than technology.”

Launched in 2021, TF 59 is a unit dedicated to integrating unmanned systems and artificial intelligence in the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet area of operations. It operates out of Bahrain and includes drones as well as other uncrewed vehicles working alongside manned ships.

In January, a new sub-unit was established, called Task Group 59.1, whose focus is on testing and upgrading industry systems to bolster maritime security across the Middle East region.

As of last month, the unit has trialed, upgraded and experimented with more than 23 different unmanned systems.

The task group took part in exercise Digital Talon in early November, during which it succeeded at remotely launching a loitering munition at sea and tested the vertical take-off and landing of drones from a USV.

According to Vandier, the goal is to launch the drone surveillance fleet before the next NATO Summit, which will be held in the Netherlands next June.

“We are to experiment with the first talks about this and then work with the allies to find a proper way to make this happen,” he added.

The most recent incidents of undersea cable disruptions took place on Nov. 17 and 18, when a cable of a telecommunications company between Lithuania and Sweden was cut, and a cable connecting Finland and Germany was damaged.

Investigations of the incidents are still ongoing.

The experimentation event took place on Nov. 14 and was co-organized by Allied Special Operations Forces Command, or SOFCOM, and the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) in La Spezia, Italy.

The test, held in the context of the first edition of Exercise Bold Machina 2024, consisted of running special forces teams fitted with different equipment, including diving propulsion devices, through detection systems to assess if they would be picked up and provide engineers with insight into signature variations.

Several companies provided a mix of sensors for the drill designed detect a variety of signals in the acoustic, magnetic, passive, and electric realms, officials said. Exercise organizers hooked up the readings to an augmented reality simulator in order to have analysts experience it directly.

The biggest challenge when it comes to forces signature management underwater, is the element of uncertainty.

“It’s not knowing if somebody knows, or if you’re being detected. … It is understanding that there is a system that has the capability to detect you, but that you know nothing about it and don’t know exactly what the capability is,” U.S. Navy Capt. Kurt Muhler, SOFCOM maritime development director, told Defense News in an interview.

Muhler noted that the war in Ukraine was a “driving force” behind Bold Machina, given the extent of the damage and destruction done to critical infrastructure by Russian bombardment on land and at sea.

“Russia is attacking Ukrainian infrastructure – why are they doing that? That’s almost a more viable target for them than the Ukrainian military is. … So that gives us some pause and reflection: how vulnerable are we?” he said. “If SOF can play a role in helping and proving this technology, that’s returning value for our nations and NATO.”

SOFCOM’s role is to deter in peacetime and defend in crisis against the alliance’s two main threats: Russia and terrorist organizations, according to NATO’s website.

The rapid proliferation of manned and unmanned underwater systems as well as the higher level of maritime activity have changed the operational landscape at sea, raising the intensity of competition over ocean spaces and introducing new types of threats.

According to Muhler, there is a lot of “political interest” in defending key underwater structures, as in many cases these are not owned or within the boundaries of any single nation, leading to a multinational approach when it comes to their protection.

“That political energy translates to resourcing the scientists, engineers and industry to come up with solutions. That’s the driving force for us to get in the water and have a seat at the table,” he said.