New RD Publication: Imitation, innovation, disruption: challenges to NATO’s superiority in military technology

• NDC Policy Brief 25-19: Imitation, innovation, disruption: challenges to NATO’s superiority in military technology, by Andrea Gilli and Mauro Gilli *

Analysts, academics and observers are worried that
NATO countries may lose their industrial leadership
in defence production. Globalization and advances in
communications are widely believed to enable enemies
and adversaries alike to copy NATO countries’ stateof-
the-art weapon systems, and possibly even surpass
them by developing next-generation weapon systems.
Moreover, so-called disruptive technologies like artificial
intelligence, quantum computing and additive manufacturing
are believed to offer cheaper and less technologically
demanding options to countries that do not possess
the decades’ old defence industrial base of NATO countries.
These countries could then use such new technologies
for weakening NATO force structure.1

These concerns are real and deserve close scrutiny.
However, adversaries and competitors still face significant
challenges which are more insidious than those
NATO countries are facing. Because of the complexity
of modern technology, imitation, innovation and disruption in armaments production have become increasingly
demanding over the past decades – especially for
naval and aerial platforms intended to operate in competitive
environments. For NATO this implies more targeted
defence investments and exploitation of industrial
specialisation across the Alliance, as well as experimentation
and innovation with new technologies to favour
their future integration into the NATO force structure.

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