In 1948, some of the brightest minds in the US, Canada, and Western Europe got together to create a novel transatlantic defence pact. Their goal was to draft a treaty so simple and clear that even “a milkman in Omaha” would understand it. The diplomats succeeded. The Washington Treaty, signed on 4 April 1949, required only 14 articles to outline a transatlantic defence community that was entirely different from the short-lived alliances of convenience that had been the curse of European history. The Treaty, which soon turned into a fully-fledged organization called NATO, described a community of destiny between two continents – a community that would last much longer than its founding fathers ever dared to dream.

However, over seven decades of successful transatlantic defence cooperation say little about NATO’s future. After all, the Washington Treaty was written at a time when security was largely understood as state-centric, focused on the defence of borders and territory against an aggression by another state. Today, these traditional notions of security are increasingly giving way to a complex mix of military and non-military threats that can affect societies also from within. These range from targeted manmade threats, such as cyberattacks or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, to broader phenomena, such as climate change or resource scarcity. For NATO, which is based on traditional notions of defence against an “armed attack”, who’s founding Treaty even defines the specific territory that is eligible for collective protection, this rise of “de-territorialised”, non-kinetic threats creates a whole series of challenges. How well NATO addresses them will determine its future as an effective security provider for almost one billion citizens.

The Interaction of Traditional and Non-Traditional Security Challenges

The return of great power competition, notably Russia’s revisionism and China’s more assertive foreign policy, is a stark reminder that the increase of non-traditional threats does not spell the obsolescence of traditional security challenges, such as inter-state wars. On the contrary, traditional and non-traditional threats increasingly interact. Cyberattacks, for example, have long been a tool for industrial espionage, yet they also have become an integral part of any military campaign. Similarly, while the effect of politically motivated terrorist attacks against critical energy infrastructure may be largely symbolic, state-sponsored attacks can also have the goal to undermine a country’s ability to build up a coherent conventional military defence. Disinformation can be used as a tool to de-stabilise a state, yet it can also be part of a “hybrid warfare” approach, intended to prepare for (and then mask) a direct military aggression against a neighbouring state. Climate change, in turn, can increase the number and scale of natural disasters, with the military often being the “first responder”, but it can also aggravate conflicts between states or generate new migration pressures. While it appears unlikely that the future will see “resource wars”, as propounded by some sensationalist authors, it is clear that oil, gas and other natural resources (e.g. “rare earths”) will affect international security policy: an oil discovery in a region claimed by two states; a dam project in a water-scarce region that further limits the scarce supply of water to a neighbouring country – such scenarios are not only imaginable but likely. Finally, the number of “virtual” nuclear weapons states is not only growing due to more countries mastering the full nuclear fuel cycle, it is also growing due to the commercialisation of proliferation, for example through the emergence of a “black market” for sensitive technologies.

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The Need to Adapt

This emerging security landscape challenges NATO on several levels. On the institutional level, the new threats challenge the centrality of NATO, as many of them are non-military in nature and thus do not lend themselves to purely military responses. On the political level, the fact that these threats offer little or no early warning, are often anonymous as well as ambiguous, and, above all, non-existential, creates dilemmas of attribution as well as of solidarity and collective responses. Consequently, NATO needs to not only grasp the specific character of such non-traditional challenges, but also define its role in each of them. At the same time, NATO needs to develop trustful ties with the broader community of stakeholders.

NATO had been addressing a range of emerging threats for quite some time, yet it had done so in a compartmentalised way, without clear-cut political guidance or thorough conceptual underpinning. The 2010 Strategic Concept, which gave considerable prominence to emerging challenges, signalled a change, however, as it provided NATO with a wide-ranging mandate to address these challenges in a more systematic way. Moreover, the creation of the Emerging Security Challenges Division in NATO’s International Staff, which happened in conjunction with the release of the Strategic Concept, created a bureaucratic foothold for non-traditional challenges within the Organization, thus facilitating more coherent policy development and implementation in these areas.

