As former NATO Assistant Secretary General for Innovation, Hybrid and Cyber, David van Weel spent a lot of time thinking about how the alliance and defence can regain its technological and innovative edge. Defence Procurement International spoke with van Weel back in May before he left NATO after four years of service to become the Netherlands' Minister of Justice and Security.

Before leaving his position, he told DPI there is a reason that defence is no longer leading the big innovations of our time as it used to do, for example, in the 1980s or the 1990s when GPS and the internet came out of defence research programmes.

“That world has changed. Governments have reduced their R&D funding, not only Ministries of Defence, but governments in general. We have let universities take care of their business model, which they’ve done. We’ve asked the private sector to come in and invest in start-ups and scale-ups, which they’ve done.”

Yet, unfortunately, there hasn’t been as much focus on defence, said van Weel. “We still have the greatest new tech from Western or allied universities. But it’s all geared towards commercial solutions and making money in a global market. Defence is not top of mind. So, we need to change that.”

Van Weel said the alliance needs to re-engage with communities it hasn’t engaged with for a while. “We also need to change how we do business,” he says. “We are very much geared towards long-term investment projects like fighter jets, frigates or tanks that take around 10 years to decide on, then another 10 to 15 years to roll out, and they need to last for another 25 to 40 years. If you put the scale of modern commercial innovation next to that timescale, there’s a mismatch. So, we also need to change our culture, processes, and procedures to be more receptive to innovations.”

He doesn’t want to do away with the hardware (tanks, planes, frigates) that sustains military forces today. “We will still need exquisite defence-only technologies and equipment that has to be robust and last for a long time.” But on top of that, he wants the alliance to be more receptive to shorter-term high-speed innovation equipment that “we need to procure today, use tomorrow, and then throw away in six months, like the drones in Ukraine.”

This doesn’t just have implications for procurement, but also for culture, which is more difficult to change. “They say, culture eats strategy for breakfast, so that’s the hardest one to tackle,” says van Weel, adding that he recognises that he cannot change the whole machine at once.

Under van Weel, NATO established its Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) and NATO Innovation Fund as touchpoints for tech start-ups and innovators to work with. “We wanted them to be at a reasonable distance from NATO headquarters, and the processes, procedures and politics that brings,” says van Weel, “but still maintain links into NATO militaries to ensure the adoption of new technologies.”

Last November, DIANA announced the first 44 companies selected to tackle NATO’s specific challenges on energy resilience, undersea sensing and surveillance, and secure information sharing. Professor Deeph Chana, DIANA’s managing director said it received some extraordinarily inventive ideas in all three categories which could be genuinely “game-changing”.

Preventing hybrid attacks on NATO allies

“Other things based on more mature technology, like AI or space sensors, we might see them sooner. The aim is, of course, to get more rapid technology adoption. So just growing the companies or getting them through an accelerator is a means towards the end, and the end is really to see this ending up in the hands of warfighters.” To do that, van Weel says NATO must change its procedures.

“We need to ensure our defence budgets are not filled to the brim for the next 15 years because that won’t allow for any short-term procurement. We also need to ensure our average procurement process doesn’t take 16 years for companies to get a contract. We need to look differently at lifecycle costs. So, for example, drones in Ukraine, you’re not buying them for the next 15 years, you’re buying them for the next six months.”

Van Wheel said there are examples from Afghanistan where armed forces have demonstrated that they can quickly adapt to new technologies. He points to how quickly countries responded to the IED threat there. “We just need to take a little bit of that mindset from the mission theatre into our capitals,” he says.

As much as you have an accelerator developing all this great new tech, on the other end, is a soldier who is thinking innovatively and creatively. To some extent, Russia may have an edge there as hybrid warfare, van Weel’s other area of focus, is something that it has seized on with gusto. Look at the use of Russian soldiers without insignia (“little green men”) who helped seize Crimea in 2014, and the proxies Russia uses in eastern Ukraine.

Van Wheel doesn’t believe Russia has the upper hand in hybrid warfare. “I would just say that they find it a more acceptable strategy than we do. We would rather not damage civilian infrastructure in a country that we’re not at war with. We would rather not spread disinformation into an adversary’s information sphere. Russia is using hybrid tactics and campaigns against us, and we will not retaliate in kind because that’s not what democracies do. So, we must deter and defend as we do in the conventional domain.”

 Since the end of the Cold War, van Weel says the alliance hasn’t worked hard enough on the resilience of its critical infrastructure in terms of seeing it as a whole-of-society effort. “Whether you work in communications or an energy company, you have a responsibility to keep the country going and protect it against outside threats,” he explains.

He believes the war in Ukraine is a “wake-up” call as Russia is not only attacking military targets but also residential areas, energy infrastructure, dams, power plants, and grain ships in the Black Sea. “We need to be prepared, not only with a military that is strong, but also with a society and an economy that is resilient and can respond to that.”

He points to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites used by Ukrainian soldiers. “If you want to disable satellites by shooting them down one by one, good luck with Starlink because it has a constellation of 6,000 satellites. So that takes away the effectiveness of taking out individual satellites.”

Resilience is a "whole of society" effort

The second part is, how do we deter? There, says, van Weel, we need to prevent plausible deniability from happening in the cyber domain. In critical undersea infrastructure, for example, it is harder to detect if something happens and who has done it, because it happened under the water, he explains. But by sharing information and private-public collaboration, van Weel says it is possible to “call [cyber attacks] out”.

He says allies have called out Russia in response to an attack on German and Czech political parties, as well as a string of hybrid attacks that Russia allegedly conducted on allied territory, which van Weel says range from sabotage to interfering with train traffic. “We have to find a way to collaborate to ensure that we take away the plausible deniability, and even better prevent attacks from happening.”

In critical undersea infrastructure, sensors on oil and gas pipelines could be used to detect attacks. “There’s a lot of information that the private sector has, but from a NATO perspective, we have the assets to respond to any anomalies that might be seen.” Second, is the use of new technologies. “Can we use AI and open-source data to find out automatically where strange behaviour is occurring in our infrastructure?” 

And thirdly, it’s about increasing resilience. “If we put in a new wind farm in the North Sea, maybe we don’t want all the electricity to go through only one cable from a resilience point of view,” says van Weel.

He said it is important for countries to learn from one another. “We want to know what hybrid tactics a country like Russia uses because we can get a better picture and create better defences against it. It requires everyone’s effort. Whatever you do, you need to think about the implications and prepare for, whether it’s hybrid attacks that are already happening on our soil or to create resilience to deter a full-scale conflict.”