Defence Science and Technology: can NATO maintain its edge as its adversaries catch up?

As warfare has evolved across the centuries, science and technology have become ever more important to determining who wins and who loses. To break deadlocks or to overcome powerful and militarily capable enemies, belligerents have looked for the technological innovation that would give them the decisive advantage. It is often not the invention or discovery that ultimately counts, but the way the technology is implemented, particularly the industrial capacity to produce it quickly and at scale. During the First World War, tanks, aircraft and, more sinisterly, mustard gas made their appearance, but they were not available in sufficient numbers and used widely enough to have the same impact as older systems like machine guns and long-range artillery. In the Second World War, by contrast, the code-breaking exploits of the scientists at Bletchley Park in accessing the German Enigma signals gave the allies a key intelligence advantage. So did the ability of British scientists to develop radar just before the outbreak of the war in 1939 and thereafter to break the German beam navigation system that rendered the German bombers striking Britain in the early 1940s far less effective. A similar technological innovation was “window”, the use of aluminium decoy strips to confuse German air defence systems. The Americans pitched in too by developing long-range Mustang fighters that could protect vulnerable bombers on long-range raids and of course, the Manhattan Project to build a nuclear weapon that knocked Japan out of the war. They also pioneered early computing. Germany was a highly developed industrial economy as well, and the Third Reich was no enemy of science and technology per se. But the Nazis drove several prominent Jewish scientists and engineers into exile or sent them to death camps. The German failure to develop synthetic fuels grounded the Luftwaffe after 1944. The Germans did achieve breakthroughs with the Messerschmitt ME 262, the first jet-propelled fighter plane, and the V1 and V2 rockets. These might have turned the tide back in Germany’s favour but they were developed too late and in too small quantities to make a difference. A similar story occurred with the German attempts to make a weapon of mass destruction using heavy water. It was stopped halfway through by the Norwegian resistance, which succeeded in sabotaging production at the plant in Vemork. Thus, the Allied science and technology victory was one of exploitation and implementation rather than of pure science. This said, the scientists were the unsung heroes of the war, arguably as important to victory as the statesmen and generals.

Fast forward to the Cold War and NATO built its capacity to deter the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact firmly on its technological edge. Due to its inferiority in troop and equipment numbers, it looked to defence science and technology to provide offsets and game changers that would enable it to exploit vulnerabilities in the Soviet order of battle. For instance, advanced sensors, network-centric data processing and information sharing that would facilitate the precise targeting of Soviet forces, long-range artillery strikes, counter radar and laser-guided missiles to destroy air defences and stealth technologies to enable fighter jets and bombers to penetrate deep into Soviet airspace. All these assets were bundled together under the heading of the “Revolution In Military Affairs” and were designed to be asymmetric, forcing the Soviet Union to fight on NATO’s terms rather than those imposed by Soviet military doctrine and its order of battle. The Soviet Union also had its technological successes, being the first in space in the 1950s, developing heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles and producing modern MIG and SU fighter jets and Tupolev bombers. Yet, the basic assumption during the Cold War was that the Soviet Union would lag considerably behind the West when it came to innovation and state of the art technology. So it would resort to espionage (as it did during the Manhattan Project) to acquire the West’s military secrets and copy its military designs and equipment. The West responded with a policy of technology denial, clamping export controls on sensitive goods such as supercomputers, gyroscopes for missiles and rocket launchers. It established a Coordinating Committee (COCOM) in Paris, which drew up a blacklist of items prohibited for export and monitored the compliance of the member states. There was little point in NATO governments spending billions on keeping their technological edge if the Soviet Union could use espionage or commerce to close the gap at a fraction of this cost. Yet, the West’s technology lead could be used for political and diplomatic ends as well as improved war fighting capability. US President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative in 1983 to develop missile defence systems on land and in space certainly persuaded the reformist Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to push for major reductions in nuclear forces and divert resources from ruinous Soviet defence spending to economic reforms at home. It was yet another example of how technology drives geopolitics as much as geopolitics drives technology.

