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This transcript is from a CSIS event hosted on March 20, 2025. Watch the full video here.
Matthew Slusher: We continue our in-depth exploration of modern warfare and strategic insights. Welcome to Part Two of the Air and Space Domain, a special two-part episode of our series, Conflict in Focus: Lessons from Russia-Ukraine.
(Music plays.)
Col. Slusher: I’m Colonel Matthew Slusher, a military fellow at CSIS. In our last episode, we explored the role of autonomous vehicles in warfare and took a deep dive into how space is shaping modern conflict. Now we continue the conversation with more critical insights and expert analysis. Up next, we’re joined by Lieutenant General Lance Landrum, U.S. Air Force, retired. General Landrum previously served as the director of operations for a U.S. European Command and later as the deputy chair of the NATO Military Committee. He now provides independent advisory services and consultation to several companies and holds the position of senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
General, it’s a pleasure to have you with us today. And thank you for joining us.
Lieutenant General Lance Landrum: Thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to it.
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Col. Slusher: Great. So we’ve had talks today about lessons learned from the war in Ukraine, and looking for just, you know, some key things that we can kind of unpack. One thing that I noted here that I think has been a decisive factor is electronic warfare, that’s been used in Ukraine over the past three years, and that it’s really reshaping the battle space and affecting modern combat strategy. So first question to you, General Landrum, how has the role of electronic warfare evolved in modern conflicts? And what makes the Ukraine war kind of a defining moment in the evolution?
Lt. Gen. Landrum: Yeah. I think, you know, before we dive into the electromagnetic spectrum – which I think is really important, and certainly one of the points I wanted to make today – I think that I need to at least put an umbrella over that, or a context of that, particularly as an airman, about air superiority, or the lack thereof that either side was able to achieve in Ukraine. And I think that is really, really apparent. And it has resulted in this positional nature of warfare, this relatively stagnant nature of warfare, this attrition warfare, because neither side has been able to establish air superiority during this entire three years.
And I think that stems from many things, right? It stems from equipment. It stems from surface-to-air missile defenses and layered defenses. It stems from operations in the electromagnetic environment and jamming and attack in the electromagnetic environment. Of course, you can’t analyze air superiority without talking about things like the doctrine, the training, and the tactics, and the procedures associated with that on each side. But for sure, the lack of air superiority has led to what we have seen throughout the last three years – the inability for quick maneuver, the inability to have cover for maneuver, the inability to prevent forces in maneuver space from being attacked, and from all layers, from the enemy. And so I think that’s really, really important, associated with the conflict in Ukraine.
And I think we can talk about the electromagnetic spectrum under that umbrella. And I think we can talk a little bit about contested logistics, which are two points that I like to bring up when we talk about lessons in Ukraine. And the reason why is I just think they don’t get enough airtime. And I think people who are really studying this really understand, and they completely – they completely get it. But I think a lot of the public information, a lot of the public debate in many fora goes right to really apparent things, autonomy being one, drones being one, air defense, very important. And all these things are really important. But I think the thing that is the really driving force behind the interoperability, the integration, and the ability to shoot, move, and communicate, really stems from superiority in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Col. Slusher: Agreed. Next one, in the same vein, in terms of technological capabilities how does the electronic – how does electronic warfare that’s being employed in Ukraine compare to previous conflicts, like wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? What have you seen?
Lt. Gen Landrum: Yeah, I think the biggest stark difference is, as we fought in coalition warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan and really all of our operations if you look back over the last 30 years, we were really uncontested in the electromagnetic spectrum. Throughout the Cold War, we had a great focus on superiority in the electromagnetic spectrum. We had lots of human talent thinking about this. We had up-to-date modern equipment associated with it. But with the end of the Cold War, like in many things – and there’s many reasons for it – we shed three decades’ worth of expertise in both human capital, human talent, human thinking associated with it, and also equipment – modernized equipment that is nimble, agile, connected, and integrated, associated with operations in the spectrum.
And I think the important part that is really something to talk about in many, many areas, is all the systems that we have today – practically all the systems that we have today rely on some sort of connectivity, data, or communications through the electromagnetic spectrum. So we have to be careful about wishing that away in our acquisition process, in our exercises, and in our training, because it’s now a contested environment. That’s the difference. Russia had capability. They formed a separate part of their armed forces associated with it. By the way, so has China. And so now we see this with Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, where it really is a contested environment, and we really do have a peer competitor that, in many cases, has superiority.
And that has manifested itself in things like the ability for drones to operate, the ability for precision weapons to remain on target. There’s much evidence out there associated with a lack of accuracy in certain jamming environments, communication infrastructure, and also the ability to command and control forces.
