Quantum Matters: NATO’S Quantum Leap: Designing A Quantum Strategy

The day Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine the infamous 2019 words of President Macron – NATO is ‘brain dead’ – were crushed under its tracks. President Putin failed to conquer Ukraine. He succeeded in reinvigorating NATO, both geopolitically and technologically.

Evidence of the latter was clear over a couple of brainstorming days to define NATO’s Quantum Strategy. Your columnist joined entrepreneurs, academics, military suppliers and NATO personnel at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and at NATO headquarters in Brussels to give their input to the strategy document, due to be published this autumn.  

The Alliance is thriving on the strong justification of its defensive purpose, with Finland a new member, Sweden in the waiting room, and even historically neutral Ireland reconsidering its stance on not joining NATO in a consultative forum this month. 

What Mark Leonard, Director of think tank ECFR calls ‘The Age of Unpeace’ – of submarine incursions to map infrastructure, cyberattacks on national health services that cannot be traced to a state actor, political destabilisation through social media – is a persistent reminder of the threats.  

As a result, NATO has accelerated its move into what it calls Emerging and Disruptive Technologies (EDT), with strategies on everything from AI to Space and Quantum. It aims to leverage its convening power to foster innovation and ensure the West and its allies like Australia and Japan retain a technological lead, a strategy called Foster and Protect.  

At the April 2022 Foreign Ministers’ meeting, it approved a charter for the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) with its initial test centre and accelerator sites. Additionally, 22 member states agreed to participate in the €1bn NATO Innovation Fund, the first multi-sovereign venture capital fund, which is set to make its initial investments at the end of 2023.  

The US Department of Defense is currently seeking permission from Congress to join it. Its quasi-threatening wording reveals how strategically significant the DOD sees this area: “Allowing the US Department of Defense to participate in the NATO DIANA initiative would support implementation of some important elements of the NATO agenda. Absent new statutory authority enacted as a result of this critical legislative proposal, the United States will not be able to participate in DIANA or other vital, successor, jointly-funded NATO R&D programs.” 

An added sense of urgency comes from the recent take off in generative AI, set to transform the world, amid warnings about its capacity for harm to the point of human extinction.

There is a similar narrative to quantum technologies. They are currently only making a difference at the margin in, for instance, optimising supply chains or the preventive maintenance of machines. However, as the science advances, and an estimated $36bn in investments from governments, plus the private sector piles in, the probability of radical breakthroughs rises. 

These range from quantum computers that could break encryption – the issue that gathers the most column inches – to quantum sensors that might detect, say, the UK’s Trident Submarine armed with its nuclear weapons.

One of the most interesting aspects of quantum is the cross over between military and civilian uses – quantum sensors for situational awareness use the same technology as those used for medical diagnosis, for instance making them profitable on various fronts. Four industries (automotive, chemicals, financial services and life sciences) are likely to see the earliest impact from quantum computing with gains of up to $1.3 trillion in value by 2035,when the industry is expected to reach maturity, according to McKinsey. 

This harks back to the civilian benefits accruing from DARPA, the US defence think tank which originally invented the internet mainly so that satellites could communicate. We are only at the starting line in understanding how quantum technologies will be used to change the world. 

What is clear is that NATO and its partners need to focus on four areas in their bid to maintain advantage. 

Firstly, support the commercial ventures which are driving development. In the US, around $4bn of public money (excluding classified military investments) is going into quantum, and a close equivalent of $3.7bn in private funding, while there are over 310 startups, as well as blue chip behemoths like Google and IBM involved.

Focus on near-wins to help propagate quantum literacy, as well as encourage funding of the industry. Quantum sensing is among the most promising technologies, with companies from Bosch to Multiverse Computing working on the hardware and software, respectively. The September 22 bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines is a clear user case: our current sensors do not have the capacity to detect a coin-sized hole through which gas escapes from 5km away. Quantum sensors are likely to be able to once further developed, while also being an independent back up for GPS. Our infrastructure, including smart phones, is dependent on the global navigation satellite systems and therefore rendered vulnerable.  

Keep clarity on regulation. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US is developing a framework for quantum cybersecurity standards, due out in 2024. Regulation from bodies like this one, or the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), are the only way to force firms to invest in quantum risk reduction because many currently baulk at spending funds and management time when they lack a sense of urgency.  

Lastly, use NATO’s soft power to bolster cooperation among friendly nations, be it through helping finance international consortiums in quantum or simply using its convening powers to bring together participants. The Alliance has a crucial, unifying role to play in an era of national industrial competition, with export controls harming allied members as well as enemy countries.  

