Ukraine War Has NATO Lagging on the Other Big Threat: AI

The alliance is turning 75, getting a new secretary general and facing a host of rising problems coming out of Russia.

By Retired Admiral James Stavridis, Fletcher Dean Emeritus, and former supreme allied commander of NATO

This should be a victory lap by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The alliance is holding its 75th anniversary summit in Washington, will name a new secretary general following a very successful decade under Jens Stoltenberg, and Sweden and Finland are settling into their place as frontline NATO states on Russia’s northwestern flank.

But things are hardly rosy. Notably, there is the potential return of former President Donald Trump — a confirmed NATO skeptic, to put it charitably — to the White House. The poor debate performance by President Joe Biden has caused major concern across the other 31 member nations. And then there is the war in Ukraine, dragging into a third bloody year without visible progress toward victory for either side or even a meaningful negotiation.BloombergOpinionHow Canada Is Defending the Place With No DawnButtigieg Is Harris’ Best Choice for Vice PresidentTrump’s Campaign Against Harris Is Like Him: Old and TiredParis Is Burning and the Fire’s Made of Coal

Looking ahead to the summit, let’s take it as granted that Ukraine is the alliance’s No. 1 priority. So what are the other top issues for this powerful democratic bloc? And how well equipped is the new leadership to take on the challenges beyond its proxy war with Russia?

Let’s start with the new secretary general, outgoing Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. A leader of the centrist People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy for close to 20 years, Rutte served four terms as the leader of the Netherlands and is deeply experienced in European politics.

I met him first in 2010 when he took over the Dutch government and I was the military commander of NATO. I was immediately struck by his relative youth and energy — he was in his early 40s — and over the next three years I found the Dutch to be very competent in combat operations. They suffered significant deaths in Afghanistan — including the son of the general who commanded their armed forces, a close friend of mine.

Rutte is a low-maintenance politician who proudly rides a bike to the office, lives in a small apartment in The Hague and teaches a high school government course. He is highly organized, data-driven, well-liked by his constituents, and always wants to be in control of events.

All of which are good signs of his ability to deal with the most significant challenges ahead for NATO other than Ukraine: cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. Warfare is shape-shifting in front of our eyes, a trend that will only accelerate over his tenure, which has a minimum of four years.

While NATO has issued some strong policy statements on the need for coherent, alliance-wide cyber capabilities, collective defense in a practical sense is lacking. There is no equivalent of the US Cyber Command or the UK’s Government Communications HQ, top-level organizations prepared to conduct both offensive and defensive cyberwarfare.

The alliance’s flagship organization is the Cyber Defense Center of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia, essentially a paperwork and policy center. Various NATO schools and academies also provide some basic training and doctrinal development. But the overall effort is under-resourced and handicapped by the unwillingness of member states to fully share their capabilities — in large part over security concerns about high-end tools leaking.

While last year’s NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, endorsed a more dynamic approach and the creation of the alliance’s Virtual Cyber Incident Support Capability, the war in Ukraine is simply absorbing an enormous amount of resources and leadership attention. Yet the two crises are really one in the same.

The Russian government and its hacker partners are stepping up their malevolent cyber-front, with constant direct attacks against Ukraine, the Baltic States and many Eastern European nations. President Vladimir Putin knows his nation cannot overwhelm NATO by sheer military force — the collective defense budget of the alliance members is roughly 10 times that of the Russian Federation — and he is likely to begin cyberattacks directly against the alliance. He has probably refrained so far because he wants to hold his strongest offensive capabilities for use against the West if conflict escalates. But make no mistake: He has immense capacity to do damage in cyberspace.

Hand in hand with cyberwar, of course, is the looming threat of artificial intelligence. AI will be a potent new tool in Putin’s hybrid warfare. For example, an American disinformation expert (and former Florida law enforcement official) living in Moscow has used AI to build dozens of websites to undermine alliance cohesion and support for Ukraine. Then there are Moscow’s infamous “Russian women” deepfake videos intended to foment anti-Western sentiment on Chinese social media. 

Over time, AI will become a potent battlefield tool — from creating avatars that can advise commanders on tactics and strategy, to weapons systems that knit together unmanned surveillance and attack platforms on land, sea and air. Learning machines will also vastly improve the “back office” of warfare, notably in maintenance and logistics — the real keys to effective military performance. NATO isn’t moving fast enough to stay ahead of Russia — which is learning rapidly in real conflict while NATO is limited to testing and hypotheticals.

When I was NATO commander, I was privileged to plant a ceremonial tree in front of the cyberspace excellence center in Tallinn — a tradition at the facility. I remember thinking at the time, we better be growing our cyber capabilities a lot faster than those trees would grow. So far, NATO is losing the race.

(This post is republished from Bloomberg Opinion.)