Three Carriers, Forty Aircraft, and NATO's Final Maritime Strike Exercise of Twenty Twenty-Six

NATO’s Neptune Strike 26-4, running October 16 through November 5, 2026, is the fourth and final iteration of the alliance’s Neptune Strike enhanced vigilance activity for the year. Three carrier strike groups - built around HMS Prince of Wales, ITS Cavour, and TCG Anadolu - are operating in coordinated exercise space with more than 20 warships, 40 aircraft, and 17 participating nations.

What Is Neptune Strike and Why Does NATO Run It Four Times a Year?

Neptune Strike began as NATO’s answer to a specific readiness problem. A single annual exercise demonstrates capability on a twelve-month cycle. Running the same exercise four times per year signals something fundamentally different: that maritime strike capability is maintained, rehearsed, and available on a much shorter timeline.

The exercise also serves a practical second purpose. There is a meaningful gap between nations that have an agreement to work together and nations that have actually worked together in live conditions. Coordinating 40 aircraft across three national carriers in open ocean stress-tests procedures that look clean on paper. Neptune Strike is where the theory meets reality. For 2026, that has now happened four times.

HMS Prince of Wales and the Royal Navy’s F-35B Air Wing

HMS Prince of Wales is one of two Queen Elizabeth-class carriers, designed from the ground up for short take-off, vertical landing (STOVL) operations. There are no catapults or arresting wires. Aircraft depart via a ski-jump ramp at the bow and return vertically using thrust vectoring and a lift fan.

The aircraft assigned to that role is the F-35B, the STOVL variant of the Joint Strike Fighter. The Prince of Wales operates a mixed air wing drawing from both the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. RAF 617 Squadron - the Dambusters - is one of the primary F-35B units that deploys aboard the carriers. The squadron flew the bouncing bomb raids against German industrial dams in 1943. In 2026, they fly fifth-generation stealth aircraft from a moving deck in the Atlantic.

The F-35B is more than a combat aircraft. Its helmet-mounted display fuses radar, infrared, and passive detection data simultaneously. The distributed aperture system, using cameras mounted around the fuselage, allows the pilot to effectively see through the floor of the cockpit. These capabilities exist because modern air combat is decided quickly, and information advantage can be decisive before any weapon is fired.

ITS Cavour: Italy’s Transition to Fifth-Generation Carrier Aviation

ITS Cavour, commissioned in 2008, is Italy’s aircraft carrier. Like the Queen Elizabeth class, she uses a ski-jump ramp and is designed for STOVL operations. Italy operated the AV-8 Harrier for years before retiring the type and undergoing a significant refit to bring the Cavour into the F-35B era. Both Italian Air Force and Italian Navy F-35Bs now fly from her deck.

The transition was not straightforward. Pilots required qualification on an entirely new aircraft with fundamentally different systems. The ship needed modifications to support the F-35’s maintenance requirements, software update infrastructure, and weapons compatibility. The logistics chain for fifth-generation aircraft at sea is substantially more complex than anything Italy’s carrier aviation community managed with the Harrier.

Italy becoming an F-35B carrier operator matters to NATO for a practical reason: redundancy. If Prince of Wales is in refit, Cavour can cover part of that role. When both carriers operate in the same exercise space - as they do in Neptune Strike 26-4 - the combined capability exceeds simple addition. The aircraft can share sensor data and coordinate tactically at a level older platforms could not achieve. Two fifth-generation carriers operating together is a qualitatively different proposition from two legacy carrier air wings.

TCG Anadolu: Turkey’s Pivot to Drone Carrier Operations

TCG Anadolu is Turkey’s amphibious assault ship, built on the same basic design as the Spanish Juan Carlos I. It is a ski-jump-equipped platform originally designed to operate STOVL jets. Turkey was a participant in the F-35 program, with Turkish companies holding manufacturing contracts for F-35 components. Turkey was positioned to become both an F-35 operator and a carrier aviation nation simultaneously.

That changed when Turkey purchased the Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile system. The S-400 is designed to track and engage stealth aircraft. The United States and the F-35 program consortium concluded that operating the system designed to defeat the F-35 alongside the aircraft itself created an unacceptable intelligence risk - specifically, that Russia could gain insight into the aircraft’s radar signature and potential vulnerabilities. Turkey was removed from the F-35 program.