You can’t plan an epiphany, but that is exactly what we have had in AI. We must be better prepared for a quantum leap, and NATO has a key role to play.

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Karina Robinson is CEO of Redcliffe Advisory, Founder of The City Quantum and AI Summit and Senior Adviser to Multiverse Computing. This Comment does not represent NATO policy. 

Cybersecurity – the spies and the crooks

Collaboration key to minimising threat

What career advice do you give a young person leaving Cambridge with a double first in Classics and entering a graduate job market dynamited by Covid-19?

Heading into an industry with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of well over 13% has got to be an enticing option. Future projections are even more optimistic on the back of the coronavirus revolution in leisure and working practices. In fact, the cybersecurity market is already worth around $120bn, similar to the GDP of Morocco, while the cost of cybercrime is estimated at up to $2tr.

Back in 2019 Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tweeted that cybersecurity is the central challenge of our digital age. His warning is amplified by the vast increase in online activity since the pandemic struck. The biggest vulnerability for companies is now a cyber breach via staff working remotely. For individuals, there has been a 667% increase in spear fishing attacks (a targeted scam) helped by the fact that “everyone’s grannie is now doing yoga online, a whole new population for cyber criminals to prey on,” quips Andy Bates, Executive Director at the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA).

In his 25-year career working with organisations ranging from the security services to NATO and telecoms group Verizon, he has seen cybercrime constantly mutate, adapting to where defences are easiest to breach and the largest opportunity lies. The unholy alliance of rogue states, criminal gangs, and individuals in their bedrooms is behind everything from the Facebook data breach earlier this year, where 267 million user profiles were hacked and then sold for a measly $540 on the dark web, to the TalkTalk hack in 2015 where two young men stole the banking information of over 150,000 customers. This was then followed by other criminals piling in to try and blackmail the CEO. Total cost to the company: £77m.

As financial services and other large firms build up their cyber defence at vast cost ($600m at bank behemoth JPMorgan Chase), criminals have moved to easier victims. “It is simpler to steal £100 pounds from 100,000 people or SMEs across hundreds of different legal jurisdictions than a million from a well-defended bank,” notes Mr Bates, speaking at a webinar hosted by the Worshipful Company of International Bankers.

In 2015 the proceeds of known cybercrime exceeded known physical crime, leading to the foundation of the Global Cyber Alliance in two of the largest financial cities in the world. The three founding partners, the City of London Police, the New York District Attorney’s Office and the Center for Internet Security, were soon joined by others including Bank of America and Lloyds Bank. Chaired by the head of Security Policy at Microsoft, Scott Charney, in its 5 years of existence this cybersecurity knight in shining armour has created free tools worth around £5000 per individual.

A not-for-profit organisation, GCA works across borders and sectors to enhance collaboration. It seeks to learn more about data to remove criminal web infrastructure. Its recently announced strategic partnership with ICANN is a case in point, aimed at cutting back on Domain Name System (DNS) abuse.  

The auburn-haired graduate mentioned earlier did not find his lack of a computer science degree an impediment to landing a job in cybersecurity. “Hiring the usual suspects into your IT department makes no sense because they don’t think like the Russian Mafia,” says Mr Bates. Whether a Cambridge education is the best training for understanding an uber-criminal is a subject for discussion; it has historically proved a great education to become a spy. The collaboration between the security services of countries like China and North Korea and professional crooks means a Cambridge education may not be entirely wasted.

A few years ago the military realised that to recruit in-house hackers they would need to relax military discipline and dress. Covid-19 has lifted the stigma from working at home, so hiring somebody who wears a Motorhead t-shirt and has dreadlocks may no longer be such a stretch for corporates, notes Mr Bates. This is essential given that the average time to hack a company is 56 days while the average time to discover the hack is 190. Individuals are attacked on average 150 times a day.

While we hear about the major hacks, such as the recent one that saw requests for Bitcoin donations emanate (purportedly) from the Twitter accounts of famous people like Kim Kardashian and Bill Gates, the press doesn’t cover the millions that occur to individuals, SMEs, and larger companies that manage to avoid all media coverage. GCA’s free toolkit, which already protects around 150m people, can reduce the risk of cyberattack by 85%.

The financial services sector is the most obvious one for criminals to attack, while the electricity infrastructure is most likely to be attacked by enemy states.  There were four failed attacks on the UK electricity grid last year, three by the Russians and one by the North Koreans. GCA, which counts a former head of European policing agency Europol on its board, is intent on encouraging intelligence sharing between the banks and the utilities to foster best practice and reveal more details on attackers.

