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28 November 2021

Algorithmic power, NATO and artificial intelligence

Simona R. Soare

NATO defence ministers have formally adopted the Alliance’s first artificial intelligence (AI) strategy. The document lays out six ‘baseline’ principles for ‘responsible’ military use of AI – lawfulness, responsibility and accountability, explainability and traceability, reliability, governability, and bias mitigation. It also provides an insight into key implementation challenges.

The strategy is meant to provide a ‘common policy basis’ to support the adoption of AI systems in order to achieve the Alliance’s three core tasks – collective defence, crisis management and cooperative security. The strategy is also designed to challenge established Alliance processes for procurement, technology development and wider engagement with the private sector and academia.

Only a summary of the strategy has been made public. However, it reveals four critical obstacles to implementation that NATO will face: reconciling the objectives of member nations; securing sufficient political and financial support; bridging any disconnect between the Alliance’s policy and operational units; and managing the transnational bureaucracy that will implement the strategy.

Hard questions

 As well as being a consensus-building policy document, the strategy attempts to position NATO as the leader of AI adoption in defence. It reiterates the allies’ commitment to transatlantic cooperation on the development and use of AI in security and defence, an important element of which is ensuring inter-operability and standardisation.

There are still hard questions, however, about how NATO will coordinate different national approaches to managing the development and application of AI in defence, combined with restrictions on technology use, access, sharing and transfer. For countries like the United States, it is a priority that allies agree practical guidelines for the operational use of AI-enabled systems and the necessary data-sharing, a challenge that should not be underestimated. Some allies, meanwhile, are not satisfied with the granularity of the six principles of responsible use, while others consider that overemphasising the normative approach risks ceding technological advantage to peer competitors.

Similar tensions are playing out in the European Union. The EU’s proposal for an AI act is more restrictive for high-risk, high-impact applications of AI, though its impact on defence will be indirect, as it do does not apply to the military domain. In the defence realm, the European Defence Agency’s Artificial Intelligence Action Plan for Defence shares more similarities with the NATO strategy. While the plan is not public, it reportedly includes a list of use cases for military applications of AI which member states may consider for collaborative development and principles of responsible development and use.

Another question that remains to be answered is the extent of NATO’s ambition to adopt AI. The strategy is meant to be implemented in a phased approach, partly to build political support for AI military projects. Initial ambitions seem modest, reportedly focusing on mission planning and support; smart maintenance and logistics for NATO capabilities; data fusion and analysis; cyber defence; and optimisation of back-office processes. As political acceptance grows and following periodic reviews of the strategy’s implementation, the goal is to also include more complex operational applications.

Finally, the AI strategy runs parallel to NATO’s Military Strategy, a military-led process launched in 2019, and its Warfighting Capstone Concept, which examines alliance requirements in future operating environments. However, the AI strategy is a stand-alone document. To avoid creating narrow implementation tracks, meaningful early engagement between NATO’s policy and military communities would be beneficial to cut across any disconnect between threat-based assessments of the impact of AI on military capabilities and politically driven processes for the development and use of AI.

Avoiding friction 

The executive summary of NATO’s AI strategy does not reflect any alignment of the roles and resources of the different NATO and national innovation bodies. It is unclear from the summary how the NATO Innovation Unit, Allied Command Transformation, the Science and Technology Organization and the NATO Communications and Information Agency will coordinate to implement the strategy.

The Alliance aims to exploit AI developments in the commercial sector by adopting an open innovation model and deliberately moving away from its present procurement model. However, this will require an effort to map out the relationship between old structures, such as the NATO Industrial Advisory Group, and new engagement channels with the private sector, such as the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic and others created by the AI strategy.

While NATO has adopted the AI strategy, there is no dedicated line of funding for it. Finance will depend on a combination of common budget funding and off-budget mechanisms such as the NATO Innovation Fund. Besides the uncertainty over the availability of funding, some Alliance agencies are concerned that their budgets could be cut and redistributed towards the implementation of the AI strategy. The allies have set a USD1 billion target for the NATO Innovation Fund. However, whether this amount is sustainably generated and distributed over the long term, and by what means, is more important for encouraging innovation than the announced figure.

The promise of AI for military applications has been clear for some time; less obvious is the route to deliver on it. For all the implementation challenges it faces, the Alliance’s AI strategy represents a step in the right direction.

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