Advanced technologies in the face of war

Dr Patricia Lewis

Welcome, everybody, to this members’ event called Advanced Technologies in the Face of War. My name is Patricia Lewis. I’m the Research Director here for International Security at Chatham House, and I’m delighted that we have such a brilliant panel to talk about this increasingly important issue, although I don’t think it’s ever not been important when it comes to war. I think technology’s always been a major feature of this human enterprise that we call war or violent conflict.

I just want to set a few house rules to begin. First of all, this event is on the record, it’s not under the Chatham House Rule, and it is being recorded, just so that you know. We would ask that you submit questions throughout the event as they pop up in your brain, using the Q&A function that you should see on your screens. The – what we might do, if you wish, is call on you to ask that question, or, if you prefer, I can read out the question, so, if you could please just let me know whether you’d like to be called upon or whether you would like to – me to read it out, that would be helpful. And then, you know, if you want to share any observations or comments, please use the chat function, so, please don’t use the chat function for Q&A, but do use it for other comments, and use the Q&A box just for questions, right? So, you’ve got a – you can make comments but don’t put that in the Q&A, and vice versa, and that will be very helpful then, and if you do get confused, just copy and paste and pop it in the right box.

And this whole session’s going to take an hour, so, I’d better stop talking so that we maximise our panellists. So, what we’re going to be looking at in this is really a whole set of questions connected with the way that technologies work in war, how – whether war can be won, as a result of advantages in technologies. Are we seeing wars at the moment being used as testing grounds for different types of technologies, and what have we learnt about the war that Russia is conducting in Ukraine, about modern warfare and how NATO Alliance should respond to this, and whether other parts of the world, such as AUKUS and Five Eyes, etc., how do we, sort of, lever those aspects of things to help us with the sharing of technologies and IP, and the creation of opportunities for new technologies?

And we have this new facility now, DIANA, the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic, which is hosted by the UK and Estonia, by NATO, which brings together academia, industry and government, and how will that operate in this whole environment? And we’ve got, as I said, an amazing panel to talk about this. So, I’m going to start with Elisabeth Braw, who is, I’m sure, well-known to many of you; Senior Fellow in Foreign and Defense Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, and Elisabeth and I first knew each other when Elisabeth was working at RUSI in London. She is an expert on technology and international security, so, Elisabeth, over to you.

Elisabeth Braw

Thank you very much, Patricia, and a reminder to everybody that Patricia is a phenomenal expert in her own right, she forgot to mention that, but it doesn’t need mentioning.

So, I remember when I was a – in a previous life, when I was a Technology Correspondent based in San Francisco, which was a phenomenal experience in the first decade of this century, and I went to visit lots of companies, because that’s what you do when you’re a Technology Correspondent based in San Francisco, and they all had amazing innovations. And I remember, for example, visiting Twitter when it was a company of nine guys sitting at computers, and I thought, “This outfit has no business model, why would anybody want to share just random thoughts on the internet?” And clearly I – my commercial skills are not that great, because I was obviously wrong, but lots of companies and lots of brilliant ideas, parking apps, couch-surfing apps, you name it, but nothing to do with and no apps relating to national security. And in fact, as you know, the tech community has often been reluctant to involve itself with national security because the – these brilliant minds have fantastic ideas, fantastic insights, but they don’t know much about national security, because how are they supposed to know about national security when nobody has ever introduced them to not just the fundamentals of national security, but the threats we face today?

And as a result we got things like Google famously refusing to work on Project Maven for the Pentagon, or rather, Google’s Engineers refusing to work on it. So, Google has since reversed course, but it’s important, I think, to bear in mind that while that was open resistance to working with the Pentagon, that’s an extreme take on where most people are, which is that they’re not really that interested because they don’t know much about national security.

So, my point is that there is an enormous opportunity for Ministries of Defence, and indeed other government agencies, to use a tired phrase, to engage with the tech community, to invite them to tell them about the threats, and specific threats that face our societies, so that they can then, against that background, apply their brilliant minds to what can be done about it. And, of course, most of those applications and those threats, the solutions to those threats have nothing to do with developing apps for the infantry.

There is a lot you can do, even if you are a pacifist, and so, there is enormous opportunity there for education of the tech community, not just in Silicon Valley, and the Pentagon is obviously trying to educate now through its office there, but the tech community elsewhere as well, including in London, and there is, of course jHub, which does fantastic work, but that’s an outfit specifically associated with the Ministry of Defence, but what about all the other tech types in London?

And on top of that, VCs, which are so crucial; if Western governments we to educate VCs about national security threats, they would then also keep an eye on potential solutions and they would fund them and clearly the government would then have to get in at some point to benefit from them, but VCs can be an ally as well. So, with that, over to you, Patricia.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thank you very much, Elisabeth, indeed, for bringing that. It’s hard to remember Twitter with nine guys to the internet, but I guess, you know, Facebook, look how that started and look where it’s ending, and indeed, where will Twitter end? But it’s really interesting to think about that, and how we can engage the new wave of tech people who are up and coming, and with that I’ll turn to Marina. Marina Favaro, who is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy in – which is based in Hamburg. I don’t know if you are right now, Marina, but certainly the Institute is, and you were previously at the London-based think tank Basic, and also at the Centre for Science and Security Studies at King’s College. So, Marina, over to you.

Marina Favaro

Great, thanks, Patricia. Yeah, thank you so much for including me in today’s event. So, in my brief remarks today, I think I’ll try to make three main points, so, I’ll first share some of the high-level findings from my technology prioritisation research, which aims to specify which emerging technologies we should focus our limited attention and resources to.

Second, I’ll argue that emerging technologies have ushered in three changes to the course of the war in Ukraine, and third and finally, I’ll address the rising costs of innovation and the extent to which even a joint NATO effort, such as DIANA, can create the requisite economies of scale.

So, taking these in turn, I suspect that I was invited to participate in this panel off the back of my technology prioritisation work over the past few years. My motivation for doing these projects over the years has been identifying which emerging technologies create what kinds of impacts on international peace and security. And the practical necessity for prioritisation is that states and alliances such as NATO don’t have unlimited resources and energy to invest in all emerging technologies equally.

So, my most recent study of this type was published just a few weeks ago by the IFSH, where I work. I’m based at the University of Hamburg, a Patricia said, and this study set out to characterise and prioritise a set of 12 emerging technologies, according to their future impact on international stability and human security out to 2040. And because it’s so forward-looking, the methods that I use fall under the umbrella of futures and foresight methods, and they rely heavily on expert elicitation, so, that means that the findings bear the caveat, “experts believe.”

