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NATO's ‘tech race': This is how it aims to harness new defence tech
As defence technologies and the geopolitical climate rapidly evolve, NATO has formally launched a plan to speed the adoption of new tech products.
World leaders gathered at the NATO summit at the Hague on Tuesday, with the organisation's new secretary general Mark Rutte and many allies ready to sign on to raising core defence spending to 3.5 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2035.
One of the main points to be decided is the Rapid Adoption Action plan. As its name suggests, it aims to speed up how NATO and its allies can integrate technologies from companies so it can use the latest tech products within a maximum of 24 months.
'We are in what we call a tech race,' Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe, NATO assistant secretary general for innovation, hybrid, and cyber, said in a press briefing which Euronews Next attended.
He said that in Russia's war against Ukraine, Russia has reduced the product development cycle to as short as two to 12 weeks.
Meanwhile, he said China has 'a serious integration of their defence industry and their defence forces'.
'We have a defence industry that has been struggling to keep up pace. We've seen it following the war in Ukraine as we've been emptying our stocks. Production lines have had difficulties to keeping up the pace,' Ellermann-Kingombe said.
Lessons from Ukraine
Ellermann-Kingombe also said that the first starting point for NATO will be looking at what tech has to offer.
He said the speed of artificial intelligence (AI) advancements and the rapid development of drones during the war in Ukraine show that 'tech today is ready and able to actually fill some of the gaps'.
AI, for example, has helped NATO by enabling precision strikes and reducing decision time by 90 per cent. But the organisation said it needs to adapt to working with start-ups and tech companies.
'The new ecosystems work in a different way than we're used to,' said Ellermann-Kingombe, referring to procurement requirements.
'So if we want to exploit what that ecosystem has to offer, we also need to adapt to the way that they work,' he added.
The Rapid Adoption Action plan aims to bridge this divide by sharing market research on a voluntary basis among allies and increasing testing to lower risks from new tech, among other measures.
But access to governments or defence ministries is lucrative, and it is difficult for start-ups to get a foot in the door, Euronews Next previously reported. A tech company working with NATO said the organisation's 'stamp of approval' helped it work with governments.
NATO said in the press conference that it aims to provide a so-called badge of approval to companies that show their solutions to the military, either through a NATO programme or another way. The badge would work as a form of recognition from NATIO that the companies could then use.
NATO has test centres in 29 allied nations and innovators from 20 countries, said John Ridge, chief adoption officer at the NATO Innovation Fund (NIF).
The NIF Fund is a deep tech venture capital fund that is supported by 24 of NATO's 32 nations. It focuses on deep tech dual-use investments that support defence, security and resilience.
It works with NATO's Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic
(DIANA), a NATO body that aims to find and accelerate dual-use innovation capacity. However, NIF does not have to invest in technologies identified by DIANA.
What tech is NATO interested in?
DIANA innovators are now working on a range of new tech, including power generation on the high seas and advanced passive exoskeletons that give soldiers more strength on the battlefield and people with disabilities more mobility at home, Ridge said at the press conference attended by Euronews Next.
Some of the technologies NATO has invested in include Portuguese drone company Tekever and Germany's robotics company ARX Robotics GmbH, both of which are used in Ukraine.
NATO has looked at more than 2,000 start-ups and has invested in 12, said Ridge.
The organisation is looking into autonomy and keeping soldiers out of risk as it considers the future of defence.
'It seems to me as if that's a sort of a direction which all militaries are going to go. The way you can remove human beings from harm's way, why wouldn't you? So that's one of the trends that we're all ready to see, and I suspect we'll double down onto that,' said Ridge.
Ridge also wants to make industrial bases more resilient so they can operate in war time, for example, by investing in semiconductor companies to make them more scalable.
'One of the lessons we should be drawing out of Ukraine is how you're able to mobilise your industry base at time of [war] to really ramp up production,' Ridge said.
'That's not a new lesson. That's a World War One lesson. That's a World War II lesson'.
