NATO Review

As the 2023 Invictus Games begin, my heart is filled with a myriad of emotions. The Games provide an opportunity for wounded, injured and sick service personnel and veterans to participate in international sporting competition, and also support broader programmes of rehabilitation and recovery. My journey to the Games has not only been about me, but also about representing the unbreakable spirit of my fellow soldiers who are unable to take part in this remarkable event. Let me take you back to the moment when my world came crashing down and I discovered the true meaning of resilience.

On 4 April 2023, Finland’s Blue Cross Flag was hoisted at NATO Headquarters, marking the nation’s entry into the Alliance. Finland’s formal accession to NATO was the culmination of an 11-month membership path that was triggered following Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine in February 2022. The overwhelming majority of Finns supported their nation’s NATO membership, and many toasts were raised that day in early spring. Though joining the Alliance without Sweden – which was left to wait for the completion of its own accession process - put a slight damper on the festive occasion.

Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine is not the only challenge NATO has to grapple with today. The week preceding the NATO Summit in Vilnius marked the planet’s hottest week in recorded history. Last summer’s gruelling heat claimed 20,000 excess deaths in Western Europe alone, threatened critical military and civilian infrastructure and caused additional military deployments in response to immense forest fires across Europe.

The Heads of State and Government of NATO countries convened in Vilnius, Lithuania for a summit that took place on 11 and 12 July. This, unequivocally, was the most important meeting of the summer 2023. Due to a plethora of international issues, politics, and global security, this year’s event became the epicenter and confluence of significant issues requiring Allied Leaders to take definitive action. These decisions will have impacts for years to come.

The issue of the appropriate level of defence spending for each NATO Ally is as old as NATO itself. It touches upon two core debates for the Allies. First, as NATO’s mission is to ensure the security of the Euro-Atlantic area, defence spending supports the ability of Allies to preserve peace and to deter all threats, at all times.

This coming summer will mark the twentieth anniversary of the initiation of NATO's engagement in Afghanistan in August 2003, which ended in August 2021 as a result of the collapse of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) and the return to power of the Taliban. This endeavour, extraordinary in both ambition and scope, brought together the commitments and contributions of troops and other resources by nearly 50 NATO and non-NATO nations from around the world, with the goal of building a stable Afghanistan freed from use as a safe haven for terrorism.

NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept reaffirmed its commitment to NATO’s founding principles and to its core mission of collective defence and security in a Euro-Atlantic zone definitively ‘not at peace’. It also reiterated its long-held view that cyberspace, the global domain of interconnected information technologies and data, is ‘contested at all times’ by a range of state and non-state actors. Set against the backdrop of widespread competition in cyberspace between military and intelligence agencies, firms, criminals, hackers, hacktivists and assorted adventurers, this assertion is hard to deny.

In the face of the “pervasive instability and threat” described by NATO’s Strategic Concept, Allies must do more to strengthen the resilience of our societies. We face a growth in the challenges we face together, illustrated by the UK’s Integrated Review describing the world as “volatile and contested”. As our National Resilience Framework sets out, we need a whole-of-society approach to better prepare ourselves for instability - and communication is crucial in delivering this by informing, mobilising and preparing populations.

How do innovators get better at anticipating and preparing for problems in the future? Most innovation efforts focus on problems in the present — ones that are easy to identify and thus to justify investing in (e.g. how do we make an airplane fly higher, or faster, or with fewer carbon emissions?) But focusing on the present can leave us unprepared for problems that may come in the future. It is equally valuable for innovation efforts to look beyond the present and to prepare for disruptions yet to come.

The USS Gerald R. Ford – the US Navy’s newest supercarrier, and the largest and most technologically advanced aircraft carrier in the world – recently crossed the Atlantic alongside warships from other NATO Allies. Aboard ship, two brothers mark the Ford’s first deployment – and one brother’s final flight.