The Anadolu entered service with a flight deck designed for jets and no jets to fly from it.

Turkey’s response was to commit to its domestic unmanned systems industry. The Bayraktar TB3 was developed specifically for naval operations, with folding wings for below-deck storage and the performance envelope required to operate from the Anadolu. Turkey converted a significant capability gap into an argument for a new concept: effectively, a drone carrier.

The logic has genuine merit on certain axes. Unmanned aircraft cost less per sortie, carry no pilot to lose, can loiter for extended durations, and if built domestically, cannot be withheld by a foreign program’s political decisions. What they cannot currently replicate is what the F-35B provides: electronic warfare capability, air-to-air performance in contested environments, and the sensor fusion that makes the pilot an information hub rather than simply a weapons delivery platform.

What the Anadolu represents in Neptune Strike 26-4 is a genuinely different capability model operating alongside two fifth-generation carrier air wings. NATO planners must work out how drone carrier operations integrate into an alliance air campaign - the airspace deconfliction requirements are different, and the command and control of unmanned systems in a multi-national environment raises questions the alliance is still working through. Running the Anadolu alongside Cavour and Prince of Wales provides a live environment to explore those questions. That has value regardless of the circumstances that produced this particular combination of platforms.

Airspace Management Across Three Moving Runways

Forty aircraft operating from three national carriers generates a significant airspace management challenge. Each carrier produces its own bubble of activity: fixed-wing aircraft cycling through departure, mission, and recovery sequences; helicopters operating in the low-altitude structure for anti-submarine work, vertical replenishment, and search and rescue. Across more than 20 warships, most are also flying helicopters simultaneously, in October North Atlantic and Mediterranean conditions.

The air traffic management structure for a carrier strike group exercise operates on the same fundamental principles as civil ATC: separate aircraft by time, altitude, and geography; establish communication procedures; assign transponder codes; sequence recoveries. The difference is that the runways are moving, ocean weather can change rapidly, and 17 nations are involved - whose pilots may not all share identical procedure sets or equivalent fluency in common phraseology.

NATO has standardized these procedures through decades of doctrine development, much the way ICAO standardizes procedures for civil aviation globally. But standardized doctrine and live execution are different things. Every exercise finds the gaps between the two. Neptune Strike exists precisely to identify those gaps and close them. Four iterations in 2026 means four opportunities to run procedures against reality before the next planning cycle begins.

Why This Matters for Pilots

By November 5, 2026, when Neptune Strike 26-4 concludes, NATO will have completed a full year of progressive carrier aviation integration work. Each iteration has informed the next. The 40 aircraft currently operating over open water are not simply demonstrating capability to outside observers - they represent an alliance learning about itself at the unit level, the command level, and the communication level across 17 national contingents.

For pilots tracking military aviation developments, the exercise highlights several things worth understanding: the operational demands of multi-national airspace coordination at scale, the doctrinal challenges of integrating unmanned carrier aircraft alongside manned fifth-generation platforms, and the reality that interoperability is a perishable skill requiring deliberate, repeated practice to maintain.

The Aviationist has the full order of battle for Neptune Strike 26-4, including ship names, participating nations, and the complete timeline.

Key Takeaways

NATO’s Neptune Strike 26-4 runs October 16 – November 5, 2026, involving more than 20 warships, 40 aircraft, and 17 nations across three carrier strike groups.
HMS Prince of Wales (Royal Navy) and ITS Cavour (Italy) both operate F-35B air wings, giving NATO two fifth-generation carrier aviation platforms in the same exercise space simultaneously.
TCG Anadolu (Turkey) operates Bayraktar TB3 drones rather than jets, a direct result of Turkey’s removal from the F-35 program following its purchase of the Russian S-400 missile system.
Running Neptune Strike four times per year is deliberate signaling: it demonstrates that maritime strike capability is maintained on a short timeline, not simply displayed annually.
Each exercise iteration generates real lessons in multi-national airspace management, unmanned carrier aircraft integration, and the gap between standardized doctrine and live execution under operational conditions.