Fast forward again to 2025, when there is much talk in Europe of the prospect of a war with Russia in as little as 5 years and geopolitical tensions are on the rise. The NATO allies recently met in The Hague and agreed to increase their defence spending up to 5% of GDP by 2025. Much of this money will go to raising current military preparedness and to restocking supplies of ammunition, shells and missiles, including by building new manufacturing plants. The UK is building six new factories to manufacture missiles and howitzers. Yet, member states are also mindful of the need for the Alliance to regain its technological edge and defence science will get a good share of the extra investments. The UK government, in its recent Strategic Defence Review, has allocated £25bn for public funding in science and technology over the next decade. France is putting €1.55bn into the European satellite operator, Eutelsat, to keep it in the number two position globally behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX. And, as the European Union embarks on the next iteration of its Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) for the seven-year 2027-2033 cycle, shifts in its Horizon programme to increase research into dual-use technologies and defence-related systems more generally will no doubt be given greater priority. Yet, this time round, the challenge is much more complex. NATO has to benchmark against a wider spectrum of adversaries, not only Russia but also China, Iran and North Korea, as well as non-state actors or failed states that nonetheless have modern military capabilities, such as the Houthis with their arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones. It is not to the West’s long-term advantage if it needs to use missile defence systems costing over $1mn-a-shot to bring down drones costing just a few thousands of dollars. In April 2022, two Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missiles costing $500,000 apiece sank the Russian flagship, Moskva, costing $750mn, in the Black Sea. A single Chinese XJ-21 hypersonic missile could sink a US aircraft carrier costing €10bn. Critics of the US defence procurement system point out that due to bureaucratic red tape and insufficient defence industrial capacity it costs the Pentagon four times as much on average as other allies to produce military hardware. Thus, one big difference in the defence technology landscape today vis-à-vis 50 or 100 years ago is the widening gap between higher costs and inflation in classic weapons systems and the ever cheaper cost (and rapidity developing effectiveness) of new technologies such as drones, cyber weapons and small networked communications, sensors and information processing units giving soldiers on the ground more advance warning of attacks and access to much more data. With Russia now aiming to produce 5mn drones a year and sending 500 against Ukrainian targets almost every night, the long-standing pattern in military procurement of seeking ever greater quality at the cost of higher prices and smaller numbers (fighter aircraft and ships being a prime example) is being inverted in favour of mass: more expendable systems that can be produced quickly, cheaply and in enormous quantities. Military establishments now need to weigh carefully what they continue to invest in man-operated platforms, like aircraft, tanks and ships, and what they invest in battlefield and observation drones, autonomous weapons systems and vehicles and robotics. How man-operated and autonomous systems work together and support each other will determine the future of warfare. Ukraine is a case in point. It is not a matter of new high-tech combat replacing traditional low-tech. There are plenty of trenches, barbed wire barriers, deep bunkers and tank traps on the frontline. What is happening is that the new technologies are being bolted on to traditional hardware to act as force multipliers and help traditional weapons to be more survivable and effective. Electronic anti-jamming software is a prime example. Laser-guided bombs as well. Long-range targeting intelligence through drone surveillance yet another.

In the past, military innovation usually happened at pace only after war had started. The sense of national emergency swept away bureaucratic obstacles and caution, allowing new ideas and inventions to gain traction. Additional resources accelerated development and production cycles. Yet, an organisation like NATO, based on deterrence and preventing wars rather than fighting them, needs to innovate in peacetime. Its technological edge over Russia, the Alliance’s principal adversary, has to be sufficiently wide and visible so as to deter Russia from any risk-taking, even in the form of a small military incursion into NATO territory. Here, the challenge is not so much the speed of technological innovation compared to the slower pace in the past but also its breadth. As I learned from a recent conversation with NATO’s outgoing Chief Scientist, Dr Bryan Wells, the Alliance’s Science and Technology Board has to track a large number of technology areas simultaneously and figure out which ones have the greatest potential to affect, and particularly disrupt military operations at any given time. Dr Wells told me that NATO’s priority list of emerging and disruptive technologies already includes many different technologies: AI, quantum computing, space, energy storage, new materials, biotechnology, synthetic biology, automation and robotics, to name but the most prominent. It is not just the individual technologies that can be game changers but rather the way they fit together. For instance, AI feeding the development of autonomous vehicles or helping different weapon systems to remain interoperable for longer. Dr Wells believed that synthetic biology is now the leading emerging technology as AI has largely been invented and is now in its implementation stage. Synthetic biology on the other hand still has enormous and untapped potential to generate new materials, such as green fuels, that could be produced using 3D computerised printing.

