The wars in Iran and Ukraine have underscored how civilian infrastructure will become a feature of future conflicts. And Poland’s former National Security Bureau chief Jacek Siewiera says that this will extend to conflicts in NATO countries.
The comments were made on stage earlier this month on a panel at Resilience Conference Warsaw. The conversation — on how technological advances are reshaping military doctrine and the implications for NATO allies — also included former Polish Chief of Staff Rajmund Andrzejczak, Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky of the NATO Innovation Fund, and Piotr Woyke of the Eastern Flank Institute.
While the frontline remains the most dangerous of zones, and a primary focus for how to shape defence strategy, Siewiera noted that it is not as central to the war effort as it had been for centuries.
The evolution of defence technology is a large part of the reason why. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, he noted, was the first major conflict where “the majority of the losses and strategic impacts were made deep behind the frontline with the use of cheap technology.”
The recent war in Iran and the wider Middle East, meanwhile, has been a litmus test: they demonstrate how attacks on energy and other critical infrastructure were a defining feature of the new era of warfare.
The growing issue of civilian infrastructure being vulnerable to sabotage — from drone attacks but other lines of attack that have evolved through technology, such as the rise of malicious cyberhacking — also speaks to how defence and resilience technology will take shape. The opportunity for startups and private investors will be to build technology and businesses to fill those gaps — grey zone or otherwise — well beyond the front line.
While NATO is not directly implicated in the Middle East war as an alliance, defence-tech start-ups from member states can export their technology to affected countries in the region, thereby strengthening European capabilities, noted Schneider-Sikorsky.
Siewiera said that while frontline technologies might be more spectacular, European start-ups can make a difference by ensuring “the unsexy but inevitable security of the agglomerations and the infrastructure.” He highlighted Orasio, a French AI company providing video analytics for internal security purposes, as one such project.
This was echoed by Schneider-Sikorsky, who said Europe will see more dual-use systems exploited by military and civilian actors alike. Taking cybersecurity systems protecting critical facilities as an example, he highlighted how the lines have been blurred between use cases.
“Is it civilian technology? Is it military?” he asked. “I don’t think it really matters anymore because almost everything is hybrid these days.”
These remarks about hybrid, dual-use technology come as European states adapt to understand the nature of hybrid and grey-zone threats.
Late last year, Germany launched a counter-drone police unit authorised to shoot down UAVs, alongside a joint federal-state counter-drone center enabling cooperation between civilian authorities and the military. France is working to introduce a bill that would relax anti-drone regulations and allow civilian “vital operators” to procure counter-drone equipment. (Indeed, some companies are already launching products in France, and potentially further, to meet potential C-UAS demand.)
