Report By Julian Lindley-French and David Richards
Wilton Park | October 2023
To view the full report, please visit the Wilton Park Website or download it below.
Introduction
The Future War, Strategy and Technology Conference was specifically designed to complement the work of NATO Chief Scientist Dr Bryan Wells and his team, specifically, the NATO Science & Technology Trends 2023-2043 report by addressing a series of additional policy and strategy questions. What will be future requirements? What impact will emerging and disruptive technologies (EDTs) have on Allied and Partner forces, interoperability, and missions, and in what combination? What new and adaptive force concepts and doctrine will be needed? What political, military and defence-industrial policies and processes will be needed to enable our forces and at what scale? How should democracies conduct warfare with EDTs? What impact will EDTs have on the conflict escalation ladder? How must military innovation evolve to enable commanders and operators to test and experiment with EDTs and accelerate both capability and new concept development? For NATO, how will such developments impact the relationship between Allied Command Operations (ACO) and Allied Command Transformation (ACT)? How best to educate political and senior military leaders to help better prepare them for informed choices on defence policy, strategy and technology? How will EDTs better enable the human dimension of warfare? How have democracies integrated technology in their respective armed forces over the past 120 years? How will command and control and C4ISR change?
To address these questions, Wilton Park and The Alphen Group jointly organised this four-day, invitation only conference, bringing together some 80 leaders, experts, analysts and commentators from public policy and politics, the armed forces, the private sector, and from technology and innovation. Participants came from the democratic world across North America, Europe and Asia.
The conference methodology centred around eight working groups that considered the implications for defence and military strategy of EDTs: the Technology Working Group, Military Strategy and Future Force Working Group; Capabilities Working Group; Industrial Implications and Procurement Working Group; Strategy and Policy Working Group; Ethics and Legal Working Group; and Training and Leader Education Working Group. Finally, the Dreadnought Working Group considered the impact of the fusion of such technologies on future war. The conference considered two phases: now to 2035 and 2035 to 2050. Phase one is likely to see the enabling of the warfighter by such technologies, whilst beyond 2035 (phase two) autonomous action by such technologies is highly likely. These groups met for over six hours and constituted the key mechanism for delivering the conference outcomes.
To view the full report, please visit the Wilton Park Website or download it below.