Using Autonomous Technology as a Tool for Deterrence and Defence - How do the Baltic States rapidly increase Combat Power and Lethality?

Since joining NATO in 2004, Lithuania has been successfully modernising its armed forces. Huge enhancements have been made, but they remain small with a limited ability to increase their lethality. This short article looks at how Lithuania and the wider Baltic states (B3) could achieve disproportionate impact on the battlefield by using autonomous technology as a cost-effective tool for deterrence and defence.

Could NATO currently defend the B3 from Russian aggression – getting the right troops to the right place at the right time? When approved and resourced, new NATO operational plans and an improved force generation model will remove much of this risk, but for now the battlefield geometry means the answer to this question is unclear. This uncertainty makes the B3 a much more inviting target for Russia – the chance to forcibly reunify former Soviet States AND the opportunity to strategically weaken NATO, maybe fatally?

“‘Russia wouldn’t dare attack NATO countries; Article 5 stops this from happening…”

Would it??There are many that are not convinced.?In the last few years, NATO has deployed an enhanced Forward Presence (eFP)?in the eastern part of the Alliance, with 4 multinational battlegroups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. In coherence with Article 5 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, their?presence, often referred to as a tripwire, makes it clear that an attack on one NATO member state will be considered as an attack against them all.?But this cornerstone of NATO's?deterrence?and the value of its commitment to its members is often misunderstood.??Article?5 does not unequivocally commit member states to unified military action, it simply requires members to assist those attacked with "such action it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area." Furthermore, to invoke Article 5, unanimous consent is required from all 31 member states in the North Atlantic Council (NAC), something that is a long way from being?guaranteed. It is worth noting that even after more than a year of Russian atrocities in Ukraine, there are still NATO member states that are politically less than enthusiastic about taking an anti-Russian stance.?Most European leaders would not agree with the French President that NATO is “brain dead”, but they should be concerned that the self-affirming principle of Article 5 should not alone be considered as being a cast-iron guarantee of security for the B3.?The problem of NATO drawing a red line, is that if it is crossed by an aggressor and not countered decisively and immediately by NATO; then its credibility will be severely wounded if not destroyed altogether.

“But what about the VJTF…”

Strategic politics aside, militarily the deterrence?value of the current eFP is also not all that it seems.?The roughly 45,000 regular NATO forces in the B3 (combined allied and host nation) that are in-place and at various degrees of readiness, rely upon very quick reinforcement by the NATO Response Force (NRF) and in particular, by the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF).?In 2023, this force of 11,500 is being led by Germany and on paper can deploy within 48 to 72 hours.?That said, it’s combat readiness has been much questioned in the media and it is worth noting that the land component can only sustainably deploy to one location – against a combined B3 land border of approximately 1,400 km with Russia and Belarus, the VJTF’s land component armoured brigade defensive frontage could only be expected to be around 18 – 20 km. A coordinated surprise attack into the B3, especially into Lithuania through the strategically?important?Suwa?ki Gap whilst fixing NATO forces in Estonia and Latvia, would present NATO with a challenge it is unlikely to be able to meet in time with it’s much depleted conventional forces.

Finally, one needs to consider the geography of the B3 and Lithuania in particular.?Deterrence, through the ability to deliver decisive combat power needs to start instantly on the border at km 0… the distance, speed/ time/ equation matters in a country where the capital Vilnius is 30 km from the Belarusian border; meaning that it is perfectly feasible to be in the centre of Vilnius in an armoured vehicle approximately 1 hour after leaving Belarus. With the fact that Lithuania is sandwiched between Belarus to the east and Russian Kaliningrad to the west, it is also very susceptible to a rapid envelopment on two fronts.?Not only does quickly occupying the Suwa?ki Gap deny NATO with the ability to reinforce Lithuania and the other B3 through NATO territory, but Russian Anti-Access/ Area Denial (A2AD) platforms operating from Kaliningrad would close Baltic airspace (SA-21 GROWLER max range 400 km) and the Baltic Sea (SS-N-26 STROBILE max range 800 km) to the vast majority of NATO air and maritime combat power. This means that when Russia assess NATO’s ability to defend the B3, it looks at what is in place now, knowing that NATO is far from being able to guarantee that it has the ability to reinforce in-place forces.