But essentially, this study found that experts view anti-satellite capabilities and AI-enhanced information operations as having the most negative or weakening effect on international stability and human security, and indeed experts actually anticipate that all 12 technologies surveyed would weaken either international stability or human security, and half of the technologies would predominantly weaken both.

The study did also identify which technologies represent opportunities to strengthen international stability and human security, and experts said that AI and quantum technologies for C4ISR purposes, so, command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, were the most likely to strengthen international stability and human security. And the, kind of, “so what” here in the DIANA context is that there’s this range of emerging technologies that might confer new capabilities to NATO, but these technologies will have varying effects on global stability and security, which may undermine NATO’s strategic objectives. So, these considerations should be included in the selection of technology as a focus for DIANA.

There’s a lot I could say about this project, but I’ll go onto my next point in the interests of time. So, the impact of emerging technologies on the war in Ukraine is not straightforward, I think, as we can all agree. So, on the one hand, this war has been quite conventional and exhibited a high degree of continuity with warfare of previous decades, or even centuries, perhaps, and in the public domain there’s not a lot of evidence of Russia demonstrating the technologies that it’s speculated to be developing for military applications.

But on the other hand, emerging technologies have created an opportunity for new actors to play a key role in conflict, new crisis escalation vectors and new timelines on which effects can be felt. So, just to briefly go through what I mean by each of these. So, when I talk about new actors, I’m thinking about the tech companies that have acted as force multipliers to the Ukrainian war effort, and one of the reasons for this is that several of the emerging technologies involved in this war are commercial, off-the-shelf technologies that were developed by the private sector, but have dual-use applicability.

Second, when I talk about new escalation vectors, I’m thinking specifically about social media and how that’s acted as a new vector for information dissemination, both true and false. And finally, on the new timescales and effects, I’m thinking about, whereas the immediate impact of emerging technologies on stability and security can be discerned with some confidence, the cumulative and long-term effects of emerging technologies are somewhat unknown, and I’m thinking specifically here about the Russian use of deepfake technology, and I’ll just seed this for conversation, we can come back to it later.

Finally, I want to make a third and final point, which is that in the face of rising innovation costs, no government can go it alone when it comes to science and technology, and this necessitates a high-level collaboration between states, which is a justification for undertaking DIANA at the NATO level. But I think the question remains, for me at least, and I hope maybe Rob can answer this in his remarks later, but whether even NATO can afford the rising cost of innovation.

So, I’ve heard some commentators say that DIANA is NATO’s version of the US DARPA programme. DARPA has been famously difficult, some would say impossible to replicate, due to its significant appetite for failure and its enormous budget. When I’m thinking about budget specifically, I saw that the NATO Innovation Fund is expected to have a budget of approximately US $68 million annually, whereas DARPA boasts a budget of approximately US $3.5 billion annually, which means that DIANA would have less than 2% of the annual budget of DARPA, and we can also assume that there might be higher implementation costs, across a diverse set of states than just for the US alone.

I’ll leave that for discussion as well, but in the interests of time, I’ll stop here and then look forward to, kind of, having a discussion on this. Thank you.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thank you very much indeed, Marina, and some really challenging points there that we can come back to in our discussion. So, Rob Murray is our next speaker. He’s a Senior Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. He has over many – well, two-and-a-half decades, he’s worked at NATO, he’s worked at – he was in the British Army, but most significantly, I think, for us today, he was the person who really conceived and led on the successful negotiations for the creation of DIANA. So, Rob, why don’t you begin with telling us about that and where you see its role, and maybe answer Marina’s challenge over the billions versus millions?

Rob Murray

Yeah, thanks, Patricia, and good morning, good afternoon to everybody. Yeah, so, maybe I can take a slight step back and just provide a little bit more context with regards to why, you know, why DIANA, why even, you know, go about trying to address some of these issues. And fundamentally, certainly the way we saw it when I was working at NATO, when I was running the Innovation Team there, emerging and disruptive technologies were really, and are, I would suggest, starting to shape how we think about national security, and that’s a big difference from the 20th Century and the Cold War, whereby national security arguably shaped a lot of emerging and disruptive technologies.

And a core reason for that was because, and I think it was, you know – Marina touched on it, was because of the financing from the public sector, particularly in the United States, and that really, you know, excuse the pun, took off during the Sputnik moment, whereby you then saw huge swathes of federal, particularly in the United States, investment going into all sorts of new technologies. So, the fact, you know, that we can have this sort of conversation today, using a lot of the technologies that enable all of this, are really driven from that era, and of course, it takes an awful long time, decades to commercialise a lot of that.

There’s some construction work going on in the building, which sounds a little bit like gunfire, if anyone can hear that, but don’t worry, it’s not.

But anyway, the point being, is that during the 20th Century that public sector money has diminished, and private sector money has increased, but of course, incentives are very, very different between the two. So, the real question is, you know, how do we then start to leverage a lot of, you know, different flavours of finance to bring about emerging and disruptive technologies that can support national security, and noting that actually, they’re influencing them? And actually, you know, this is quite critical, because our societies are becoming very used to leveraging and having at their fingertips technologies such as artificial intelligence, when people go to watch Netflix or shop on Amazon or, you know, go on whatever it might be. And therefore there’s an assumption that our militaries and our national security apparatus have the same sorts of technologies at their fingertips, and that is a false assumption.

So, the point being is that it’s quite critical to put in place the structures that can enable the amazing Engineers and Technologists and potential that exist within the 30 – gusting 32 NATO nations to actually leverage all of that, so, that’s the rationale for DIANA. And I would suggest that, you know, we’re not in a technological development race with China, and we’re not in that race, I don’t believe. And when you look at the amount of – you know, the market capitalisation of our markets, when you look at the amount of venture capital money going into technology, when you look at where Nobel Prizes are won, you know, there is a significant proportion of that across the NATO landscape. It may be highly concentrated, but nonetheless, it’s not about technological development, that is not the race we are in.

The race we are in is a technological adoption race, and there’s a big difference, and it will be those with the most agile bureaucracies that are going to win that race, and therefore, what DIANA is trying to do and bring about is creating really the space whereby government, academia and the private sector can actually come together and look to really, you know, accelerate, I mean, it’s called – it’s an Accelerator for a reason, accelerate the development of these technologies and bring about the market opportunities for 32 different countries, and I can talk a little bit more about that, you know, later, as to – actually, one of the, sort of, jewels in the DIANA crown is the Rapid Acquisition Service, and I’ll sow that seed for a little bit later on.