Similarly, more collaboration between the private sector, the government and NGOs is crucial in the fight against crime and spying. Not least because distinguishing between criminal networks and country attackers is problematic: the latter often outsource their dirty work to the former, a shadow version of an economy’s supply chain.

And mistakes happen. Moller-Maersk, the world’s largest shipping container company, saw its computer screens go black on 27 June, 2017. To understand the scale of the disaster, it helps to know that every 15 minutes one of its massive ships docks in a port somewhere in the world, a complicated logistical and digital exercise. Recovery took ten days. The cost to the firm is estimated at $300m. To cap it all, the Danish company was not the intended victim. The Russian ransomware, known NotPetya, was aimed at Ukrainian businesses as part of the troubled relations between the two countries, but Moller-Maersk’s office in Kiev accidentally caught the virus.

A much larger issue for internet security over the next five to ten years is quantum computing, which would break all known encryption. Although quantum computers currently lack the necessary processing power, the industry is advancing in leaps and bounds.

With over 4 million unfilled vacancies and the demand for neurodiversity to understand better an ever-changing threat, the cybersecurity sector has opened its arms to bankers, doctors, and a host of other professions, as well as the auburn-haired Cambridge graduate, my stepson, who is due to start his new job for a top cybersecurity firm this autumn. I wish him well.

END

GCA is looking to partner with financial services and other firms to help them combat fraud and create a safer internet.  

Russia is the only existential threat

An interview with US Commanding General Hodges

Despite the heightened threat from North Korea, the Alliance mustn’t lose sight of the fact that Russia is the only existential threat to Europe and the US, declares the Commanding General in charge of US troops in Europe.

Interviewed as Russia and its ally Belarus hold the Zapad-2017 war games, following similar ones in 2009 and 2013 which served as distractions and preparation for the invasions of Georgia, Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges says: “There are multiple threats all around us, of course, which is part of why our NATO alliance is so important. Of course Russia, and its behaviour over the last three years, is the only nation that really possesses the ability, the capability, to destroy a European country or the United States with its nuclear weapons. In terms of an existential threat: that’s Russia.”

He adds,” Now it’s not likely, but that’s a part of it.”

Zapad, which is Russian for “West”, is causing heightened anxiety in the North American Treaty Organisation (NATO) for many reasons. They are the largest war games in years – although the Russians insist troop numbers are under the 13,000 beyond which foreign observers have the right to participate, NATO members like Estonia estimate the numbers at around 100,000. Meanwhile, the state of Russian-NATO relations is at a low, communications between the two camps to avoid misunderstandings have declined considerably and rumours are rife that the Russians are considering leaving behind troops in Belarus or annexing it outright on the back of disagreements with its ruler Alexander Lukashenka.

At a 2016 summer summit in Warsaw, NATO upped the military stakes on the back of Russia’s actions. It feared that its troops were too far back from a potential war front. Moving from what it called an assurance to a deterrence strategy, European and US troops are now closer to the border in the Baltic states and Poland. For instance, there are 800 British troops in Estonia, Canadians in Latvia and Germans in Lithuania, part of NATO’s forward presence, although “the foot is tapping on the brake to avoid anything provocative as no one wants a war with Russia,” says Hodges.

NATO armies, including the US, have been under financial pressure for a number of years. The top US army commander in Europe is philosophical about the resulting trade-offs, no doubt helped by having experienced many different twists and turns in policy over a 37-year career. Reports that the ever-diminishing British army may end up with only 65,000 troops don’t faze him: “I would say the British army has the same challenge that the American army has: not enough resources to do everything that it’s asked to do.”

He sings the praises of the British army leaders for making the most of their funds, while pointing out possible parallels with the US: “We reduced the size of the US army to pay for modernisation and readiness and now we’re having to grow the army back up and increase the size to meet all the requirements, so the price will be paid somewhere else.” In fact, in his trademark southern drawl, he points out that the UK is launching two magnificent aircraft carriers but “I don’t know if they have enough sailors to man both aircraft carriers.”

Hodges, whose family home was spared the destructive ire of Hurricane Irma, is more concerned with the many impediments to moving troops and equipment around NATO countries. These range from bridges too weak to take the weight of Challenger tanks to bureaucratic processes appropriate to peacetime only. Already in 2015 he called for the military equivalent of a Schengen zone – in essence the ability to move forces freely through all European nations without the current red tape restrictions -a move seconded this year by Dutch Defense Minister Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert. Yet no advances appear to have been made on this front.

“If we had only three days to send a formation to Poland, it has to be be done under peace time conditions and we will be way too late to the party,” he warns.