NATO has issued a public document on macro trends that will shape the defence technology landscape for the next 20 years. This is a much-needed horizon scanning and forward planning strategy for an organisation that is normally focused on the immediate and the next summit or ministerial meeting. The NATO Science and Technology Organisation (STO), co-located in Paris and Brussels brings together 5,000 scientists worldwide in its scientific research ecosystem. It is currently managing 400 individual research projects. NATO partners, especially from the Indo-Pacific region like Japan and Australia or Switzerland in Europe contribute to this effort and benefit, according to NATO calculations, to the order of €10 return for every €1 invested. More inputs certainly make for better science. The advantage of NATO having its own science organisations, and applied science and technology bodies, like Allied Command Transformation, as well as science cooperative funds like Science for Peace and Security, is that it has the expertise to base its policies on a solid scientific foundation. This was the case, for instance, with the Alliance’s revision of its Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) protection plan approved by allies at the NATO Madrid Summit in 2022 and guided by a scientific report. As NATO’s defence strategy has become broader, involving issues such as the integration of women into its armed forces and dealing with propaganda and disinformation campaigns orchestrated by social media, so its scientific community has been enhanced with social and behavioural scientists, psychologists and cyber engineers and data technicians. If war has to seriously be prepared for, then a military medicine capacity to treat mass casualties efficiently is a key requirement, particularly the use of modern medical science to treat wounds and war traumas such as PTSD. A pandemic like COVID-19 could also stop an army in its tracks if vaccines could not be discovered and rolled out en masse quickly. Today, it is civilian science and technology that is driving military innovation. 50 years ago, it was the other way round. Yet, now it is the private sector that is at the forefront of innovation and the research budgets of the major US or Chinese tech companies surpass those of many NATO governments. Private companies, rather than state-run plants, are also producing a larger number of armaments. For instance, 50% of the weapons used in Ukraine come directly from private companies. So, if NATO is to seize the opportunities of technological innovation and maintain its edge over its adversaries, its relationship with industry has to be central in order to spot new trends and developments early on and assess what they could mean for the Alliance’s security. The mantra of Silicon Valley: ‘Innovate or Die’ henceforth applies to NATO too. But how can the Alliance actually manage the challenge of constant technological transformation in practice?

In first place, the task is to link science to effective and timely policy making at the leadership level. From my participation in a conference recently organised in London by Allied Command Transformation, it was evident that the alliance’s command structure and the Science and Technology Board have together produced an enormous amount of scientific knowledge and analysis for the education and guidance of the NATO leadership. The alliance also has established nearly 30 Centres of Excellence in its member states to specialise in core areas, such as Cyber Defence in Estonia, Maritime Shallow Water Operations in Kiel, low temperature warfare in Norway or the impact of climate change on military operations in Montreal. Allied Command Transformation organises numerous Industry Days and individual allies host technology trials and demonstrations. For instance, in recent weeks, the Netherlands and Estonia have conducted trials of counter drone systems. Other allies have hosted tests of aircraft and helicopter protection against missiles and shoulder-held munitions (MANPADS). Yet, in any busy and overloaded organisation or government the challenge is ‘the churn’. This expression refers to the confusion that policymakers experience when being hit by too many complex issues hitting them at the same time. Is it more important today to focus on an immediate problem like a series of cyber-attacks against leading retailers or airlines or instead to take time out to master the future implications of artificial intelligence or synthetic biology? If resources are tight, which emerging technologies should be prioritised for investment? NATO in this respect needs a filter to translate the findings of its science and technology community into strategic foresight and geopolitical analysis and consequences. The filter has to provide a net assessment of where the alliance stands vis-à-vis Russia and China in terms of comparative advantage or disadvantage, and offer also decision points and timelines for action. In the past, NATO had a Science Committee of senior government scientific advisers to engage with ministers and ambassadors in the North Atlantic Council on pressing science and technology issues but strangely (like a similar Committee on the Challenges of Modern Society to look into the uses of NATO science research to solve broader societal problems), it was eliminated in a committee reduction exercise at the turn of the century. Time, perhaps, to bring it back. The position of Chief Scientist was only established in 2012 and NATO’s first Science and Technology Policy was only agreed by the North Atlantic Council in 2017. Yet, the growing impact of rapid scientific and technological change on NATO defence also necessitates more NATO ambassadors and senior officials with a science and engineering background, and who understand the technologies more naturally. As the British author, C.P. Snow, wrote in his well-known book, The Two Cultures, published during the 1960s, there is always room in a policymaking body for people with a humanities background and those with a scientific background. Both types of education produce mindsets and analytical methodologies that can illuminate decision-making and strategic choices. But in an organisation largely made up of talented generalists, the cursor arguably needs to move more in the direction of recruiting scientists, engineers and technology experts.

