“NATIONAL DEFENSE MAGAZINE” By Josh Luckenbaugh, Staff Writer
“NATO has established the Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic, or DIANA, to bring together the best and brightest innovators with the most cutting-edge technology and to harness it, develop it and adopt it to outpace adversaries.”
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“The war in Ukraine has showcased the many ways commercial technology can impact the modern battlefield, and that’s one of the reasons NATO is expanding how it partners with both traditional and nontraditional defense companies.
Arguably the “most significant change” the organization has made in recent years is “the amount of time and effort we have spent working with the defense industrial base,” said Rachel Ellehuus, the U.S. secretary of defense’s representative in Europe and the defense advisor for the U.S. Mission to NATO.
With the alliance’s focus on out-of-area operations in previous decades, the defense industries of member nations are “producing things just in time, there are low stockpiles in national inventories, there’s very little excess capacity to boost demand in an emergency scenario,” Ellehuus said in an interview.
But with NATO now reprioritizing collective defense following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the alliance is working with its industrial base to reverse those trends and “reinforce its deterrence and defense capabilities to prepare for an Article Five scenario,” in which an armed attack on one member is considered an attack on all members, she said.
At the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2023, the alliance initiated a new “Defense Production Action Plan” with several lines of effort, including increasing industrial capacity across the member countries and encouraging multiyear, multinational procurement contracts that help aggregate demand and “get at some of these supply issues in a more efficient way,” she said.
The plan is also designed to foster better standardization and interoperability, she added. “Are we really doing enough to implement the standards NATO has on the books, and is interoperability where we can just kind of operate alongside our allies in a coherent way, [or] do we have to go a step further where we’re really creating platforms and weapons that are interchangeable with one another in the way the Ukrainians have shown us [can be] done?”
Along with the traditional defense industrial base, NATO is looking to bring in nontraditional partners to increase the speed of innovation across the organization.
David van Weel, NATO’s assistant secretary general for innovation, hybrid and cyber, said one of the key lessons from the war in Ukraine is “we need that classical defense equipment — and we need a lot of it” — but “at the same time, we need to be very agile in innovation and bringing in new technology at speed. Even if they’re not perfect … they can, temporarily, make a big difference.”
In 2022, NATO established the Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic, or DIANA, which is modeled after the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It also recently established an office near Helsinki, Finland.
DIANA Chief Operating Officer Jyoti Hirani-Driver said the goal of the accelerator is to bring together “the best and brightest innovators out there with the most cutting-edge technology” and to “harness it, develop it and adopt it at some stage so that we are outpacing our adversaries.”
DIANA provides innovators with networking and learning opportunities to better navigate the defense market that otherwise can be quite “tricky” for inexperienced companies, Hirani-Driver said in an interview. DIANA is looking for dual-use technologies with both civil and military applications, “given most innovators are likely to be attracted to the civilian market.”
“For companies today, it’s all about, ‘Am I going to make revenue, and I need to make it quickly or my business just doesn’t last,’” she said. “So, we’re trying to get people who are innovators who wouldn’t normally think to work with defense” to participate in DIANA.
DIANA began its first challenge program in June 2023, seeking proposals in three focus areas: energy resilience, secure information sharing and sensing and surveillance. The program selected 44 companies, and in January they began an “in-depth learning curriculum” on how to manage their business and navigate the defense industry, she said.
The chosen companies also have access to DIANA’s network of 23 accelerator sites and 182 test centers “where an innovator can go to test their innovation, to get the validation, … to experiment and understand will it actually work in the environment that it’s going to be used for?” she said.
The initial curriculum wrapped up in June, and as of press time DIANA was in the process of downselecting around nine companies to participate in the next phase of the program called “Grow,” which “will be much more bespoke and much more focused on defense and security adoption and commercialization,” Hirani-Driver said.
“We’ll be working really closely with investors, with industry partners — and this is where we really need their help and expertise — to really guide these innovators and hopefully scale them up” and “give them the chance to survive and scale their innovation,” she said.
Van Weel said DIANA is “meant to actually go out there where the innovators are and make them enthusiastic for the problems that we’re trying to solve. But then, as these companies are successful and they have things that can really help us, then what they need is money to be able to scale and really build it into a solid product.” That is where the alliance’s other new initiative, the NATO Innovation Fund, can help.
Historically — and particularly in Europe — “there’s not that much private or venture capital that was willing to invest in dual-use applications,” Van Weel said. Launched in 2022, the NATO Innovation Fund “invests in deep tech-driven enterprises that can strengthen our nations’ collective security and prosperity,” a fund press release stated.Twenty-four of the 32 NATO allies have backed the fund, including the newest member of the alliance Sweden.
It has “a solid amount of money behind it: 1 billion euros,” Van Weel said. It also has what he described as an “umbrella fund construction, so we can hang up more sub-funds as more nations want to come in, or partner nations or maybe private companies at some point in time.”
The United States and Canada are among the eight allies not participating, the main reason being “to avoid duplication with existing national innovation efforts,” according to a Carnegie Europe article written by Raquel Jorge Ricart, a policy analyst at Spain’s Elcano Royal Institute.
However, “Canada … announced in a recent defense bill that they want to join the NIF,” Van Weel said. “It would be great if the [United States] would also join because then you would have a North American sub-fund to go around.”
“I think for some countries it’s always easier to see something that’s already up and running and think, ‘OK, well, great. This works, so let me be part of it,’” rather than join the fund initially, he said.
However, NATO’s new initiatives will only succeed if member nations participate in these new processes and invest in the technologies, Ellehuus and Van Weel said.
“One of the challenges with aggregating demand and implementing the vision that’s laid out in the Defense Production Action Plan is that it’s not NATO that owns these processes; it’s individual countries,” Ellehuus said. “So whereas NATO can be a vehicle and a mechanism by which we aggregate demand and drive standardization and drive interchangeability, if the nations aren’t part of that equation and moving in the same direction, we won’t make much progress.”
Similarly for innovation programs such as DIANA, “at the end of the pipeline, NATO doesn’t have the money to buy this stuff, and so we will be reliant on nations to actually write the contracts for these companies,” Van Weel said. “Otherwise, if that doesn’t happen, the initiative will dry up at some point in time because … these innovators want to make money and build their companies. So, I think we still have some work to do in adapting our procurement procedures to such a rapid cycle.”
DIANA is also looking to expand its number of challenges from three to five next year and by 2025 intends to run up to 10 challenges per year, which will require growing the organization and increasing its funding, Hirani-Driver said.
“What I’m really encouraged with is we’re in NATO, which is … traditionally not seen as the beast that moves at the pace of relevance,” she said. “But I think what I’m really heartened to see is actually NATO is taking risks — and setting up DIANA is a risk. So, I think continuing that risk appetite is going to be really, really important.”
Ellehuus said she feels a “new momentum” growing across the alliance for greater collaboration with industry and implementing new processes such as the Defense Production Action Plan.
Similar to how AUKUS — the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States to provide Australia nuclear-powered submarines and collaborate on emerging technologies — has seen the U.S. Congress ease some of the “retransfer and export control regulations within a smaller group of allies and partners, I would like to see some of that transferred to NATO,” Ellehuus said. “Because I do think we have a lot of trust among allies that with a little bit of easing of some of the traditional obstacles to aggregating demand and retransfer, we could really make some progress there.”
Initiatives like DIANA and the NATO Innovation Fund “can ensure that even as we’re still getting collective defense right” in the present, “we’re investing in the capabilities of the future” and thinking about “how these types of capabilities can really help amplify what is a very traditional defensive alliance,” she said.”
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2024/6/28/nato-going-commercial-to-develop-new-tech
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