Col. Slusher: Thank you, sir. What would you say are some specific examples of how both Russia and Ukraine have used electronic warfare to gain a strategic advantage on the battlefield?
Lt. Gen. Landrum: Yeah, I think there’s some good examples out there. And there’s a lot of good studies out there. I know the Royal United Services Institute, RUSI, has done some good work on this. And there’s others out there that have done some good work associated with the electromagnetic spectrum. Clearly, there’s a capability to jam GPS signals, so the position navigation and timing signals. So if you think of any autonomous system, it can be an air autonomous system or a ground autonomous system that is using GPS signals for its navigation and for its queuing, when those signals from the GPS satellites are jammed – which are fairly easy to jam because of their weak signal strength when they get to the earth – they lose that – they lose that ability to guide themselves off of GPS positioning.
And so now that then requires an adjustment for capabilities and for forces to put inertial systems on board those, or to have backup line of sight communications with things like drones in order to operate them. But then that comes with other problems, especially with line-of-sight communications, because that is transmitting in the electromagnetic spectrum. So I think, you know, everything from very large, heavy jamming of GPS and position navigation and timing, to jamming of communications, to eavesdropping and signals intelligence associated with communications – on both sides, by the way – and then more local tactical jamming of autonomous systems and drones is another example.
And there’s one specific example where the ability to be agile in this environment and make adjustments is very key. Russia was operating a whole host of small UASes in a certain frequency band, to which Ukraine, of course, became savvy to. And they were able to jam and had good effect in that frequency band. But then Russia swapped into a different frequency band and it took some time for Ukrainian forces in order to adjust, associated with that. And that opened up an area of vulnerability for the Ukrainian forces during that time.
Col. Slusher: Yeah. Great example. And based on these current trends that we’re seeing in Ukraine, can you extrapolate, and how would you see electronic warfare shaping a future conflict in the next decade?
Lt. Gen. Landrum: Yeah. I think – when we talk about operations in the electromagnetic spectrum, I think we’re learning some old lessons right up front again, and it’s becoming a reality. Like many other things in Russia’s war in Ukraine, there’s just no denying certain aspects of it. And so I think as we shape the future, we can look to learning from what has happened there, and then extrapolating what we expect to happen into the future. Because we need to do that, because our adversaries are doing that. And so I think that there are some fundamental areas that need to be addressed by not only the United States, but the rest of the NATO allied nations and our partners around the world.
And that is, we have to consider the operations and connectivity in the electromagnetic spectrum from the – from very day one, right? And it has to be across the board. The United States signed an electromagnetic spectrum superiority strategy back in 2020. And they have certain lines of effort associated with that, that are good lines of effort, right? And starts with superior capabilities, right? That’s the tech and that’s the equipment. But it also has the underlying underpinning of that, and that is a fully integrated architecture and system and infrastructure associated with the spectrum, partnerships with industry, government, and military. Because the spectrum is a physical space that is shared by all these, and needed by all of these, both on our side, and our commercial side, and the military side. And so you can’t deny the fact that there’s some overlap there in the need.
And, of course, NATO has followed suit with a similar strategy that is in line with what the United States produced. But I think the real key is that when we develop capabilities, the capabilities have to be modern, agile, nimble, software-defined, and able to react and maneuver in that space, in order to understand the space, understand the electromagnetic environment, being able to evaluate it, and maneuver when and where we need to maneuver, and deny the enemy the same.
Col. Slusher: That’s great. We’ll just stay on EW, I think, for one more, and then we’ll switch gears. So this is kind of the last one in that vein. How do you envision the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into electronic warfare in the next coming years, if we’re not seeing it already? And then, how could these technologies impact the military decision making and then for our overall operational effectiveness?
Lt. Gen. Landrum: Yeah, sure. There’s some concepts out there, and maybe even more than conceptual nature, of cognitive electronic warfare, right, in bringing in modern algorithms. And, of course, it’s easy to say machine learning and artificial intelligence in a lot of things we talk about. The bottom line is there really is a lot of technology that is state of the art, modern, from a lot of creative and innovative industry, in order to produce capabilities that are incredibly agile across the spectrum of radio frequencies and other frequencies in the spectrum, to be able to sense, make sense, and maneuver in the open space, and then jump over and maneuver in the other open space when it is denied. And so the ability for systems to do that automatically, at computing speed that a human mind would never be able to keep up with, is really, really important.
