Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary General, speaking during a Q&A at the Memorial Event commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, explained what the Alliance is learning from Ukraine’s drone war.
…We have to take into account these new insights in modern warfare, and this is drones and counter-drone technology, for example. But also how AI is now, artificial intelligence, as part of the whole war effort, and we are capturing those lessons. So, we have a joint NATO-Ukraine organisation in Poland, which captures all the lessons from the war, making sure that we figure out what it is, make sure that they are part of our defence plans.
And just to give you one example, I think only one or two years ago, we would think that you have to mass produce drones in advance, have them on the shelf if war breaks out. Increasingly, the realisation is yes, you need to have the drone technology, but better to have the drone production capacity than to produce the drones already, because these drones, in terms of their impact and quality, they change almost every six to nine months, and also the counter-drone technology has to change.
Take, for example, the jet-powered drones the Russians are now using, the Ukrainians are using. A new development in the last two or three months, which shows you that if you would have produced them in mass and put them on a shelf, they would have been obsolete by now.
So, all these insights we capture to make sure that we stay ahead and don’t forget, NATO is so much bigger and stronger than Russia. We can do this, but we have to learn from Ukraine, and that’s exactly what we are doing. And also helping Ukraine in sharing some of our insights in modern warfare. Obviously, we can still help them, but they’re also helping us, and we have to absolutely take those lessons into account. That’s what we are doing.
Source: NATO.int