In terms of the NATO Innovation Fund, that’s slightly different. That’s basically a venture capital fund and so that €1 billion Marina referred to, and that’s for investment, which will fun – which will function, rather, similarly to the model of In-Q-Tel, for those that are familiar with that, which was the United States’ venture capital fund, which really spun out from the CIA, and now supports the whole US intelligence community. And so, the idea there is not necessarily to invest lots and lots of money in new companies and new technologies, but actually – and lead investment rounds, but actually, it’s to shine a light on those areas within the NATO countries, particularly in Europe, but not exclusively, which, quite frankly, VC money, of which the world – you know, 80% of the world’s VC money resides in the US, it simply doesn’t find its way to Europe. And there’s reasons why, and we can unpack those, but it just doesn’t find its way there. So, the – this is the rationale; it’s, you know, shining a light on amazing opportunities that would otherwise not exist.

So, perhaps I’ll pause there, and we can unpack some of those other bits and pieces as we get into the Q&A.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thanks very much indeed, Rob, that was really helpful, to get some of that background and also, I think, this issue of the speed of procurement, the speed of adoption is really critical. Nicholas Nelson is our next speaker, and final speaker this morning. Oh sorry, this morning, lunchtime, evening, wherever you are, I should say. He is a Senior Fellow for Emerging Tech and Policy at the Center for Policy Analysis, and he’s worked in the past at the – in various private sector companies, including in venture capital, and is also a Senior Technology Advisor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, so, welcome, Nicholas, we look forward to what you have to say.

Nicholas Nelson

Yeah, thank you very much and thank you for the invitation to speak today. As Dr Lewis alluded to, I’ve spent about the last 16 years working across the aerospace, defence and technology sector, ranging from the intelligence community in the US to various roles in management consulting, as well as a Director at a multi-billion-dollar aerospace, defence and tech company, and more recently advising and investing in dual-use and defence tech start-ups.

In my capacity at CEPA, where I serve as the emerging – the CFL for Emerging Tech and Policy, I recently co-authored with my colleague, Retired Admiral James Foggo, a piece on this very subject, so, I would encourage you all to go out and have a look if you get a chance.

Overall, I’m looking forward to the conversation today, and I really hope to bring the industry view to the table, particularly as much of the discussion to date has largely been driven by policymakers and Civil Servants, but industry, particularly the segment driving most of the recent defence and really dual-use technology innovation writ large are venture-backed start-ups, and these have traditionally not been represented within the broader NATO and national governments and military ecosystems. And this has resulted really in a defence innovation base that lags significantly behind, and this is particularly the case outside of the US, and to a larger extent, the United Kingdom, because out with of these two examples, broadly speaking, NATO, the European Union and the member states have excluded, either by design or omission, these entities, and it really shows.

And so, I want to start off by saying there are a couple – I’m highlighting really a couple of good metrics that evaluate this. First and arguably the best is the number of unicorns, which are venture-backed start-ups valued over $1 billion, and centaurs, which are venture-backed start-ups valued over $100 million. In the US, within defence unicorns and dual-use tech unicorns alone, you have over a dozen, with dozens more of centaurs that have been created, most over the last five or six years.

Conversely, in the UK, depending on how one defines it, you really only have one true defen – dual-use tech unicorn and one defence tech centaur. Continental Europe, even more concerningly, does not have a single unicorn and only one rather nascent centaur, and that’s not due to a lack of talent, you know, there are more STEM graduates in Europe every year than all of North America combined. There are a lot of other factors that go in here, but before I, kind of, broach those, I want to highlight the second metric I alluded to, which is [inaudible – 23:38] gap in Europe, and that’s the venture capital gap.

In the US, you have over 14 micro-VC funds, so, those under 100 million of assets under management, investing either predominantly or solely in defence and dual use tech, along with our array of multi-billion-dollar VC firms, which are household names, so to speak, in the industry, such as Founders Fund, Andreessen, Lux Capital, 8VC; the list goes on. And these funds have either entered the dual-use and defence tech sector or even expressly founded, in the case of the former, two – because of demand signals, these are from entrepreneurs, military or government.

This has not been matched at all in Europe, and at present there is not a single successfully raised fund in Europe investing predominantly in the defence or dual-use sectors. And this is again, due to array of factors, which I look forward to discussing today, but won’t get to right now, in the interest of time.

Finally, I know the questions and conversations today are really centred on technology, but with the private sector, partially venture-backed start-ups, driving R&D, it’s important to highlight the nuance that it is not NATO member states and their governments that are creating the technology, but businesses in these member states. It will be the member states’ rule to facilitate the understanding of military use cases, while creating attractive investment opportunities for private investors, and becoming good customers to ultimately capitalise on this technology created within these venture-backed start-ups.

Therefore, when we talk about dual-use technology and DIANA, it should be focusing on companies and technological support, and as such, we should not lose sight of the fact that fundamentally, as an accelerator, DIANA really should be geared towards businesses and catalysing the broader allied defence and innovation base, particularly in Europe. As to date these existing efforts have been either too Byzantine, disjointed or have not met intent, or even in some cases not paid their bills on time. ‘Cause, fundamentality, overall, a bureaucrat can wait for a new framework or a new authorities; businesses can’t. So, thank you, and I look forward to the discussion today.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thank you, Nicholas, thank you very much indeed. So, lots and lots of questions coming out from these presentations. So, one of the things I wanted to do is just take a minute to step back and just think about collaboration and competition. So, this is primarily about NATO countries, and what I’m hearing mostly from this is primarily about US/UK, but presumably, we’re also including in that other NATO countries that spring to mind, such as Germany, France, Italy, Norway, etc. But who else should we be collaborating with in this? We have AUKUS as a mechanism, but we have also Five Eyes, we have collaborations in the Pacific, for example, with the US-Japan, US-Korea. Is there a, kind of, an effort of collaboration where the numbers would start to make a difference? Because, in thinking about who our competitors are, right, who are they, who are our competitors in this regard, what are we really worrying about here?

We’re using the framework to talk about Ukraine, and we’ve seen the use of Russian capability in Ukraine, and it’s not been terribly impressive, right, for various reasons, so – and they’ve had to buy in from Iran, for example. So, who are our competitors in the sense of lagging behind, in the sense of not being innovative enough, in the sense of, you know, procurement not being fast enough? What’s the driver here, what’s the big issue?

So, Elisabeth, I’m coming to you first, so, I’m just going to go to everybody to ask for that view. Elisabeth.