A second task is for the alliance to stimulate research and applied science in promising technologies rather than sit back and wait to see what comes out of Silicon Valley and other technology hubs, and react accordingly. NATO has set up a Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) with centres in Canada and the UK as well as a €1bn Innovation Fund based in The Hague. The idea here is to move the focus away from the big defence contractors, who have their own research and development (R&D) budgets, towards the startups and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), which are often at the forefront of innovation. NATO provides the seed capital to allow innovative technologies or ideas to be developed and tested thereby encouraging venture capital and the markets to invest as well and bring the technology to maturity. The NATO Innovation Fund (which is the first multi-sovereign fund of its kind) has just announced its first investment, co-leading a $35mn fundraising round for a UK-based SME, Portal Biotech. This company uses protein sequencing to detect engineered threats and to defend against biological weapons. The technology is AI-enabled with biological sensors that can work at the single molecule level on-site, giving results within hours. As the Portal Biotech founder and CEO, Andy Heron, told Reuters: “It is for everything from measuring diseases to better pandemic prevention. You can take this out of large labs with long turnaround times into the field and detect any pathogens from the field to water supply”. The portable equipment can be used also to aid drug discovery and for precision medicine. The NATO Innovation Fund is working on the investment package with a number of venture capital firms, notably Earlybird VC, Science Creates VC, Pillar VC, 8VC, We VC and the British Business Bank. DIANA, for its part, has launched its first projects too, particularly in the area of quantum computing and the use of new materials in space. The purpose behind DIANA is to examine the transition phase between an idea emerging in a lab and the actual ability to produce a technology in the form of a usable product. It is in the transition phase that new scientific discoveries often fail to progress. For instance, it was General Motors, which first invented the electric car in 1996. But it was not until Elon Musk and Tesla came along 20 years later that a business model and technical design were developed to market electric cars in their hundreds of thousands. Think also of the early days of COVID-19 vaccines; they had to be stored at incredibly low temperatures to remain effective. But as long as this was the case, they were totally unusable on the mass scale required.

It will take some time before NATO is able to evaluate the impact of DIANA and the Innovation Fund in helping the alliance to steer technological advances according to its security needs. In the meantime, it makes sense for NATO to closely integrate its defence research with the civilian and dual use projects in the EU’s Horizon Europe Programme (with a budget of €95.5bn for the 2021-2027 period) and the more military-focused European Defence Fund (€8bn). Science always benefits from related work and the EU and NATO must be wary of duplicating each other’s efforts. One positive step is that the Alliance is now sharing its capabilities targets with both the EU and industry so that they are aware of NATO’s capability gaps and major military requirements and can organise their own research programmes towards supporting these Alliance-wide priorities. Conversely, since the NATO Washington Summit in 2024, civil emergency and resilience planning targets have been incorporated into NATO’s defence planning system. As resilience is more of an EU concern, cooperation between the two giants of Brussels is even more critical. Countries will not want to spend the same research money twice. Consequently, Horizon and the European Defence Fund should be represented on NATO’s Science and Technology Board and the NATO Chief Scientist enjoy equivalent status in the EU. Fortunately, he is already linked up with DG Research and Innovation, DG Defence and Space (DEFIS) and the EU Joint Research Council.

