Publication of Policy Papers for the SPF Project “Cooperation Between European and Indo-Pacific Powers in the U.S. Alliance System”
IINA (International Information Network Analysis) hosts a series of policy papers featuring analyses and insights from U.S., Japanese, South Korean, Australian and European experts, which discuss constructive cooperation among U.S. allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. The series aims to provide readers with valuable perspectives on the future of NATO-IP4 (Indo-Pacific 4) cooperation for regional and global security.
Many indicators suggest that strategic competitors are gaining a lead in advanced technologies across their commercial and defense applications. For example, Beijing’s Military-Civil Fusion (MCF) strategy is effectuating China’s rise. Defense-technological cooperation with the Russian Federation under the rubric of their no-limits strategic partnership is enhancing China’s progress. Since this partnership of revisionist powers transcends both the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific theaters, the strategic challenge for NATO and its Indo-Pacific partners Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand is to accelerate their own efforts in the domain of next-generation technologies, collectively as well as nationally. Such efforts extend beyond the confines of scientific innovation and hold implications across all domains of strategic competition writ large.
Emerging Disruptive Technologies (EDTs, also known as critical and emerging technologies [CETs])—such as quantum computing, AI, machine learning and big data, the cyber and space domains, sensors, biotechnology, and robotics—have potential military as well as commercial applications. Moreover, dedicated defense-technological research into uncrewed autonomous weapons systems, directed energy weapons, hypersonic missiles and counter-hypersonic weapons, drones, stealth, and electromagnetic warfare could produce a decisive military advantage on the battlefield as well as in hybrid operations. These technological developments create a need for defense-technological resilience, including secure supply chains for key components and munitions and the preservation of national production capability.
Enhanced defense-technological cooperation and collaboration on next-generation technologies feature prominently both on the NATO-IP4 Agenda for Tackling Shared Security Challenges and within its constituent bilateral ITPPs. The next step is to translate collaborative aspirations into unified action. This paper proposes a two-pronged solution:
- 1. Increase systematic oversight and coordination.
- 2. Identify frameworks for practical implementation.
Both initiatives are required to ensure synergy between secure top-level political coordination and defense implementation on the ground. The result would be a networked defense-technological ecosystem that would improve overall alliance effectiveness in this domain.
1. Increase Systematic Oversight and Coordination on EDTs at the NATO-IP4 Level
The NATO-IP4 format presently focuses on consultation, information-sharing, and dialogue but lacks formal institutional structures to coordinate technology exchange or joint defense innovation. While member states have little appetite for converting NATO-IP4 into a more cumbersome formalized organization, this does not preclude its use as a platform for coordinating defense-technological cooperation. Practical cooperation does not need to occur at the NATO-IP4 level, nor does it require approval or participation by all parties. Yet it could be beneficial to establish a dedicated working group or track 1.5 dialogue that maps out sector-specific information, oversees relevant activities, or scopes collaborative opportunities among member states.
Such a mechanism would liaise with interested parties to oversee pertinent individual, bilateral, and minilateral activities. It would break down silos to aggregate collective knowledge of relevant projects underway, identify opportunities for connectivity between projects and member states, and assess ways to synergize them to attain common goals. The role of such a mechanism would be to monitor the activities of individual projects at all levels, not to direct such projects in motion under a NATO-IP4 banner.
A NATO-IP4 defense-technology forum could facilitate cooperation in the following ways:
- Serve as a platform for government, industry, and academic dialogue (leveraging a triple helix model), alongside NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) and IP4 member state equivalents.
- Monitor the big picture and assess relevant activities at all levels to ensure strategic coherence toward collective goals and better align production efforts, including supply chains.
- Advise on how activities meet required strategic and operational needs, including multidomain operations, rather than promoting scientific innovation for its own sake.
- Identify opportunities to exploit the scalability of member participation based on willingness and comparative advantage to create force-multiplying effects, including through transnational public-private partnerships.
- Assist in eliminating duplication and redundancy through consolidating activities, including activities that help achieve economies of scale and distribution of production centers across states.
- Forge consensus on the application of data security, information warfare, and activities in cyberspace and harmonize approaches to the use of EDTs such as AI and biotechnology.
- Deliberate on regulatory and export control issues and how to overcome them to better facilitate technology or arms transfers among members.