Treading carefully to avoid any criticism of President Donald Trump, whose public berating of NATO country heads of government at his first NATO summit in May made the Alliance look weak and in disarray, Hodges makes the point that prior US Presidents also complained about burden sharing. In a rather more positive tone than his President, who lambasted 23 of the member nations for not paying what they should for their defence, the General notes that the 2014 commitment to spend 2% of GDP was to be reached a decade later in 2024 and yet “almost every nation in the Alliance has moved either towards that two percent, has achieved it, or at least has stopped that decline. That’s very important because that demonstrates commitment towards collective security.”

“US economic ties with Europe are five times what they are with any other region in the world,” he points out.

The General, due to retire next year, is concerned about balancing the need for more cyber security to counteract Russian and other attacks, with the need for interoperability between the troops of different countries. “No doubt, it’s undisputed, that Russia is putting pressure on nations, individuals, or organisations through the use of cyber… The cyber domain is on the front of everybody’s minds,” he says.

Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO, has said that a cyberattack against a member by another state could trigger a collective military response under Article V.

Hodges, whose career encompasses time spent fighting in Iraq and as Director of Operations in Kandahar, Afghanistan, is sanguine about another nation involved in cyberattacks against the Alliance: Turkey. This is despite an official German security report accusing the NATO member of interference in the German elections due later this month, as well as other policy moves by President Erdogan which are not in keeping with an ally.

“The fact is we are more effective as an alliance with Turkey than we would be without Turkey. It’s been a loyal member of the Alliance since it joined in 1952. It has a very good professional military. The geographic location, obviously, on the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the eastern Mediterranean. It’s essential for the alliance for so much that we have to do in that part of the world,” he says, adding some caveats: “It is a challenge. I think that Turkey knows that their future is with the West. They may buy weapons from Russia, they may depend on Russia for energy, as does half of Europe, but their real, true economic prosperity depends on the West, not Russia.”

Having been involved in NATO at various points in his career, he sounds relatively unconcerned, if not blasé, about internal divergences. “So, look, each member of NATO irritates other members; the United States irritates people; Germany irritates people; the UK irritates. That’s kind of the nature of a coalition.”

On the Korean front, he is very concerned, and sees China as key. “China has the most important role here. China does not want a war in Korea because they will inherit all the debris and the disaster that would fall out from it. But I also don’t think that China wants a unified Korea that would possibly become an American ally the way South Korea is. So, they’ve got to figure out their role,” he says.

Earlier this week, the UN Security Council, which includes China and Russia, voted unanimously to boost sanctions against North Korea. How well these are being respected is another matter.

Meanwhile, Hodges dismisses as misguided a headline-grabbing open letter signed by over 100 tech entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk calling for the United Nations to ban the development and use of killer robots like drones. Their precision significantly reduces civilian and military casualties, while any ban would mean that terrorists and enemies would use them: “So I don’t know what good, in terms of real effect, would come out of that.”

Interviewed after a breakfast briefing to the Worshipful Company of International Bankers, a City of London livery company, as part of reaching out to the public, the General is philosophical, and endearingly humble, about his stellar 37-year career. “I’ve made about every mistake you can make seriously and not get sacked,” he muses.” I’ve been forgiven for losing equipment, getting lost, failing a mission, those kinds of things.”

At a time when there has been a mass erosion of institutional legitimacy in the US and other NATO countries, the fact that the military can hold its head high is due in no small measure to men like General Ben Hodges.

The US and Europe – in sickness and in health

The importance of the Transatlantic Alliance

The venue: an estate close to New York. Our mission: to develop initiatives to help save the transatlantic relationship between the US and Europe. The participants: 40 movers and shakers from the countries involved.

I arrived full of optimism and left in despair because every action we came up with was dismissed as being unworkable due to domestic political agendas. Populism is the curse of our time.  Somewhere in the Trump/Marine Le Pen/Brexit intersection lie the forgotten remains of a transatlantic relationship that forged the post WWII liberal economic and political order.

Those who argue that its day is over, that we must accept and forge ad-hoc alliances amidst constant accommodation with our enemies, are misguided. Although returning to an earlier era is impossible, the West’s strength is dependent on its unity. “All good habits need to be practiced regularly and the Alliance is losing the habit,” in the words of one participant of the Ditchley Foundation’s weekend retreat at the Greentree Estate on New York’s Long Island.

When US President Barack Obama warns the Syrian regime not to cross a red line which it then crosses; when the West is reduced to asking Russia to “show mercy” to Aleppo residents, in the words of the UK’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson; when there are so many crises and flash points in the world, then the need for a reinvigorated transatlantic partnership becomes critical.