There are other things that can be done too. Participants at the Allied Command Transformation conference stressed the need for a new NATO classification policy as most scientific knowledge is traded in the open source space. Over-classification for routine purposes or to eliminate risk may end up being counterproductive to the Alliance’s interests in keeping ahead of the knowledge curve. Yet, in some areas, particularly key to defence, maintaining secrecy and limiting the ‘need to know’ are vital and call for tighter classification rules. So, NATO needs to come up with a new information sharing policy that is more variegated and aligned with its area-by-area classification needs than a one-size-fits-all approach. Another priority is to use the large number of military exercises that NATO is currently conducting at land, sea, in the air and in cyberspace to test and experiment with new technologies and see how well they fit in and respond to battlefield requirements. The lessons learned and feedback loop would help to determine where emerging technologies can be upgraded or adapted or used as force multipliers for existing systems. AI in data processing and battlefield awareness is an obvious example here. As we have seen in Ukraine, drones are transforming the ways that wars are fought. The enhanced battlefield visibility and real time detail that drones are providing are forcing armies to operate in small groups, move constantly, operate at night, use cover and use small vehicles like scooters rather than weighty armoured vehicles. Drones can disrupt logistics chains and thus access to food, water and medical supplies as well as ammunition. They need to be produced in several, small and hidden locations as they are now prime targets for enemy attacks or sabotage. So testing counter-drone devices in realistic battlefield conditions would also be a useful thing to do. Yet, this implies that NATO exercises be less pre-scripted or focused principally on military mobility into the battlefield. There needs to be more free play, less focus on procedures working smoothly and more on genuine war-fighting performance and evaluation. Ukraine has also shown that military equipment needs to be constantly reconfigured to overcome countermeasures, for instance, jamming or cyber hacks. A new invention such as the first person vision drone or wire-guided drones that do not emit signals can negate months of hard efforts to counter more traditional drones. This means that the lab and the battlefield have to be brought closer together. Weapons and vehicles need to be repaired quickly behind the lines and brought back into service rather than be sent for repair back to Germany or Poland. Private sector specialists need to be in the front line too monitoring the performance of their weapons systems and working real time on upgrades and technical fixes to keep them in service. How can future NATO exercises integrate these clear lessons from Ukraine?

NATO insiders are still confident that democracies, with their free and open systems and their entrepreneurial culture and spirit, will continue to outperform autocracies with their state-driven programmes, inefficient and corrupt investment practices and top-down approach. They point out that the world’s top universities are still in the West (and largely in NATO countries) as well as the most successful research institutes and most innovative startups. Western countries are also more willing to take a risk or punt on research that may only have a payoff in the distant future. In 2013, for instance, the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) invested in messenger RNA vaccines in cooperation with the biotech company, Moderna. In 2020, this proved a godsend when Moderna developed a vaccine for COVID-19 in record time. Yet, complacency here would be costly. The Western system depends on big state budgets for science and technology research as venture capital prefers to invest in science applications rather than fundamental science that could be years away from turning a profit. The nexus of government, industry and academia is key here.

Moreover, there have been some useful initiatives in recent years to fund science. In 2022, the US Congress passed the Chips and Science Act, which allocated $280bn to research over the next 10 years. But governments under pressure to trim public spending have often cut funding for science research. In 2015, the US research budget fell for the first time in real terms since the Second World War and today in proportionate terms is about 70% of what it was in the 1960s. In both the US and Europe, populist forces are pushing on limits to immigration and stronger rules for visas for shorter stays. Yet, immigration has long provided NATO allies with fresh blood and innovation talent. In the US, over half of all scientists and engineers working on AI are from abroad. As long as countries do not produce enough STEM graduates themselves or science and engineering PhDs, they will need to continue to make themselves attractive to foreign students and workers and not put additional paperwork and bureaucratic obstacles in their path. Trade deals with India or other Asian countries that encourage their researchers to spend some time in a NATO country as skilled workers make eminent sense.