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Improving Situational Awareness

By bringing together over 60 intelligence services, NATO provides a unique forum for discussing current and future threats, including non-traditional ones. Intelligence-sharing in NATO includes all developments that are relevant to allied security, ranging from regional conflicts to new developments in attacks on critical energy infrastructure. To further enhance situational awareness, NATO stood up an Intelligence Security Division in its International Staff, including a unit that analyses hybrid threats, while at the same time expanding its in-house analytical capabilities to deal with strategic analysis and foresight. In contrast to intelligence-sharing, strategic analysis allows for a more forward looking, and sometimes more provocative, open-source approach towards emerging challenges, ranging from then security implications of Artificial Intelligence to the strategic consequences of Bitcoins.

Countering Hybrid Challenges

Russia’s use of hybrid tools in its assault on Ukraine in 2014 forced NATO to not only re-emphasise its core task of collective defence, but also to examine responses to hybrid threats. This is all the more urgent as hybrid campaigns could undermine NATO’s collective defence preparations in a crisis, notably along NATO’s Eastern flank. Consequently, NATO is systematically enlarging its counter hybrid toolbox, which now encompasses, inter alia, enhanced intelligence sharing, a stronger focus on national resilience, the creation of specific tools (such as Counter Hybrid Support Teams), more responsive public diplomacy efforts, specifically tailored exercises, and closer relations with the European Union. In addition, more analysis is devoted to the hybrid approaches of specific actors, such as Russia and China, and to deterring hybrid threats, notably to the unique role of the military in a predominantly non-kinetic context. Even the difficult problem of attributing certain hybrid attacks to specific state or non-state actors, which is essentially a national prerogative, is being discussed – as well as exercised – in a NATO context. If the threat of attribution is supposed to act as a deterrent, one must seek to attribute collectively.

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Enhancing Training, Education and Exercises

The growing importance of non-traditional challenges is making them a permanent fixture in NATO’s education and training programmes, as well as in its exercises. Diplomats and military leaders alike must be given the opportunity to develop a better understanding of cyber, energy, climate change and similar challenges as drivers of future security developments. To this end, dedicated courses have been set up at NATO’s training facilities as well as the NATO Centres of Excellence, and existing courses are being augmented with appropriate elements. The challenge of coping with non-traditional threats is also being increasingly reflected in NATO’s exercises. Even a “traditional” military conflict today will include numerous cyber elements, the targeting of energy and other critical infrastructure, and massive amounts of disinformation. Hence, it is only through exercises that one can gain a thorough understanding of how these non-traditional threats affect a military campaign.

Enhancing Allied Resilience

If one must assume that certain types of attacks, such as cyber or terrorist, will happen and cannot be deterred, the focus needs to shift towards resilience. Again, cyber provides a case in point. Since cyberattacks are happening all the time, the emphasis must be placed on upgrading cyber defences, so that one’s networks will continue to operate even in a degraded environment. Similarly, the effects of attacks on energy infrastructure can be minimised if that infrastructure can be repaired quickly. Such resilience measures are largely a national responsibility. However, NATO can assist nations in conducting self-assessments that help identify gaps that need addressing. This new focus on resilience is also important for NATO’s traditional collective defence: an opponent seeking to undermine NATO’s collective defence preparations will do so first and foremost by non-traditional, non-kinetic means, such as cyberattacks or energy supply disruptions.

Reaching Out to Other International Organisations

The nature of non-traditional security challenges makes NATO’s success increasingly dependent on how well it cooperates with others. Consequently, NATO needs to be much better connected to the broader international community. This is true for its relations with other security stakeholders such as the European Union and the United Nations, but also with respect to non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Hence, enhancing NATO’s “connectivity”’ (former NATO Secretary General Rasmussen) is a precondition for its future as viable security provider. The NATO-EU relationship, which is perhaps the most important of all, has seen considerable progress, yet still remains nervous and incomplete. While certain national sensitivities of NATO Allies and EU members must be respected, the urgency for closer coordination and cooperation between both organizations is greater than ever. Many of the new challenges are both internal and external in nature. For example, terrorism can be home grown or imported, protecting cyber and energy infrastructures against hybrid threats are essentially national responsibilities, and a pandemic requires the early coordination of responses. This poses entirely new challenges for all actors involved. A stronger NATO–EU relationship would be a major step toward overcoming such challenges.

