AS A YOUNG naval fighter pilot operating from a French carrier during the Kosovo war in 1999, Lieutenant Pierre Vandier would pore over surveillance photographs developed from celluloid film. Now an admiral, the French officer is NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, one of the alliance’s two most senior commanders. His job is to work out, among other things, how to use artificial intelligence and human skill to make sense of the mass of surveillance imagery and data that the alliance collects. He is, in effect, in charge of bringing NATO into the 21st century.
It is a race against the clock. “We have a problem of time,” Admiral Vandier tells The Economist. If a lasting ceasefire is secured in Ukraine, the alliance has “three to four years” to adapt and fix its shortcomings. During this time Russia will rearm, recruit and innovate. In the past, says Admiral Vandier, arms programmes took years to design, years to produce and years to adopt. “We don’t have this time.” He wants 15% of additional money for defence to go on “the new”. Tech will supplement old kit rather than replace it, he argues. Planes and ships with drones attached will be “maybe ten times more lethal [and] resilient”.
That is not hypothetical. In January NATO launched Baltic Sentry, a mission to monitor undersea infrastructure, such as cables, at risk of Russian sabotage. But it was challenged by a shortage of ships and the high cost of crewing and maintaining them. “When you use a…frigate to look at cables in the Baltic with 300 people on board, do you think it’s a good way to use your money?” he asks, rhetorically. “It’s better to use them to chase submarines.” Instead, NATO launched Task Force X, a fleet of autonomous naval systems.
Drones might struggle in heavy Atlantic or Pacific storms. But in the calmer Baltic they can perform well, freeing up big vessels for other tasks. Underwater, he adds, “you can do a lot of things with drones which even the submarines are not able to do.” The lesson from Ukraine is to “constantly update, update and update”, he says, noting the success rate of Ukraine’s naval attack drones in the Black Sea fell from 85% to less than 10% as Russia adapted.
In theory, few NATO generals or admirals disagree that their forces need to be more modern. The debate is over the precise mix of old and new. The admiral’s command is using modelling and simulation tools—borrowed from America—which use classified data on enemy capabilities to produce better answers to this question. He hopes to present allies with simulation results shortly after a NATO leaders’ summit in The Hague in June.
Armed forces can be resistant to change. “Pilots think they will lose their job,” argues Admiral Vandier, who went from flying fighter jets to commanding the French aircraft-carrier. The most prestigious posts often involve large platforms. He invokes a hypothetical lieutenant-commander involved in planning a future force: “Do you want to programme drones…or do you want to command a ship?” NATO has not changed for 30 years, he complains. “Adoption [of technology] is a cultural problem,” he says. “It’s a fight against ourselves.”
Today NATO’s European allies are openly talking about a new security order on the continent in which America may be absent, or actively hostile. But America, insists Admiral Vandier, “does not intend to disengage from Europe”. NATO’s capability targets, which are to be approved by defence ministers in June, remain valid, he insists, and do not need to be changed in response to the geopolitical turmoil of recent weeks. He offers an implicit rebuke to panicked allies who talk as if the alliance is crumbling. “The adult discussion is…what kind of capabilities the Europeans need to do more.” ■
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