So, if in reality the security of the B3 are not in fact guaranteed by NATO membership alone, how can the B3 maximise their own ability to deter Russian aggression and increase their combat power and lethality with forces that are in-place and don’t require reinforcement?

The increasing defence budgets of most eastern European countries is strongly regarded as being to meet an existential threat to their existence.?The Lithuanian Minister of Finance Gintar? Skaist? recently noted, "Strengthening national defence is a priority of this Government”, and yet despite raising defence spending to 2.52% of GDP, like the other B3,?Lithuania?still suffers from a?relatively?limited defence budget, limited personnel in their regular and reserve armed forces,?and most importantly, a very limited ability to generate combat power - the Lithuanian Land Forces have a regular strength of around 9,000 and are concentrated into a single mechanised infantry brigade. In March 23, the Lithuanian Chief of Defence, Lt Gen Valdemaras Rup?ys, announced the that Lithuanian Land Forces aim to acquire up to 54 main battle tanks and that whilst there is a longer term ambition to increase Lithuania’s combat power to a division in size, in the short term the plan would be re-role a mechanised infantry battalion into a tank battalion. Given that most main battle tanks cost around $8 million each; without spares, ammunition, support vehicles and the entire logistics and infrastructure requirements, this alone would strip Lithuania of $432 million – for reference the entire 2023 defence budget for Lithuania is around $1.7 billion.

For other NATO member states along the border with Russia such as Poland, for so many years caught in the 'bloodlands' between east and west, the strategy of?deterrence?is much simpler.?Their population, size and economic strength, allows them to generate a huge amount of traditional heavy combat power. In 2022, Poland was already proportionally NATO’s 3rd?highest spender. In 2023,?Warsaw’s military expenditure is set to reach 4% of GDP and plans are afoot to double the size of the regular army to 300,000.??HIMARS, Abrams tanks, K2 Black Panther tanks, Apache AH-64E attack helicopters, F-35 jets, Patriot surface to air missile systems, domestically made 'Borsuck' infantry fighting vehicles.... the list goes on.?With something like an F-35A fighter costing approximately $70 million; a defence strategy based on utilising exquisite platforms is not cheap.

Today in 2023, most rearmament conversations in government meeting rooms across Europe would have been familiar to those facing the impending collapse of European security in 1938.?Discussions on how many main battle tanks can be produced by the industrial base per month or how quickly reserve forces can be mobilised.?The often-quoted statement from General Cavoli, NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), regarding the vitality of hard power “if the other guy shows up with a tank, you’d better have a tank” should not be taken at face value.?How allied forces threaten overmatch to deter aggression does not mean that they have to be able to field thousands of tanks, but it does mean that it must have the credible ability to deploy combat power and cannot reply on soft power measures alone.?Unfortunately, despite the incredible leaps forward in commercial technologies that we all use everyday from Ring doorbells to Apple iPones, military deterrence is largely achieved in 2023 as it was in 1938 - the very expensive and slow procurement of heavy crewed platforms that involves a huge human resourcing burden and the associated logistics and political willingness to accept casualties; a very real burden for NATO member states but one that historically does not hamper Russia in anyway.

So, without the buying power or size of population of Poland, how do the B3 deter Russian aggression??How do they generate ‘mass’ and make themselves a 'bitter pill to swallow' against whom no aggressor is going to want to risk their hand? The answer could be technology and autonomous technology in particular.