The other part, I think, that is ripe for modern algorithms and machine learning in AI is understanding the electromagnetic environment. Remember, it is commercial use. It’s civilian use. It’s government use. It’s military use. And a lot of times these frequencies and these bands are overlapping, and they step on each other and they interfere with each other unintentionally. Sometimes in warfare and crisis situations we do this intentionally, but most of the time we just need to deconflict and maneuver in open space. So understanding the environment, understanding where there’s vulnerabilities, understanding where friendly systems and neutral systems are operating, and then understanding where offensive – like electronic attack, electromagnetic attack – would interfere with your own friendly systems, as well as interfering with enemy systems. I think that those areas are very ripe for a lot of this modern technology.
Col. Slusher: Agreed. So let’s spend the last half of our time here, and let’s touch on contested logistics. How has the Ukraine war highlighted the importance of contested logistics in modern warfare? And what lessons can be drawn from both sides’ experiences in managing supply chains under a direct threat?
Lt. Gen. Landrum: Yeah, I think the logistics and sustainment part is, again, another example of the reality of, there’s an element of this that we fully understood, knew. And I know that the Department of Defense in the United States was thinking about it as they thought about the joint concept for contested logistics, along with its nesting into the joint war fighting concepts. But this has brought reality to the vulnerability of supply chains, the vulnerability of logistics centers, and how we move and project force.
And so when we talk about contested logistics, I think it is such a big, big area to delve into, right? And they’re all very, very important. But my point today is really not to talk about supply chain security, although it’s very important, defense industrial base, right? The United States has a whole strategy to generate the defense industrial base, to produce surge capability. All that, incredibly important. It’s incredibly important for the NATO alliance as well. But I think the thing that we’ve learned by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the vulnerability of the nodes, right? Large infrastructure, large supply centers, large distribution centers. The vulnerability of the modes of transport – rail, roads, bridges, aerial ports, et cetera.
And so the main takeaway that I think is we have to really think about how we disaggregate our logistics and sustainment in order to survive, and re-aggregate it at the time and place of need. Not an easy thing to solve. Easy thing to talk about and not an easy thing to solve. But I think the vulnerability with long-range strike, long-range precision weapons, non-kinetic, you know, cyber and connectivity, electromagnetic attack, requires us to really think about how are we going to disaggregate for survival, command and control this disaggregated logistics and sustainment capability, move and generate it at the time and place we need, and then disperse it again for survival?
Col. Slusher: Yes, sir. Hundred percent, that’s what we need. How is – how has the U.S. and NATO thought about their logistic strategies, which you you’ve mentioned they both have them, when you address an emerging threat of contested supply lines? Especially in areas of peers and great-power competition?
Lt. Gen. Landrum: Yeah. I think there’s a couple of avenues that I think that we’re struggling with, both in the United States and within the alliance, right? Just because it’s not a simple – the question isn’t even simple, let alone trying to figure out the answer for it. I think the best way to think about this is to just examine where we have evolved over the last 30 or 40 years – again, since the end of the Cold War. And in general, what militaries have done – this is the United States and other NATO alliance members – over the course of the last 30 or 40 years have significantly divested military logistics and sustainment capabilities. And we have outsourced them to commercial industry.
It was legitimate. It was it was understood. And there was a level of efficiency that was brought to bear by commercial industry, because they streamlined things to make perfect – just in time, on time delivery, no non-value-added effort, no non-value-added work or expense, right? And so what happened is over the – over the decades is that we became incredibly efficient. We outsourced and divested of military logistics capability, using commercial capability to get this service that we needed, because we had the luxury of planning well in advance for our operations.
So think about when we deployed into Iraq over the years. Think about when we deployed into Afghanistan over the years. Those forces and units that would deploy had months and months, if not over years, of planning time in order to plan out the movement of forces, the movement of equipment, and the shipment, in partnership with commercial industry, to do most of that. And it had the luxury of time to do that. Think about today. Do we really have the luxury of time? Oh, by the way, we did it in an uncontested environment where we can move really – pretty much freedom of maneuver.
This is going to be a different environment. It’s going to be contested from the beginning. It’s going to be contested through cyber. It’s going to be contested through kinetic. And it’ll be it very difficult to assess what is the commercial surge capability when and where we need it, and how far will commercial companies go towards areas of danger in order to continue the sustainment.
Col. Slusher: On the line of, again, future conflicts, or this modern landscape we found ourselves in – and particularly again with great powers – how do you expect them to evolve with regard to – in contested logistics, and the integration of hybrid or unconventional supply methods?
Lt. Gen. Landrum: Yeah, I think when you talk about hybrid tactics we’re seeing this right now throughout Europe. There’s sabotage happening. There’s cyber happening. There are odd things happening under the sea and on the seabed that are difficult to attribute, and they’re difficult to explain. And so I think that our supply chains are brittle, right? Our modes of transport are brittle, right? This is about the ability to project forces across the European continent. It’s the ability to project forces across the oceans, whether it be to the Pacific or to the European continent. And the ability of the nodes to receive them, and then stage them, and onward movement, RSOI.
