Internet of Tanks: NATO courts the tech scene - POLITICO Europe

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ĀDAŽI, Latvia — Man down. Send in the robot dogs.

A soldier lay on the ground, far away from his platoon, in a battlefield simulation video. To his aid came Spot, a robot dog, legs whirring as it moved around to assess injuries, direct threats and report its precise location back to base.

Spot, originally created by U.S. firm Boston Dynamics to help out on large industrial sites, is part of a generation of technology that is coming out of the research lab and into the capabilities of armies allied in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The alliance showcased some — including Spot, quantum-safe messaging apps, AI chatbots, drone navigation tools and cloud infrastructure — at its recent 5G Next Generation Technology demo just northeast of Latvian capital Riga in October.

Where once innovations like the internet, the microwave and even duct tape came from within the military and found broader use with the public, today it's the tech industry that is leading the way in transferring technology from homes, work floors and factories back onto the battlefield. Big brands in consumer and enterprise tech like Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft are ramping up their efforts on dual-use technology.

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The internet was created by the military but the tech firms that sprung from it have overtaken armies as "the drivers of innovation,” said Warren Low, an official of NATO’s Allied Command Transformation. "It’s now flipped around where the industries are innovating.”

Tech firms recently played a critical — and public — role in supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia. After Russian tanks invaded the country in February 2022, tech companies were quickly pulled into the conflict. Elon Musk's Starlink offered satellite internet solutions. AWS helped the government remove essential data from Ukraine. Microsoft and Google helped the country fight a deluge of cyberattacks. Many others followed, providing threat intelligence and safe communications.

The war in Ukraine means “there's an appetite now” to invest in the world of defensive security, said David van Weel, NATO’s assistant secretary-general for Emerging Security Challenges.

Venturing into military tech comes with risks for the technology sector. Google and Amazon both faced internal uproar in past years, with staffers openly protesting projects like Project Maven and Project Nimbus for defense services in the U.S. and Israel. Others, like Apple, have treaded carefully with projects in the defense space. At the United Nations, governments have been working on rules to curtail the proliferation of artificial intelligence-powered weapons and killer robots, debating red lines for industry developments of next-generation warfare.

But increasing demand and potentially massive profits have still spurred tech firms small and large to adapt services to cater to the defense market.

Exonicus, a Latvian startup that began in 3D visualizations to help medical students study the human body, has now pivoted to offer a virtual reality trauma simulator to help train soldiers deal with common battlefield injuries, it demonstrated at the demo in Riga.

Or take Amazon Web Services’ Snowball product. The U.S. cloud giant developed the compact gray box — a little larger than an ordinary PC — as a remote-cloud storage solution, but for soldiers, it solves the issue of operating large equipment at a distance as it allows for the transfer of terabytes of data without the high network costs, lag time or security concerns.

"The industry is moving at such speed that defense wants to benefit from modern technology like this," said Neil Beet, director of software development at AWS. "Nothing we've built is bespoke for defense, it's all commercial off-the-shelf technology, which is designed to be interoperable, available at speed and replaceable."

In 2022, the defense alliance set up the NATO Innovation Fund (NIF), a €1 billion venture capital fund designed to fund promising tech in artificial intelligence, space and biotechnology.

In Europe especially, venture capital for companies working in defense and security was scarce, Van Weel said. “Until now a lot of these pension funds, venture capital funds and the European Investment Bank couldn't invest in a company that also worked for defense ... We’ve changed that by putting together a fund that can only invest in companies that have a dual-use earmark, and what we're seeing now is that the market is changing as well.”

Van Weel said NATO is already pushing the European Investment Bank to realize the market opportunities in security and defense.

“Up until a few years ago, defense was definitely not seen as Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG)," he said. “My opinion is that you should actually add a D to ESG and that's defense ... If you don't have security, you can't have ESG.”

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