Preparing NATO and the Allies to the future challenges.

The NATO Chief Scientist Dr Bryan Wells spoke at the online international conference “Preparing NATO and the Allies for the Future Challenges“. The conference was opened by the NATO Deputy Secretary General, Mircea Geoană.
The event took place online on 27 October2020, and was organized jointly by the Crisis Management and Disaster Response Centre of Excellence, the Sofia Security Forum and the “Nikola Yonkov Vaptsarov” Naval Academy, with the support of Konrad Adenauer Bulgaria and NATO.

Dr Wells addressed how to provide NATO with new capabilities in the new technological environment.
Dr Wells emphasized that NATO faces challenges in exploiting to the full the opportunities provided by new technologies: the majority of new technologies are readily available to all, and so NATO needs experts to maintain its technological edge; the huge scale of the change is as important as its rapid pace, and so this makes decisions on what to prioritize particularly difficult.

Dr Wells argued that in facing these challenges, NATO has access to scientific tools that allow it to address them from a position of strength.

Indeed, as Dr Wells stated: “the academic institutions in NATO Nations are amongst the best in the World and the NATO Science and Technology Organisation has over 6,000 of Allied and Partner scientists actively working in it. It is the largest international defence science network in the World”.
The NATO Science and Technology Organisation also undertakes a range of Horizon Scanning activities to assist decisions on which technologies to prioritize research on.

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Published by STO

03/11/2020