At the same time, the progress of the authoritarians cannot be overlooked. Russia has succeeded in bypassing Western sanctions after its invasion of Ukraine to source advanced electronic components for its missiles. The Ukrainians frequently find US-manufactured chips in Russian arms. Beyond the Ukraine war, NATO will need a long-term strategy to keep these technologies out of Moscow’s hands. Yet, China is a much more serious challenger. Beijing certainly uses mandatory collection of data to develop its large-scale AI models and its privacy laws are lax compared to the West. We may not like its methods but it is becoming a science and technology powerhouse in its own right. Two decades ago, it was an assembler of iPhones using a maximum of 5% of Chinese-manufactured components. Today, that figure is near 30% and growing. As the US has imposed restrictions on technology transfer to China, for instance, in social media platform algorithms or chip making, so China has developed its own alternatives and now produces its own five and seven nanometre microprocessors. China controls 85% of the global production of rare earths and precious metals that the West needs for advanced batteries and precision electronics and manufacturing. If China pulls ahead in quantum computing it could break NATO encryption codes or use its AI models to gather information on NATO soldiers, analysing their lifestyles or storing their DNA and using this data for targeted disinformation campaigns or even biological attacks. The competition between the West and China will be as much one of systems as of states. So, to protect itself and its populations, NATO has no choice but to stay ahead. This is no time for allies to question the value of science and refuse to heed what it is telling us, particularly in the field of climate change denial. Or cutting government agencies that use science and data for monitoring and early warning, especially of droughts, wildfires and catastrophic flooding such as we have seen with the deadly floods in Texas in recent days. Or when science points to the consequences of more rapid global warming due to the increase in fossil fuels production and use as well as government cuts to green energy programmes. Science cannot be ignored because it presents us with ‘inconvenient truths’ that we prefer not to hear.

Finally, NATO needs to pay attention equally to the geopolitical context for the optimal use of scientific innovation. It can learn from China as its rival must be doing something right when Beijing is the first country to land a rover on the far side of the Moon and to achieve quantum-encrypted communication via satellite. It may be behind in logic chips – the processors inside all digital devices – but it has pulled ahead in sodium-ion batteries that can be produced without using scarce lithium and cobalt minerals. What China has mastered is not so much original scientific research but process engineering or the ability to turn out technology to a high standard and at scale relatively cheaply. To compete, the West needs to scale up its manufacturing capabilities so that it has the basic high-tech grids and production infrastructure that it can plug its scientific innovation into easily in order to convert ideas into usable products. An example occurred about six years ago when the first Trump administration pressured Europe to disinvest and decouple from Huawei’s 5G telecommunications systems and equipment. It was widespread in Europe’s public administrations due to its high quality and low cost. But it was not easy for allied governments to decouple as they lacked viable European alternatives. Nokia and Ericsson were still far from being able to fill the gap. But the overall lesson was that NATO cannot build democracy on foreign and hostile tech infrastructure.

So, in conclusion, as NATO works on an update to its Science and Technology Strategy, it needs a vision of what its technology sovereignty needs to look like. In which areas can it depend on outside suppliers? Where does it need full or partial self-sufficiency? What are its vulnerabilities and how can they be reduced and using which policy solutions? How can the NATO science and technology community be further strengthened? And how can NATO mainstream innovation and technological transformation across all its 32 members to avoid a digital divide between those Allies that have integrated the new military technologies and are able to use them and those other allies still unwilling or unable to make the leap and lagging behind? The alliance’s ability to provide security and a robust defence for its citizens will depend on the answers it gives to these questions. There is also the issue – equally pressing for Europeans – of how much they need and can afford to decouple their defence science and technology base from the US given trends on the other side of the Atlantic. But that is the subject for another article after the summer break.