- Deliberate on common approaches to ethical and responsible use of EDTs, such as autonomous weapons, to forge common standards across member and partner states.
- Create a collective organizational culture that transcends national and institutional perspectives and builds bridges between NATO and non-NATO members.
- Draw together lessons learned from completed or active projects, such as production acceleration, scalability, and interchangeability, and share that information among its membership.
2. Identify Frameworks for Practical Implementation: Minilateral Consortia
Since it is not feasible, or necessarily desirable, to direct and manage defense-technological cooperation on a NATO-IP4 scale, member and partner states would continue to pursue practical action on a minilateral and bilateral basis in tandem with national efforts. The result would be an interlocking web of projects that contribute to the collective agenda. Greater coordination at the NATO-IP4 level may facilitate additional or expanded collaborations based on country-specific interests and comparative advantages.
Some member states are equipped to pursue major defense-technological projects at national or sometimes bilateral levels, such as the UK-Australia frigate program and the Germany-Australia armored fighting vehicle (AFV) program. However, countries are increasingly having to resort to small minilateral groupings to pool technological knowledge and defray production and R&D costs. The way forward for many NATO-IP4 states is to expand cross-national collaboration to form new minilateral consortia or coalitions of the willing and able.
The cross-regional minilateral grouping AUKUS points the way forward. First, strategic analysts have recognized it as a paragon of defense-technological cooperation across the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions. As such, it is the gold standard that select NATO-IP4 partners could further expand or emulate. Though questions remain as to the ultimate success of the enterprise, AUKUS is notable for its rigorously designed organizational structure based on two distinct pillars. Pillar I, the nuclear-powered submarine program, is an exclusive collaboration between the three core members that aims to procure one of the most ambitious undersea capabilities possible. In contrast, Pillar II, Advanced Technologies, is extensive in its remit, which includes undersea capabilities, quantum computing, AI and autonomous systems, advanced cyber capabilities, hypersonic missiles and counter-hypersonic capabilities, electromagnetic warfare, innovation, and information sharing.
Moreover, AUKUS has declared Pillar II open to additional partnerships. It has already formally nominated Japan as a Pillar II partner, and South Korea, New Zealand, and Canada have expressed interest. On this basis, AUKUS could serve as an aggregating hub around which to pursue additional defense-technological projects across the NATO-IP4 membership. Importantly, AUKUS is already delivering results in advanced capabilities, including the testing of AI-controlled drone swarms and the establishment of the Hypersonic Flight Test and Experimentation (HyFliTE) Project Arrangement. Furthermore, AUKUS could demonstrate technologies its members have developed under Pillar II to NATO-IP4 countries during joint exercises, with the possibility of transferal to partner states, furthering allied defense integration.
Leveraging existing minilateral models and engaging additional partners from within the NATO-IP4 collective, and perhaps from outside of it, appears to be a feasible way of further operationalizing common goals. Such targeted and well-structured initiatives selectively draw on the vast reservoir of capabilities available to NATO-IP4. And they do so without the need to harmonize the vast range of stakeholder actors that compose it, such as the 32 NATO member states and the EU. Such expanded or new minilateral configurations capitalize on existing connective tissue, often at the bilateral level, including the vast range of strategic partnerships between European and Indo-Pacific countries such as the UK and Japan, Poland and South Korea, and France and Australia.
The approach described here would encounter familiar problems of allied cooperation. These include political willingness, capacity constraints, equity in financial contributions, distribution of benefits, intellectual property rights, data security, and regulatory export controls at the coalface, such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). A dedicated platform to strategically coordinate defense-technological cooperation at the NATO-IP4 level would assist in addressing some of these issues, if not fully resolving them.
Meanwhile, NATO-IP4 efforts involving only some member states, particularly at the minilateral level, could continue apace without the need to achieve unanimity, providing diffuse collective benefits to the overall enterprise. Small, specific, targeted group projects are the only way to overcome the immense range and complexity of the national and multinational stakeholders involved and to work toward the desired collective results. NATO and IP4 need to identify specific projects of interest and match them with willing and capable partners, building around existing minilaterals such as AUKUS, or form new consortia. The proposed initiatives would create a necessary interface between political oversight and practical implementation of defense-technological collaboration across a networked ecosystem.
(2025/04/04)