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Developing Links with the Private Sector

Another part of an adapted NATO is a sustained relationship with the private sector. Just as the urgency to enhance NATO’s cyber defence capabilities is leading to closer ties with the software companies, the need to develop a more coherent approach to energy security will require NATO to reach out to energy companies. With most energy and cyber networks in private hands, it will be crucial to build public-private partnerships. The goal should be to establish “communities of trust” in which different stakeholders can share confidential information, for example on cyberattacks. Creating such new relationships will be challenging, since national business interests and collective security interests may sometimes prove to be irreconcilable. Still, the nature of many emerging security challenges makes the established compartmentalisation of responsibilities between the public and private sectors appear increasingly anachronistic.

Understanding Emerging Disruptive Technologies

NATO is also making a greater effort to get a firm grasp on new technologies and their implications. Artificial intelligence, “big data” analysis, or block chain technologies may offer huge security benefits, yet they can also empower adversaries, enabling them to orchestrate smarter and stealthier attacks. Moreover, like autonomous vehicles, these Emerging and Disruptive Technologies also raise legal and moral issues that need to be thoroughly examined. Today, with many new technologies being driven by the private sector rather than the military, and with many more actors gaining access to them, NATO’s erstwhile technological dominance can no longer be taken for granted. Consequently, the Allies need to turn NATO into a facilitator for robust innovation. At the same time, Allies need to discuss how to design new arms control mechanisms that capture the speed of technological change, as well as how to set new norms of behaviour in new domains, such as space, and in new “virtual” domains, such as cyberspace. In short, NATO needs to prepare for an entirely new era of how conflicts will be fought.

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Improving Collective Decision-Taking

Another obvious challenge pertains to the speed of the necessary response and, consequently, the question of political control. Cyberattacks offer the most glaring example: they simply do not leave one with enough time to engage in lengthy deliberations, let alone with the opportunity to seek parliamentary approval of a response. While this challenge is already significant on the national level, it is even more severe in a multinational context. To overcome it, nations have to agree on rules of engagement, or pre-delegate authority to certain entities. This quasi-automaticity runs counter to the natural instinct of governments to retain political control over each and every aspect of their collective response; yet the slow, deliberative nature of consensus-building may turn out to be ill-suited for the challenges at hand. The consensus needs to be built before the actual event occurs. Consequently, NATO is constantly reviewing its decision-taking procedures, and seeks to adapt them to the unique circumstances imposed by non-traditional security challenges, such as cyberattacks or hybrid warfare.

Fostering a new Culture of Debate

Finally, Allies must use NATO as a forum for a sustained political dialogue about broader security developments. While NATO is engaged on several continents, its collective “mind-set” is still largely Eurocentric and reactive. As a result, many NATO members approach discussions on potential future security issues only hesitantly, worrying that NATO’s image as an operations-driven alliance will create the impression that any such debate was only the precursor to military engagement. While such misperceptions can never be ruled out entirely, Allies should nevertheless resist making themselves hostage to the risk of a few false press reports about NATO’s allegedly sinister military intentions. Indeed, the true risk for NATO lies in the opposite direction: by refusing to look ahead and debate political and military options in meeting emerging challenges, the Allies would condemn themselves to an entirely reactive approach, thus foregoing opportunities for a pro-active policy.