In one area, the relationship is working: NATO. Russia’s actions have forced the US to reconnect with the Continent and forced rearmament in Europe, with President Barack Obama’s 2009 “pivot to Asia” reduced to a distant memory. Ties between the European and American military are exceptionally strong, while the relationship between the UK and European NATO members have the friendliness and cooperation absent from the economic and political sphere.

Yet European leaders no longer focus on world order but on internal political stability, even as the continent is surrounded by a ring of external instability, from the Baltics to the Ukraine, the Balkans, Turkey and North Africa. For the UK, Brexit was yet another step in this isolationist direction. For the US, isolationism is the sleeping ogre in its history.

Challenges facing the Transatlantic Alliance include:

1. CHINA Managing the rise of China. The Chinese are “eating us for breakfast and lunch,” according to one participant. Note how badly the Chinese are now treating foreign companies in their own country, even as they buy up our companies and other assets, and transform the South China seas into their own domain. Their policy-makers speak of the New International Order led by a resurgent China and barely pay lip service to the idea of a multi-polar world.

The West’s only opportunity to counter their strength is through strategic unity, not apparent at the moment, and unlikely to surface. The Europeans are hungry for Chinese investment and prepared to overlook cyber-attacks and industrial espionage in the interests of GDP growth and jobs in their low-growth economies. The Americans, as the declining world power, are more combative towards their only serious rival.

2. REFUGEES German Chancellor Angela Merkel took in over a million refugees, a policy that has seen her popularity plummet. Due to families being allowed to re-unite, Germany will probably end up having to take in another 3 million.

The squabbling and disunity in the EU around the problem is no excuse for the US not to get involved in accepting a share. It would be a gesture of solidarity towards its European allies and a nod to the US/West’s role in the Middle East’s bloodbath. However, when Presidential candidate Donald Trump does so well in the polls with an anti-immigrant/Muslim message, it would be politically impossible for Hillary Clinton (if elected President) to welcome Muslims. Not only will the many Americans who vote for Trump still be around and very vocal, but the makeup of Congress may well impede any controversial policy. The massive displacement of populations due to war and the effects of climate change is, according to experts, bound to continue if not increase.

3. RUSSIA Reasons for Russia’s aggression include a declining population, the strategic nightmare of a 4,000 kilometre-plus frontier with China, jihadist problems on its borders and a shrinking economy. Not to mention a sense of humiliation post-the Soviet era and a corrupt, power-hungry President Putin who relies on creating a sense of outside menace to keep his popularity ratings high. In early October Russia launched a three-day civil defence exercise involving 40 million civilians to protect against a supposed US nuclear, biological or chemical attack – a large enough exercise to inspire paranoia in the most sensible Russian.

4. TRADE Global trade growth has decelerated notably since the financial crisis, both a consequence and a reason for lower world economic growth. The relatively simple Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada (pop. 36m) and the EU (pop. 510m) nearly failed because the Walloon (pop. 4.2m) Parliament rejected it. CETA was finally passed a few days later with amendments to satisfy that region of Belgium.

The much more complex Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the US and Europe should be left quietly ticking over in Geneva in the hope that in a few years it could be resuscitated. Now, the coalition of interests arraigned against it is insurmountable. The lack of new trade deals is much more serious than it looks. Trade experts point out that like a bicycle, trade must move forward through new deals or else it collapses. On the transatlantic front, rows over multi-million US fines on European banks, and European Commission attacks on US giants like Google, look likely to continue. Meanwhile, protectionism is on the rise.

5. THREAT TO COMMON VALUES. The spike in hate crimes in the UK after the Brexit vote, especially directed at eastern Europeans, is still above pre-referendum levels. In the US, Donald Trump’s insulting language and behaviour towards Hispanics and women, among others, continues. The anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant platform of the National Front in France looks likely to see the party emerge as the second strongest in France in elections next year. Western societies have made huge advances in recognising the right to respect all individuals, whatever their race, gender and sexual orientation. Yet this basic tenet, one that unites both sides of the Atlantic, is nevertheless being eroded.

There is only so much time to act. The younger generation in the US are internationalists for whom Europe is “just another place full of cathedrals and museums,” as one eminent Harvard professor told us. Contrast this to a previous generation: within three weeks of taking office, President Nixon headed to Europe. The new generation are more prone to turn towards a growing, ever-more powerful Asia.

In the shorter term, the less we focus on our similarities and our combined strengths, the more we risk tiptoeing into a Third World War.