Autonomous technologies that are available today offer the potential for a paradigm shift in how the B3 deter aggression.?They allow NATO to generate in-place, affordable and quickly replaceable combat power with enhanced lethality.?Of course there is an enduring place for conventional crewed platforms, whether they be warships, attack helicopters or main battle tanks; but there is also an increasing role for autonomous systems.?It is possible for allied nations to augment their conventional crewed platforms with teams of low-cost autonomous systems under the command of a single human operator; generating combat power to achieve desired effects whilst saving lives by reducing risk to human operators in dangerous, highly-contested environments.?There are some tasks that only humans can do, like making ethical decisions, and yet there are others that robots can do far better and faster that we will ever be able to; most obviously in collecting and analysing vast amounts of information in real-time. When one fuses human decisions with courses of action devised by robots operating at machine speed, it allows us to increase speed and accuracy of not just one human controlling one kill chain, but one human controlling multiple kill chains simultaneously. Anduril Industries ‘Lattice’ open architecture software enables customers to 'understand, decide and act' with machine speed; collapsing ‘kill chains’ in minutes not hours.?By fusing and integrating thousands of sensors and effectors into a single intelligent C2 mission engine, Lattice provides real time understanding of the area of operations, an automated decision advantage in complex operations and integrated C2 of multi domain assets in a single pane of glass, allowing operators?to conduct the required effect at the speed of relevance.?A user can fuse Anduril’s autonomous sensors and effectors and their own current in-service platforms, to markedly speed up their reaction time and generate tempo.

Thus with the addition of autonomous systems between the Forward Line of Enemy Troops (FLET) and the Forward Line of Own Troops (FLOT), there now exists a Forward Line of Sensors (FLOS) positioned in mutually supporting depth from the border rearwards, and a Forward Line of Robots (FLOR) that begin the coordinated destruction of the enemy from km 0. No longer is the generation of tempo reliant upon making the best of a plethora of stove piped sensors and effectors and co-ordinated by a large number of humans working on hub and spoke networks, but instead a single person can receive an accurate understanding of the multi-domain environment through a mesh network, instantaneously fused from multiple sensors, and with a click of a button engage all targets simultaneously by pairing the most appropriate sensors to shooters in seconds. ?In such a scenario, an aggressor could lose the vast majority of its deployed combat power in the first few minutes of an engagement whilst NATO forces preserve its crewed platforms for subsequent engagements.

As allied nations face up to the challenges of operating in peer and peer-plus environments, the lessons from Ukraine must be quickly learned and opportunities for autonomous systems identified. ??Amongst many such lessons, is the fact that when the adversary has a well-developed Electronic Warfare (EW) capability, supported by massed and precision fires, there is no sanctuary on the battlefield.?In the same way that the Ukrainians have focussed on destroying Russian C2 nodes through multi-domain targeting, NATO member states should be very concerned by their own C2 vulnerabilities. The never ending demand for decision-quality information to provide understanding and enable decisions to be made in real-time, has increased markedly.?20 years of operations in the peer-minus theatres of Iraq and Afghanistan, total air superiority, and a plethora of stove piped sensors and their associated human operator burdens, has led to ‘flabby’ C2 nodes that are based on hub and spoke networks and an overly comprehensive and process-driven approach to targeting.?In November 2021 NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) delivered Project Artemis on Ex STEADFAST LEDA, an exercise to increase interoperability and operational effectiveness in multidomain operations.?Using Lattice, which applies AI and ML for the purposes of target acquisition and prosecution, the Joint Air Ground Integration Cell (JAGIC) achieved an 80% efficiency in the application of their staff power against existing joint targeting processes and up to a 30 minute dividend in time.?The use of the software not only allowed the ARRC to achieve tempo across multiple targeting cycles, but it exponentially reduced the human burden required and consequentially dramatically reduced the required size and footprint of the deployed HQ.

In conclusion, it is possible today for NATO countries such as Lithuania to generate in-place combat power affordably and increase lethality across all domains if the benefits of autonomous technologies are harnessed and integrated into existing doctrines and force structures; not to replace crewed platforms but to augment them and maximise their potential. NATO talks a great game regarding emerging technologies in defence, but in order to actually benefit from the cutting edge of technological enhancements and regain the advantage in multi domain operations against a peer foe, what is needed is rapid adoption of autonomous technologies that are not concepts of tomorrow but platforms that exist today.