Such a culture of debate is all the more important as many new security challenges do not affect all Allies in quite the same way. A terrorist assault or a cyberattack against just one Ally will not necessarily generate the collective sense of moral outrage and political solidarity that one could witness after the terrorist attacks of “9/11”, for example. Consequently, political solidarity and collective responses may be far more difficult to generate. Admitting this is not fatalism. It is simply a reminder that the new threats can be divisive rather than unifying if Allies do not make a determined effort to address them collectively. On a positive note, there are some indications that this cultural change in NATO has finally begun, as Allies have become more willing to discuss potentially controversial issues in a brainstorming mode. This welcome development must now be sustained by beefing up NATO’s analytical capabilities, including improved intelligence sharing and longer-range forecasting. Over time, these developments should lead to a shift in NATO’s “culture” toward becoming a more forward-looking organization.

Achievements and Challenges

Given the many structural differences between traditional and non-traditional security challenges, it should not come as a surprise that NATO’s forays into addressing the latter category have been difficult. However, since the 2010 Strategic Concept set the stage, much has been achieved. This is particularly true for cyber defence, which has seen the fastest progress, including the development of an agreed NATO policy, the definition of cyber as a distinct operational domain, and its mention in the context of the Article 5 collective self-defence clause. While nations are still reluctant to share information beyond the very small trusted communities in which their intelligence services and private-public partnerships operate, the need for NATO to meet the cyber challenge has been fully acknowledged. As pointed out earlier, the attribution challenge remains difficult to meet in a collective framework, yet Allies have demonstrated the political will to “name and shame” a country that they consider the perpetrator of cyberattacks or the use of chemical/biological weapons.

Non-traditional challenges have also been a convenient venue for some partner countries to move closer to NATO. Moreover, several of NATO’s about two dozen Centres of Excellence have proven to be invaluable analytical resources, as have the two Strategic Commands in Mons and Norfolk. NATO’s support for scientific research also focuses on non-traditional challenges, including climate and water security, and NATO has built ties to the scientific community to discuss these and other issues. Allies have also increased their work on – and understanding of – hybrid threats, notably in cooperation with the European Union. In short, NATO has become a serious interlocutor on non-traditional challenges.

All this is not to say that NATO has entirely mastered the difficult terrain of non-traditional security challenges. There are still areas where the gap between expectations and reality remains wide. For example, while the 2010 Strategic Concept refers to climate change as a potential threat multiplier, Allies are only now starting to develop a visible collective approach to dealing with this phenomenon. The same holds true for resource scarcity and similar issues: while NATO should not “militarise” what are essentially economic matters, the lack of interest in such topics could lead to all kinds of unwelcome surprises. By the same token, despite a variety of forecasting efforts by NATO as well as by individual Allies, NATO as a collective has not yet fully embraced this methodology.

A New Concept of Security

Dealing with non-traditional challenges requires a paradigm shift away from deterrence and toward resilience – an enormous challenge both for individual states as well as for alliances. A security policy that accepts that certain threats cannot be prevented through deterrence, and that, some damage will inevitably occur, will be difficult to explain to populations that have become used to near-perfect security. Thus, such a policy will be charged as being fatalistic or scaremongering, while others will interpret it as an alibi by governments to better control their citizens, or simply as an excuse for increasing defence budgets. And yet the governments of modern industrial societies have no choice but to admit to their citizens that in an era marked by hybrid conflict, climate change, proliferation, terrorism, and resource scarcity neither the individual state nor an alliance can still offer near-perfect protection. Hence, the notion of defence will increasingly have to be understood as “total defence”, as practised for instance by Nordic European countries, which includes many non-military elements such as civil defence (including counter-disinformation), civil emergency planning, or medical stockpiling.

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Conclusion

NATO was born at a time when the “Omaha milkman” delivered his bottles in a small van from door to door. Soon, however, the refrigerator will order the milk autonomously via the Internet, and the product may be delivered by a drone. Such a world has little in common with the world of 1949. Neither can its security challenges be met with the means of the past. If all Allies understand and embrace this fundamental fact, they will be able to transform their Alliance into a true 21^st century security provider. NATO’s founding fathers surely would approve of this.

NB: Michael RÜHLE heads the Hybrid Challenges and Energy Security Section in NATO’s Emerging Security Challenges Division. He writes in a personal capacity.