NATO must learn from Ukraine and modernize

The events in Ukraine, which have the entire world hanging with bated breath for each new intelligence dump and open-source tweet, have proven that NATO remains a relic of the Cold War and needs prolific revisions with regards to its role in trans-Atlantic security.  

The situation in Ukraine has highlighted the areas in which Western competitors will challenge the existing security apparatus — including the hard power of ground forces and domains like cyber and electronic warfare and disinformation. If NATO does not learn from this experience and reform itself to compete in those new categories, this will happen again in the future.  

NATO, of course, is an institution, not a leviathan or a superstate. It embodies the neorealist idea of power politics between states as a balance of power against hegemonic threats, a decidedly un-liberalist endeavor in its own right. Yet NATO also stands as a cooperative arrangement, built on interdependence and shared interests. NATO’s original purpose was to provide an effective counterpunch to the feared invasion of Europe by the Soviet Union while serving as a forum for cooperation and a peaceful Europe.  

What NATO failed to do, however, was deter or prevent Russian aggression in advance of the invasion. Granted, in a dark hour such as this, it marshaled its member states into a collective defense to prevent a more expansive Russian front, although such actions beyond Ukraine were never likely. Moscow’s behavior has been all about Ukraine because NATO and the West offered no incentive to ward off this kind of aggression. This is where NATO’s value needs to be considered: strategies should be revised for it to function as a credible deterrent, not merely a reactionary, ad hoc institution in crisis. As the United States begins the strategic pivot to ‘integrated deterrence’ (admittedly, with a prejudice towards the Indo-Pacific), NATO must critically review its role in failing to prevent aggression in Ukraine and build up its security capabilities in such a manner that it can effectively discourage future conflicts.  

There are many positives to be taken from the tragedy unfolding within Ukraine, the first being that open-source intelligence (a nod to Bellingcat and AuroraIntel in particular) has provided riveting, credible reporting on Russian hybrid activities leading up to the invasion — including false flags, the anticipation of the conventional force intervention and Vladimir Putin’s decision matrix and discrediting disinformation campaigns.  

Second, countering cyber warfare operations from Russia has led to support efforts from Western states in Ukraine working with cyber teams from the U.S., U.K. and the EU to aid in protecting vital infrastructure. Of course, some credit must also go to the non-state realm, where the hacker group Anonymous claims to have attacked Russian state media in response to the Ukraine invasion.  

These avenues are the new paradigm of state-on-state conflict in the international order. The conventional invasion force is the seeming exception to the norm, and the relative lackluster Western response to the build-up of military forces on Ukraine’s border demonstrates that reality. No one reasonably expected that Moscow would order an invasion until late in the game, and the surprisingly inept performance of Russian forces demonstrates why this type of hard power — though still important — is not as foundational as it once was. NATO needs to invest in other methods of competition in order to remain a viable institution for security and cooperation for the future, including cybersecurity, electronic warfare, countering disinformation and proactive deterrence.  

Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg himself said on Feb. 25 that “we are facing a new normal in European security” and that new normal means evolving NATO to fight and deter aggression in new and complex paradigms of strategic competition. It already has demonstrated that it knows how to marshal forces in a traditional manner, now it must develop capabilities in domains that have proven to have significant impacts on the modern battlefield.  

There is some correlation between the performance of Russian military forces and Putin’s historical reliance on cyber and electronic warfare — the presumed effectiveness of the latter would result in easier goings for the former, although Ukrainian resistance has rendered that judgment moot in the past few days. Yet this shows that competitors — those threatening NATO and liberal security institutions writ large — consider these new domains as priorities in achieving political end states, which is why NATO must modernize its panoply of capabilities to deter this kind of aggression in the future.  

NATO cannot forego its conventional hard power institutionalization, something it knows how to do well. But so long as the alliance assumes that future challenges will fall into traditional categories of state competition, failure to harden and diversify new domains of security will result in aggressors like Moscow continuing to test the limits of acceptable behavior.  

Russia is learning difficult lessons right now from its Ukraine incursion, the question is whether or not NATO is learning from this crisis as well.  

Ethan Brown is an 11-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force as a Special Operations Joint Terminal Attack controller. He is currently the senior fellow for Defense Studies at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress, a contributor to the Diplomatic Courier, and has written for the Modern War Institute (West Point) and RealClearDefense. He can be found on Twitter @LibertyStoic.