Elisabeth Braw

Yeah, so, our main competitor in science and technology innovation is clearly China and unfortunately, they’ve been playing an unfair game for a number of years, through their access to phenomenal seats of higher learning where, as I think everybody on this call knows, they’ve been able to access and tap into world-class research and science and technology innovation, even before those ideas and that innovation was commercialised in start-ups and spin-outs, and spin-offs and spin-outs, and that is really a Gordian knot to solve, because we do need that collaboration with international Researchers, and including Chinese ones and, on top of that, we need universities, especially in the UK, where – and perhaps also in the US, where tuition fees, at all levels, from undergraduate to PhD, where they contribute income to universities’ funding. So, it really is a very difficult situation.

I thought for a while that may be the answer would be to let students, from undergraduate to PhD and even then at the Researcher, but the paid level, student – such people from countries we consider strategic rivals; we would let them study at our universities, but only in the humanities. But I’m not sure that would be – there would be a lot of interest in doing that; the interest is clearly in science and technology innovation.

Then the other thing is, with regards to VCs, so, there are some things happening. So, for example, I’m on the advisory board of a new UK VC that has managed to raise phenomenal amounts of money in a short period of time, Gallos Technologies, but we – the UK is clearly not as well-set-up as the US yet. But the challenge there is also, I think, in legislation, so, European countries have been passing new FDI screening legislation recently, but if you ban – or if you introduce more scrutiny of FDI, then the countries or the companies that want to access your best companies will do so at a much earlier stage, meaning before those companies are commercially active, or commercially – well, commer – operating commercially. So, they will invest at the start-up stage, which is why so many Chinese VCs are interested in UK start-ups, and they have all these show-and-tell events at Oxbridge and so forth, and what do we do about that?

The US has introduced legislation, formal legislation, to try to eliminate such tapping of our best ideas. But whenever you introduce new legislation, the other side comes up with more innovative ways of accessing your ideas. I don’t have an answer, but it is worth looking at the formal legislation, which is at least an attempt to regulate the access that foreign – or VCs from countries considered strategic rivals have to our best ideas.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thanks, Elisabeth. Have we got any reaction to that from the panel? And also, maybe, Rob, you could talk a little bit about, you know, when you were setting up DIANA, how much you thought about the other collaborations outside NATO and how to bring those in.

Rob Murray

Yeah, absolutely. So, NATO obviously has its allies, and anything to do with partners, so, those other nations that are not NATO allies, but are, you know, deemed friendly and so forth, is always quite tricky. Always difficult to fold in partners, and that’s for Politics, with a capital P, there’s a political reason as to why that’s the case, or reasons, I should say, plural. And so, it was thought of with DIANA that the way that, you know, the way it was, kind of, put together was, “Alright, let’s get it going with regard to allies to begin with, but let’s not exclude the opportunity to work with partners once, you know, once we get going.” So, that was, kind of, the compromise that was found with regards to DIANA.

But I think, just stepping back slightly, with regards to alliances and more broadly, away from DIANA for a moment, with regards to new technologies and development, I think it’s those countries that share one’s values. And I think, you know – and that needs to be where any sort of meaningful multinational effort with regards to new technological development needs to be thinking of focusing on, and about, you know, shared values. And that immediately unpacks a very thorny question as to, “Okay, well, what are” – you know, if I take the UK as an example, “what are our own values, you know, as a country and, you know, who shares those, and what does that, sort of, Venn diagram look like?”

And when you, kind of, extrapolate that over multiple countries, it gets quite complicated, quite fast. So, I think that notion, though, of shared values is an important one, as to who you want to work with and collaborate with. In terms of competitors, I would actually say, and this is perhaps slightly philosophical, I would say that the way in which we think about our economic model at the moment is a problem, and so, what do I mean by that? I mean that this, kind of, you know, the Milton Friedman, neoliberalism type of approach to economics, where it’s all about maximising shareholder value; that doesn’t fly at the moment, you know, and I’d say that model is dying.

Why? Because, you know, there’s too much inequality in societies that have adopted that, and it’s not sustainable, and so, what does that mean with regards to the topic that we’re talking about? Well, it means that those venture capitalists that want to maximise their return; you know, that, to me, in the world of defence and dual-use technologies, that doesn’t fly either, and so, it’s – we’re going to see some rewiring, I think, of different types of limited partners, those people that pony up the money for venture capitalists. We’re going to see different types of LPs, who are actually comfortable with what I’ll say as “optimising” their returns, as opposed to trying to maximise their returns.

And it comes back to this notion about values and about what’s important, and so, understanding the flavour of money with regards to all of this activity, and also the broader economic model within which it sits, is quite critical, because you can’t compete with China, let’s say, and simply the state-backed activities that they have and the resources that they have, when you’re doing it basically, a capitalist approach and a capitalist model. But the way in which we work at the moment where it’s all about, you know, maximised return; you know, that is going to change in the world of deep technology and emerging and disruptive technology for defence and security, it’s – otherwise, it’s not sustainable.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thanks very much, Rob. Marina, do you have anything you’d like to add to this discussion?

Marina Favaro

Yeah, I think I wanted to come to Rob’s point about these value-driven trade partnerships, but I think also in, kind of, the work that I’ve done looking at the UK’s SNT, kind of, strategy, they’ve got this “own, collaborate, access” model, which is – and the determinant of which kind of type of partnership you might have internationally are national security concerns, sovereignty concerns, prosperity concerns. So, whether the UK’s going to own the entire end-to-end process itself, collaborate with, you know, one other state, or other states or an alliance like NATO, or access someone else’s innovation would be determined on those grounds.

And I think some of the interesting questions here are, you know, on which sides of technology innovations are we happy to collaborate with states with whom we don’t share these values? So, on cancer research, for example, would we be happy to be working with China? What about on climate change, which may, on the face of it, look like it could be this benign, sort of, area of collaboration because it’s in everyone’s shared interests? But, on the other hand, when you look at the innovations themselves, you see that there’s real dual-use potential for some of these things as well. So, I think that’s a really interesting set of questions on this.

And then, to Rob’s point earlier when, in his initial remarks, when he was talking about how we’re not in a technology development race. Actually, the IFHS study that we just published, kind of, found evidence to the contrary of that, which was that we – part of the study was looking at these technology development trajectories for these 12 emerging technologies, for the US, China and Russia. And we were amazed to see how neck-and-neck experts thought that these three states were on these 12 military applications of emerging technologies.

You know, even the – we did the data collection before Russia’s renewed attack on Ukraine, and we were amazed to see how little of that was actually borne out in the Ukraine war as well. So, there does seem to be some evidence to the contrary of that, but I also think that there’s – there are flaws in expert judgement and we need to, kind of, be – have a lot of humility when we talk about these things. Thanks.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thanks very much, Marina. Nick, Nicholas, do you have anything you want to – and particularly the challenge perhaps on the liberal economic model being unsustainable?

