In Geopolitics Today - Thursday, July 15th
NATO Transformation of its Air and Missile Defence and Britain Approaching Operational Drone Swarm Capabilities
NATO Transformation of Air and Missile Defence
NATO is in a period of transformational change. The NATO structure, in mirroring the National Defense Strategy of the United States, now looks to meet the challenges of an era of great power competition. That competition will primarily come in the form of conflict with China and Russia, with the stage to be global in scale, involving everything from adverserial states to various sub-state threats.
With that in mind, the Royal United Services Institute has published a paper assessing one aspect of NATO’s transformation: the recalibration of NATO air and missile defences. Their anlysis emphasises NATO’s need to surmount several capability and capacity challenges. In addition, the paper identifies shortcomings potentially preventing NATO from mounting a credible defence against multi-tiered salvos from Russia. NATO, they note, will have to be coupled with initiatives based on the Capstone Concept, which aims to leverage the all the capabilities of national power in concert with the US Joint Forces to ensure the United States is “immune to coercion.’’
NATO’s forthcoming future warfighting capabilities look to be focused on interoperability and joint combat just as the United States military approaches an operational joint all-domain command — a complex cloud network which will afford the US the capability of responding to a call for destruction from an infantryman with any of its other capabilities, whether that be artillery, rocket artillery, naval gunfire, close-air support, or other means of delivering military power. The US aims to retain the ability to operate effectively in all domains in a theater conflict.
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Britain Approaching Operational Drone Swarm Capabilities
The Chief of Britain’s Royal Air Force, Marshal Sir Mike Wigston, suggested at the Global Air Chiefs’ Conference in London that the UK is ready to declare a multidomain combat cloud capability. Wigston said that the UK is now "at the point where our combat cloud, called Nexus, can begin to be introduced operationally.”
A ‘combat cloud’ is a decentralised, cyber-resilient information network which functions across air, land, sea, and space domains. It essentially allows for the flow of real-time information for military forces across all domains, bringing about a significant achievement in the speed and connectedness of intelligence.
Interestingly, Wigston also revealed that the Royal Air Force is near a point where swarming drone technology is operational:
That success, in little over a year, points to the operational utility of swarming drones. I aim to declare it operational in an equally short period of time, with more than one squadron, such is its impact. And we will spirally develop it year by year, moving swiftly where the technology allows and the threat invites. […] Our drone test squadron, 216 Squadron, has proved beyond doubt the disruptive and innovative utility of swarming drones under our Alvina program. Working with our defense science laboratory and specialist industry partners, I can say that we have exercised swarms of over 20 ultralow-cost drones operating together against threat systems to brilliant effect.
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