West risks falling behind its rivals, NATO warns

Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are systematically learning from the war in Ukraine and could erode NATO’s advantages over time unless the alliance adapts faster than they do, a senior NATO military official has warned.

On the sidelines of the NATO Defence Ministers’ meeting, the UK Defence Journal was told that the war was “no longer just the regional war” but had become “a global learning environment”, with the four states not simply watching the conflict but learning from it, supporting one another and exchanging technology in a way the official said was “increasingly systematic”.

The official set out how that cooperation worked in practice, saying Iran provided drones, ammunition, explosives and technology, North Korea supplied artillery systems, missiles and personnel, and China provided microelectronics, machinery and assistance that enabled Russia’s defence industry, with Russia in turn sharing technology and battlefield lessons with its partners.

This led to what the official described as a question that was “not a rhetorical question”, namely whether the alliance was learning more than its adversaries, warning that “if our adversaries can observe, adapt, and scale faster than we can”, then the advantage of NATO’s current capabilities would erode over time.

The lessons of Ukraine were not Ukraine’s alone, the official argued, but “modern warfare lessons” that applied in Europe, in the Indo-Pacific and wherever future conflict might occur, in a battlefield where decision cycles were compressing, unmanned systems were proliferating and electronic warfare had become foundational, with adaptation itself now a capability in its own right.

Every Ukrainian lesson had been learned under combat conditions and every innovation developed under pressure while the country fought for national survival, the official said, concluding that the alliance’s responsibility was “to learn from those lessons before we are forced to learn them ourselves”.