Nicholas Nelson

Yeah, I would say the biggest thing that I would foot stomp here or at least really want to highlight, and I’ve heard it at a lot of panels like this, and really throughout the industry, that industry needs to learn more, or, “Oh, we need to educate them.” At the end of the day – and/or “we need to fund – the model has to change or, you know, we can’t work with them.” I fundamentally disagree with that point on a very basic level.

We can say all that stuff at the end of the day, but if we actually look back, that still presupposes that governments and militaries are the 800-pound gorilla in the room, that they can drive R&D priorities, and that has not been the case and our parity concerns since 1990.

In fact, right now, as of last year, we’re looking at about 5.2x R&D spending between commercial industry and government. So, given that, is it really industry that needs to change? And you can make some arguments there, but saying that we need to fundamentally change the model of how venture capital invests; you can make an argument there, but I think that’s also down the pipe of how we’ve gotten failed initiatives like Trusted Capital in the US and others, that fundamentally don’t understand the private sector, and have not taken their concerns or their inputs into consideration earlier in the stage.

Fundamentally, we are probably never going to, nor do I believe we should, match China dollar-for-dollar and be suckered with some state or economy or government-driven efforts R&D. What we do have the benefit of is, you know, our markets and the dynamisms thereof, so, what we should really be focused on is attracting and incentivising investors and start-ups to engage with government in defence, having the mechanisms to provide them funding and monetary grants or indeed contracts, which are most important, and picking those winners and losers early and then keeping them, retaining them in the ecosystem.

Right now we talk a lot about how, at the very highest levels of government, military, great initiatives and how we’re going to do this, but that is not borne out with the action office or mid-levels, nor is the incentive structure, particularly in Europe, but also, I would argue, in a lot of US innovation ecosystems and the UK, borne out by actual action and programmes. There’s still a fun – no matter how far we get, there’s still a fundamental misunderstanding from particularly the Civil Service side of what the actual drivers and pain points are for venture-backed start-ups and investors, and we’ll continue to have wasted efforts if we keep not connecting the dots, not actually putting that into practice.

One of the things that we sought to do on our CEPA paper that we released about three weeks ago was actually go talk to the start-ups, talk to the venture capital investors out there, because what the pain points that were perceived by Civil Servants and military leaders that start-up investors had were not really the case. They’ve talked to a handful, and this goes back to one of Elisabeth’s points. I’ve seen a lot of new, and I saw this happen a lot in the US, a lot of new venture funds out there that say they are raising money, or have raised x-number of dollars, but in the US you can go verify that with the SEC. There’re not similar mechanisms in the UK or Europe that do that.

In fact my colleagues over at the European Venture Capital Network, great folks, David and Andreas, if anyone gets the chance to check them out, they’ve done a whole series about how people are claiming to have raised a lot of money, and it not being validated, and that’s another, separate issue that we really need to address from the European side.

So, for those two points, really, understanding the incentivisation and the pain points from the horse’s mouth, I think, critical. But also at the same time, on the, you know, when they go to engage venture capital, make sure you’re talking to the right people and not people who are just saying, they’ve, you know, raised money, and that kind of thing. I think those are three really key challenges we have going forward.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thank you very much indeed, Nicholas. I’m going to turn now to questions and I’m going to call on Patrick next, but before Patrick speaks, so, just prepare yourself, Patrick, I’m just going to read out two questions that I think have – are connected. One is from Lincoln, who says, “Do you think that we’re generally moving to a safer world due to technological development, and if not, then does technological development inherently pose dangers to peace and stability?”

And Byron’s second question, which was specifically for Marina, but I think it can apply to everybody, which is, sort of, the other side of this question; “Has there ever been a technology that was not seen as destabilising, and therefore having negative impacts on perceptions of security?” So, Marina, I’m going to start with you because that was addressed to you, and then anyone else who wishes to address that question or an aspect of it, just put your hand up in the screen and I’ll see you. So, Marina.

Marina Favaro

I wish I saw this question earlier, because I think I’d like to mull it over a little bit more, but I agree that there’s always this, kind of – Lee Vinsel, who’s a STS Scholar, calls it criti-hype about emerging technologies. So, people looking back and saying, “Oh, my gosh, the bicycle is going to be a terrible innovation, it’s this emerging technology that we need to be very afraid of,” all these sorts of things, and there’s all these ridiculous examples of this.

So, I agree that there is this, kind of, maybe penchant for a techno-pessimism and, you know, people wanting to see the destabilising effects of emerging technologies, perhaps especially in the security and defence context, where yeah, it would be really shaking up something that is very foundational to our lives and our, you know, prosperity and ability to live. And so, I agree that a lot of technologies are seen as maybe primarily destabilising; this came out in our report as well; but I do think that we were also talking about emerging technologies in military and – or in security and defence context specifically, and so, you know, as I said before, conferring capabilities, new capabilities to NATO would likely have, kind of, destabilising effects in other ways.

Yeah, I think, I honestly think that I need to have more of a think on this, maybe the other panellists can come in on this but, yeah, I think I’ll take this home with me. Thank you.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thanks very much indeed, Marina. Nicholas, you want to come in.

Nicholas Nelson

Yeah, certainly. First, I would agree with a lot of what Marina laid out. I think there’s always a rush to condemn any new technologies, potentially destabilising or upsetting the applecart, so to speak. From a macro standpoint, I say this in my own personal capacity, I guess my question would be, does it really matter?

We tend to get wrapped round the axel in debating, you know, these things, whether something’s going to – “Oh, is this going to be destabilising and what are the implications of this?” And it’s a conversation worth having but, to a certain extent, when we end up having these things. It’s almost like shutting the barn door after the horse is already out. These capabilities are coming online whether we like it, regardless or not, and we particularly have two adversaries, arguably three right now, with different emerging and disruptive technology capabilities that are going to develop them, regardless of what our own ethical influence are.

Now, I’m not saying we should push those off to the side entirely. We also have to be cognisant of any delays or trade-offs we’re going to make to ensure that we are comfortable with how things operate, are going to cede ground to adversary capability development, and that’s something that we don’t articulate, I think, often enough, at least in public forums. I know there’s a lot of concerns around that and I, you know, fully welcome, kind of, the ethical dialogue. But at the end of the day, my question again to, I guess, the audience, or the questioner, is “Does it really matter?” ‘Cause they’re going to get developed, so, we just have to understand that it’s going to be kind – somewhat a moving target, and really push on with it, but I know that’ll be slightly controversial in this organisation.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thanks very much, Nicholas. So, I’m going to now turn to Patrick, who’s going to ask his question for himself. Are you able to show your camera, as well, Patrick, or are we just going to have that lovely avatar?

