NATO has announced a new agreement to boost cooperation with Ukraine in the field of innovation, according to a summary published this week.
The NATO-Ukraine Innovation Cooperation Roadmap, endorsed at the recent Washington Summit, aims to enhance collaboration and innovation efforts between NATO and Ukraine.
The agreement outlines five key objectives:
- Helping meet Ukraine’s urgent needs through innovative solutions
- Strengthening Ukraine’s innovation system and making it more resilient
- Enhancing cooperation between NATO’s and Ukraine’s innovation networks
- Sharing best practices on Ukrainian technologies and tactics
- Bolstering NATO’s military innovation and technological change
The roadmap seeks to unite a diverse array of stakeholders, including entrepreneurs, technology companies, venture capitalists, students, researchers, and defence innovation agencies. The goal is to address Ukraine’s immediate challenges and transform them into successes on the battlefield.
By serving as a central platform, NATO say that it aims to facilitate Ukraine’s communication of its technological needs, encourage innovation, and invite both public and private sector contributions to meet those needs.
The agreement also promotes stronger ties through initiatives like prize challenges, hackathons, and other collaborative activities. For instance, the first-ever Defence Innovators Forum was launched in June, bringing together over 450 start-ups, investors, and government officials to tackle real-world challenges.
This initiative is, say the Alliance, expected to unlock Ukraine’s innovation potential and ensure that both NATO and Ukraine can find innovative solutions to operational challenges.
From what I’ve been reading, what Ukraine really needs is more a reformation of their staff and senior command corps than anything else; there is far too much inconsistency in quality between units and it is (literally) killing them.
It’s all very well complaining about NATO superiority complex and assuming that we know better etc. etc. But I’d respond in two ways:
It is very clear that there are very high performing units (3rd Assault, 82nd and 79th Airborne), often with western equipment and more NATO-style command and training, who perform very highly. There are also plenty of very average units, and some very poor units, whose troops are not receiving in-unit training, where commanders do not prepare defensive positions or seem to have any kind of expectation that they may be attacked, and who conduct similarly wasteful tactical attacks as the Russians do- with similar results. There will be inconsistency between units in any army, but not at this level in any NATO military I would wager. That alone is justification for a reform of the higher levels of the Ukrainian military.
For all the back and forth about whether NATO strategy and tactics are applicable in Ukraine, and how we shouldn’t expect Ukraine to fight like NATO, I’d also point out that NATO-style strategy (which is really just western allies WW2 strategy with updated tech and capabilities) has a far better track record for success in conflict than the Soviet/Russian style that Ukraine also uses. That’s not superiority thinking, that’s really a objective statement. Not just against inferior forces either: the Korean War was pretty much a peer conflict, and was fought with the tech of the day in a combined arms style; in Vietnam, the US never really lost a conventional fight with the NVA; the Falklands war ended up being pretty much peer, given the extended distances that Britain’s forces had to operate at. Of course, tech has changed, and not all tools in the full NATO toolkit are available to Ukraine. But the key principles of combined arms, delegated authority, inter-unit communication, inter-service communication, honest and accurate self assessment, are fully applicable.
We don’t need to be apologetic about what we have in terms of the quality and consistency of training within NATO; we need to listen to feedback from Ukraine on what particular tactics work and don’t etc. but the core fundamentals need to be drummed into Ukrainian senior command and downwards. Or they’ll keep losing more people than they need, keep having to fight fires with the few elite units they have, keep losing equipment and ground unnecessarily, and the war will drag on longer than the west has an interest in sustaining it…
Ukraine us sacrificing lives defending Europe, NATO must shoot down missiles and drones over Ukraine. NATO should be sending engineers to construct defences on Ukraines borders