Tacticians, warfighting experts get after homeland defense at WEPTAC 2026

PETERSON SPACE FORCE BASE, Colo. - The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) hosted the 2026 Weapons and Tactics Conference (WEPTAC) Aug. 24-27, 2026, successfully aligning the strategic priorities required to defend the homeland.

The 2026 conference focused on solving complex defense challenges across five specialized working groups:

• Contested C2 and Domain Awareness: Enhancing command and control resilience and visibility in degraded environments.
• Point Defense: Securing critical infrastructure and high-value assets against targeted threats.
• Area Defense Left of Launch: Developing proactive capabilities to deter and disrupt threats before they launch.
• Area Defense Right of Launch: Optimizing active interception and defeat capabilities after a threat is airborne.
• Arctic Personnel Recovery and Search and Rescue: Advancing PR and SAR operations in the strategic Arctic region.

Through these working groups, tactics officers and warfighting experts developed innovative solutions to modernize continental defense, enhance multi-domain awareness, and strengthen NORAD efforts in an increasingly complex global security environment.

This year's NORAD WEPTAC was fully aligned with both the Air Reserve Component (ARC) and Combat Air Forces (CAF) WEPTAC. This unified approach directly supports the National Defense Strategy (NDS) and its No. 1 priority - defend the homeland.

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