Patrick

I can try to share my camera, but I don’t have a – I can’t see the button for it, unfortunately. I don’t know if – maybe you have to…

Dr Patricia Lewis

Well, don’t worry, then.

Patrick

I don’t think you’ve enabled the video function. Thank you so much to the panellists, I’m really enjoying this. So, I’m a VC who invests in deep frontier technologies, mainly in the UK, but also in continental Europe, and my question applies more to Europe than the US, because I, you know, I, kind of, agree with both Rob and Nicholas, in some ways, even though Nicholas, I know, you disagree with Rob, in that the US – the venture capital industry in the US is far more developed and there’s a lot more, kind of, integration between the defence community and the VC community in the US, I think there’s a big difference.

Whereas in Europe we don’t have that so much. So, anyway, my question is, how do we, especially Europe, juggle the shorter-term needs of very commercially-focussed LPs, and the requirements of the defence community, who prioritise the long-term development of strategic frontier technologies that will give us an edge, regardless of commercial viability? ‘Cause there’s a massive tension between those two, and if you’re a VC, you know, you either – you, kind of, you, sort of, have to choose one bucket or the other, and you really shouldn’t, in a way, ‘cause the spending and investment in these technologies will massively increase if we can, kind of – if we can reconcile those two tensions.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Difficulties with managing boxes, I think, so, I’m going to turn to Rob first, and then Elisabeth and then Nicholas.

Rob Murray

Great stuff. Well, thanks very much for the question, Patrick. So, the way I think about this is – and this is, you know, a lot of the work when we were putting together the NATO Innovation Funds, we, you know, we had this discussion a lot, in terms of, you know, how do you generate the incentives for developing new technologies, which may take – deep technologies in particular, deep tech, that may take, you know, perhaps twice as long as a traditional VC, sort of, return?

So, you know, if one accepts that, generally speaking, limited partners are, kind of, looking for a return within four to seven years, broadly speaking, for venture capital, in deep technology it’s, kind of, double that, if not a bit longer perhaps, and it’s very difficult to be able to raise a fund and say, “Okay, great, we’ll see you in 15 years and let you know how it goes.” That’s a little bit, perhaps, unrealistic. So, I think that the way in which I look at this is, there’s different flavours of limited partners, and so, of course, you know, when perhaps you’re looking to raise a fund and you’re looking maybe to sovereign wealth funds, for example, to be an investor, you know, that sort of investment arm carries with it that kind of timeline that could support deep tech investments, arguably. And so, I can easily see a world where, in Europe in particular, you have venture capital funds, who might have, you know, sub-fund one, which might be geared to those, sort of, dare I say it, lower-hanging fruits of traditional, sort of, four to seven-year-type time frames, and you might have sub-fund two, that is looking slightly deeper and beyond that, and trying to find that middle ground.

Of course, you know, that presents quite a challenging, you know, investment thesis to put about and actually to run and manage, and I fully appreciate that. But my point is that there are different types of investors with different perspectives and, you know, quite frankly, it comes back to values again, in terms of, like, you know, not fiscal values but, you know, what’s important to people, that, you know, would, certainly in the work that I did when I was at NATO, would be willing to invest, and these aren’t necessarily just government entities or public-sector arms either, there are private actors out there. So, I think what it really comes down to is finding the right sort of limited partners, you know, for whom this is an important issue and for whom, you know, they are prepared to invest over that timeframe.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thanks very much indeed. Elisabeth, I’m going to you now.

Elisabeth Braw

Thank you, Patricia. So, I have a quick point on the previous question, and on this question as well. So, for the previous question, I think the instinct, everybody’s instinct is always to look at the US, because it has the most money, and say, “Oh, that’s the most successful model.” But if we look at other countries: Finland, Estonia, Israel, they have the population, or half the population, or in the case of Israel a whole population, that is inculcated in national security thinking, and that really makes a huge difference. Yes, as a conscript you don’t learn strategy, you’re at the tactical level, but the Israelis have clearly implemented, and lots of Western governments have visited the Israelis over the years to see how Unit 8200 operates.

But that remains a fantastic model, does it not, of helping young, brilliant minds apply their skills to national security threats, and then they go off and start companies. Similarly in Estonia and Finland, they don’t have a lot of access to – they don’t have the same venture capital sectors that the US does. But if you have a critical mass of the population that thinks about national security as they then go about, for example, creating technology, that makes a huge difference, which makes me to – because it’s not just about making money, it’s about wanting to make a contribution to national security. Obviously you want to make some money as well, but if you’re only motivated by that you can get – you can go into any technology application, or any direction of technology, you don’t have to concern yourself with national security.

And that takes me to the second question of the fantastic question posed by Patrick, which really is one of the dilemmas for VCs, and they operate on a commercial basis, and yet the solutions that we want them to be involved in are solutions that should benefit society as a whole. Well, that’s not always – it doesn’t – it’s not easily combined, but I – so, coming back to Rob’s point, or building on it, I wonder if we have reached the point where actually it matters whether you’re not just looking at this as a commercial proposition, but wanting to do your part for – to keep our societies safe and to help them win, because if they don’t, it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve made in the past, we’re not going to be viable economies or indeed viable liberal democracies if we allow China to win, for example.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thanks very much. Nicholas, I’m aware of the time, and I have a couple of questions I want to ask, so, can I ask you to be brief, please? Thank you.

Nicholas Nelson

Certainly. So, I think Patrick asks the million-dollar question, and there are a lot of statistics we could go through on why it’s the case, and as I’m, yeah, sure he has scars from, raising a fund is never easy and I don’t think it’s, you know, a solution to just say, “Well, just approach values-backed or value-focussed LPs.”

I’ll use a good example, just being aware of the time, of a rather well-known VC based in Europe who I talked to recently, who is interested in this area and has started dipping their foot in, so to speak, and their first thing was, “Well, I’m only really going to talk to US family offices and US LPs, because in Europe there’s just too many issues.”

Now, I’ve talked, had the similar discussions with half-a-dozen different folks, who have everything from micro to large funds here in Europe, and it is due to a number of concerns, be it fragmented markets, be it ESG and, you know, reputational concerns. And so, what he said was, “I’m just going to go to the US LPs, see if I’m going to invest there,” and a lot of it has to come down to, in my view, one, the fragmented market in Europe, but more importantly, ESG concerns, which don’t really meet the smell test, that have restricted exits as well as valuations, and investing within Europe for European investors. So, definitely there’s a lot more – I’m happy to connect offline on that, but there’s a lot more that goes into it, but I think that was, kind of, the short-term answer, was, if you want to invest in this area, go find US LPs. I think it’s tragedy that that’s the case, but I think that’s the short-term answer.

Dr Patricia Lewis

No, that’s a good point, thank you very much indeed. So, I’m going to turn to Beyza, Dr Beyza Unal next, and, Beyza, your question and Nils’ question are quite similar and I wonder if I could ask you to also incorporate Nils’ question in yours. Thank you.

Dr Beyza Unal

Okay, let me try to do that. Let me see if your question, yeah. So, the question that I had in mind is really, what we are seeing at the moment is a bit of techno-nationalism and tech alliances being formed, especially with regards to the developments on semiconductors industry and microchips, and this competition that’s going on between the United States and China and many others, in a way. So then, that question is really linked to, how can we make sure that that type of nationalist or, you know, alliance-based approaches don’t get away – get on the way of international security and multilateral efforts? And I see that there is a bit of a security dynamic that is going on with regards to this.

And then Nils’ question, and I think it’s quite linked to that, is, she asks, to what extent may competition link to protectionism and how will this impact on technological development and adoption, as well as international security and peace? Thank you.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thanks, Beyza. So, Marina, I’m going to turn to you, you haven’t got your hand up, but nobody has, so, I’m just feeling mean.

Marina Favaro

Yeah, Beyza’s asked an amazing question here. I mean, I – one avenue for it that I see is industry standard development because it’s, kind of, this bureaucratic, kind of, not apolitical, as we’re really discovering, but, kind of, it’s not a diplomatic sort of thing in the same way that a lot of other arms control for new technologies might be. But even the industry standards bodies are really subject increasingly to geopolitical competition and countries, kind of, you know, fragmenting these groups into, you know, crudely a, kind of, US and a Chinese camp. And so, I agree that this is a really difficult question. I don’t necessarily have any suggestions but, yeah, I agree that this is something that we’re going to have to look for – look to in the future in order to regulate these technologies and mitigate their impacts on international security.

Dr Patricia Lewis

So, I don’t know if any of the other panellists want to answer that question. Rob, is this something you considered in the discussions on setting up DIANA?

Rob Murray

Yeah, very much so. I mean, it was a real strategic driver with regards to the rationale, to try to create the conditions to get at some of these issues, which Nick’s been talking about, in terms of the fragmentation we see in Europe, as to how we might, kind of, you know, look to, you know, help bring some effectiveness to that. I was going to say efficiency, but I’m not a big fan of efficiency in this context, but effectiveness is probably more appropriate.

I think that, you know, what we’re really seeing though is that geopolitics now is technopolitics, and I think it leads into a really interesting area, because when you look at most of our elected officials, in some way, shape or form, you know, very few can talk to any meaningful level with regards to a lot of these technological issues and areas. And often, indeed, you tend to find, certainly I found when I was in Brussels, sort of, in the ivory tower of NATO Headquarters, you would tend to find that anything that might be deemed technical was not so strategic, and therefore, kind of, consumed to the, “Oh, you know, other people can deal with that.”

And I see that as well in a lot of gov – I’ve certainly seen it in UK governments, and I’ve seen it around a lot of other countries as well, and so, what does that mean? It means we have a real problem, that our political leaders either can’t or won’t get engaged with what is now the new normal, and getting comfortable with some of the detail associated with technological areas, and understanding the implication of what it means when you – you know, in the example given was semiconductors, when you concentrate your semiconductor manufacturing in a handful of places around the world, you know, that carries massive risk. And so, it goes back and very, a very, sort of, you know, really 50,000-foot view; it goes back to this notion as how we’re, kind of, rewiring globalisation now, and going back to the earlier question with regards to how we’ll be co-operating, particularly over terms of trade and economic activity, with those nations that share one’s values, and what does that mean for Politicians? It means they’re going to have to get smart on some of these technologies and the impact they have on society.

You know, you can’t have, it’s not credible to have, for example, CEOs from tech companies going to Congress and giving evidence, and for a lot of those Politicians there simply not understanding what’s going on. It’s not credible for Ministers to not understand some of the basic, basic elements with regards to artificial intelligence and its relationship to data. You know, we live in a world where those areas simply are no longer credible for the, you know, the political class, quite frankly, to either ignore or just not be bothered to engage with. So, I think there’s a real – you know, if we accept that the premise that technology and that, sort of, techno-competition is impacting geopolitics, then it’s pretty obvious that our Politicians are going to get smart on this, above and beyond they have done previously, and I think I see that across the board, certainly for a lot of European and North American countries.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thanks very much indeed. I’m going to go for one last question, even though we’ve just reached time, and that’s because it’s with our CGS Fellow, our Army Fellow, Will George, and he asks the, sort of, the pointy end of the question. He says that “The endpoint for much of the technology in warfare is the trained soldier, so, how can NATO and the West ensure that it’s producing the correct calibre of soldier, capable of operating sophisticated technology?”

So, Elisabeth, I know this is right up your street. I’m going straight to you, but I’m sure others will have something to say as well, so, please.

Elisabeth Braw

Yes, so, the point, I think, that is important to consider in this context is that we don’t need to train every single young man and woman. So, there is so – there are so many suggestions coming up that “now we need to bring national service back, everybody should contribute to the national military effort.” Well, it’s just not possible to train 50% or indeed 100% of 18-year-olds in sophisticated technologies, when there is no need for it. We don’t need these mass organisations any more that were set up for World War One and World War Two-style warfare. And if we instead do what the Norwegians do which is, in my mind, the best model out there; they test all male and female 18-year-olds and select the 15% best, and those men and women, I think currently about 32% women in the current intake, they are trained to a very high level in their respective areas. And then, as a result, you have people who go into the armed forces on the basis of having had a fantastic experience as conscripts, and others go out into civil society and they automatically join the reserves.

That’s a fantastic resource and it’s also financially efficient, because they haven’t wasted a lot of technologically sophisticated equipment on people who may not want to be in the armed forces in the first place and will never darken the doors of a barracks ever again.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thanks, Elisabeth. Nicholas, you wanted to come in. I’m wondering, Nicholas, if I can also point you to Roderick’s question on defence offset and industrial co-operation as a source for co-ordination funding. I don’t know if that’s too specific or whether you’d like to address it.

Nicholas Nelson

No, I’m certainly happy to. I want to address the first question regarding, you know, the right kinds of soldiers going forward. The first and foremost is, when we look at these new technologies, we have to recognise that this is no longer this very platform-centric, high-end, bespoke, multi-mission-assets environment. Fundamentally, it’s more of a system-of-systems-based approach.

The thing we need to be cognisant of and deeply careful of is two things. First, making sure there’s product market for new technologies that come out, but also making sure that we’re not over-engineering things. There has been a ton of ink spilled recently over some of the VR and AR demonstrations within the US military, in terms of sickness, err, discomfort, and limit operability, despite these being high-end systems, because they weren’t really trialled early on with the war fighter in mind.

So, first and foremost, we don’t need these ex – there’s always going to be a place for certain high-end, bespoke technologies, but for a lot of these individual war fighter, I think it’s about finding the technologies that work for them, rather than just trying to over-engineer something and saying, “Well, we only – only a very small sub-segment of these can operate them.”

The second piece of this is largely getting towards, you know, we got into the conscripts and down-selecting there. I mean, fundamentally, is – we have a choice to make between, do we want large conscript armies back with varying degrees of training and capabilities, or do we want more focus on high-end war fighters who are able to do both? I’m not arguing for either side here, but I think to say that we’re going to develop all these bespoke technologies that all these people are going to use; I think we’re pulling at our resource pool a little too constrained.

So, my first and foremost thing is making sure we have product market fit with the technologies we’re trying to trial with, you know, your in-line war fighters, and for certain capabilities, yes, find the folks who can use those really critical ones out there, be it within the special forces community or the intelligence services writ large. So, there’re, kind of, two different points there that we, I think, don’t pay enough attention to or, in some cases, really have a bad track record of over-engineering on.

Getting to the second question, we look at industrial co-operation or , kind of, industrial policy. In certain countries that can be, kind of, a dirty phrase and not really welcome, and I think we do have to be careful of how we do that. At the same time, there needs to be, as I alluded to a few answers ago, concerted and focused efforts to, you know, identify the pain points and challenges that start-ups and investors have, but how do we incentivise them and engage them?

A lot of efforts can be – you know, it’s a similar things like Pineo Innovation Fund, trying to have, you know, government-driven, you know, venture funds that invest alongside, but at the same time we need to understand the other levers out there, ‘cause they’re not all purely financial. Can we solidify things like secondments over in – from industry to government and vice versa? Do we have things like government-first equipment or GFE we could provide at reduced cost or free to some of these start-ups working on this, and can we get over the hurdle of, you know, cutting the primes off certain equations when we want to have start-ups who are able to come into cleared spaces and, you know, show their – understand those clear problems at the different classification levels, as well as more at the more, you know, nascent levels, just understanding those problem challenges Elisabeth alluded to in her very first answer? And so, I think there’s a lot to be done on that. I do think that if we’re trying to go down the route of, say, China and having really government driving R&D priorities, that ship has sailed a long time ago, and would actually undermine our greatest strength in the West, which has been the dynamisms of our private markets.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thank you very much to you, Nicholas. Rob, Marina, anything you want to add? I know, Rob, obviously the issue of the soldier is something you could speak to.

Rob Murray

Yeah, well, having been a former British Army Officer, I totally concur that – and it’s – this is all about getting the latest equipment to those at the front that need it. And so, I think the beauty of looking at those technologies that are dual-use is that, by definition, because those companies will be creating those technologies for civil markets, you know, they’re going to be competing, their products are going to be getting better and better, you know, it’s going to be relatively simple with regards to things like, you know, user interface, user experience, this sort of stuff. So, I actually think, with new technologies that are dual-use and find their ways into the hands of soldiers at the front, they will be relatively straightforward to use, simply because they’ll have come from an environment, which will have made that, you know, be a forcing function, if you will.

It’s – I would say, you know, there’s a big difference between dual-use technologies associated to those areas such as AI, autonomy, data analytics and so forth, you know, there’s a big difference there versus acquisition of major armaments programmes, you know, submarines, jets, you know, that’s a different story, and something which we need to just, sort of – they’re not totally mutually exclusive. Of course, some of these technologies will find their ways into various platforms, but nonetheless, I think the more you can generate access for soldiers to these dual-use technologies, actually the easier and simpler it will be for them to leverage and use, because otherwise the companies, you know, they wouldn’t be selling anything, nobody would be buying them in the commercial world if they were really complicated. So, I think it’s a win-win.

Dr Patricia Lewis

And final point to you, Marina, if you want to take it.

Marina Favaro

Sure, yeah, it sounds like what we’re talking about here is really the importance of translating innovation into capability at the end of the day, and I’ve heard a few of us, kind of, pick up on the importance of an agile method when we’re doing this and a, kind of, circular innovation pipeline where you’re always coming back to your stakeholders and what you’re actually trying to deliver for. And then also prototyping and creating this minimally viable product, which would have been very helpful in that AR/VR example that Nicholas cited, and then, you know, working upwards from that.

I think when we’re talking about innovation, it’s really easy to talk about process, and – but what is often missed out from this is thinking about the relationships, buy-in and, kind of, co-development with the relevant stakeholders, because you can get things through the pipeline efficiently, but if the end users aren’t interested or bought in then it really falls flat. And here, I think defence and security is really different from the consumer goods market, where you have a market of thousands of people that can help you to get that potential, that, kind of, product market fit, whereas it looks a little bit different in security and defence.

So, yeah, I think it – I think there’s this temptation to spend a lot of money on the pipeline and the development of these technologies, but it should look, in my opinion, more like a 50/50 split between innovation and this, kind of, tech transfer bit, to ensure that it can get into the hands of people and they can use it, and it’s actually, you know, going to help them deliver on their outcomes at the end of the day.

Dr Patricia Lewis

Thanks, Marina. I mean, I think this is one of these seminars where I feel like we could have another hour and still not even begin to scratch the surface, and I think some of the questions too, as well, have been really great and again, you know, because of the time constraints, we haven’t been able to do them all justice. But, you know, if it gives us, I think, flavour; somebody mentioned flavour of money, and I think that this gives us a flavour of the issue for people who perhaps haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it.

We’re really keen on DIANA, Rob, and we would really love to see how we could, in the UK, do more to collaborate and work to help DIANA promote what it’s trying to do. I think that goes probably for all the think tanks in the UK who are working on these issues. So, thank you so much, each of you, for your really excellent, thoughtful and sometimes provocative comments, so, really appreciate it, and thanks to everybody who listened, who participated, who asked questions, etc.; again, much appreciated.

We run a – quite a few seminars over the year in which we look at the issue of defence technologies, so, this won’t be the last time that we’ll be able to engage in this way. So, thank you, each of you, very much and I hope you have a great rest of the day. Bye, now. Oh, and thanks to all the Chatham House team for putting this on, I should say, especially Tom, Claire and Laura, who are on the call.