So ports, port structure, who runs, operates, and owns those ports? We’ve seen a lot of foreign investment in ports around the world. The Chinese has a lot of investment in ports around the world. The port infrastructure, the ability for throughput, the ability to surge. And then when you take it from ports, you take it to aerial ports, it’s the same thing, right? What is the throughput and the ability to surge roads, bridges, et cetera? In fact, the Center for European Policy Analysis in 2021 did a very large study on military mobility. A very good report, very comprehensive, with many recommendations associated with military mobility across the European continent.
Some are relatively simple to identify, difficult to work with politicians and those who hold the money and resources in order to do it. But it’s road infrastructure, the weight-bearing loads of roads, weight-bearing limits of bridges. It’s rail infrastructure and rail gauges as we transition into Eastern Europe. Those changes that are really important. Port structure, et cetera. So there’s not only infrastructure associated with this, but there’s a lot of policy and rules as well. There’s customs and border crossing across the European nations. Even within the European Union, in the Schengen, there’s a lot of difficulty across borders, particularly with hazardous materials, explosives, other hazardous materials.
And I think we have to be very cautious about getting into a mentality that, well, when there’s a real crisis and a real war it’ll all be OK. We have to practice, train, and exercise, and smooth flow military mobility across the continent in day-to-day business and day-to-day operations, so that this transition through crisis and into conflict is as smooth as possible. Because rapid action in order to project force, to deny an adversary their initial objectives and goals, and then take back NATO territory, is going to be very important.
Col. Slusher: Hundred percent. So we’ve got time for one more. How might the experiences from Ukraine influence military procurement strategies, especially in terms of stockpiling, supply chain diversification, and logistics innovation?
Lt. Gen. Landrum: Yeah. I think as far as procurement, when it comes to contested logistics – and now we broaden that out to more of the stockpiling, the warehousing, supply chain, sort of management – I think what we’re seeing is, first of all, there are certain stores that we just need to have larger stockpiles of. I mean, we went in – “we,” Ukraine, NATO alliance members, to include the United States – went into this Russian invasion with stockpiles that were, admittedly, too low. Artillery shells are the easy examples to bring out on that. And so there’s a level of just investing in crisis in advance, right, and accepting the cost of stockpiling.
The other part of it is being more agile in some of our capability development, right? What parts and pieces can use modern technology? So, for example, additive manufacturing, or 3-D printing would be one example. How can parts and pieces be brought together to integrate and interoperate? This is a lot of software systems and technology systems. We have to get away from systems that are proprietary, that the company that made the system and made the brains inside the system cannot have firewalls that allow no other third-party vendor to integrate with. I think that understanding the commercial benefits, and understanding the nation’s industrial benefits, this is not serving the alliance well to have proprietary, closed systems that cannot interoperate, and integrate, and communicate, and push and pull data, in between systems.
So I think all of that relates to how we think about logistics stockpiling, which is going to be critical for the weapons needed for all systems and all domains. But, back to the original thought of air superiority, just the amount of petroleum, oil, lubricants that are necessary, the spare parts that are necessary, the weapons that are necessary, particularly when we disperse aircraft and combat aircraft into austere locations, right, disaggregate to survive, reaggregate when necessary. The C2 of that, not only in the actual forces but in the logistics and sustainment of those forces, and the disaggregated positions is going to be very important.
Col Slusher: Yes, it will. Well, sir, thank you so much for, you know, touching on these very critical functions and explaining them in a way that I think we can all benefit from and, hopefully, start to get after. So, again, thank you for your insight that you shared today. And appreciate your time.
Lt. Gen. Landrum: My pleasure. Thank you.
Col. Slusher: Thank you.
It is my honor and pleasure to introduce our final guest today, Air Marshal Johnny Stringer of the Royal Air Force. He is the deputy commander of NATO’s Allied Air Command, where he oversees NATO’s air operations and has a key role in strengthening the interoperability of the alliance’s air forces across Europe. Air Marshal, great to see you again. And thank you for your time today.
Air Marshal Johny Stringer: You too, Matt. Great to be here.
Col. Slusher: Great. Well, we’ve been discussing with some of our other guests on just kind of unpacking lessons learned from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, especially in terms of air and space domain. So just kind of on that same train of thought, in light of the Ukraine conflict how has NATO adapted its air strategies to address the increasing complexity of hybrid warfare? You know, which is blending conventional and unconventional tactics.
Marshal Stringer: Yeah. Thanks, Matt. I mean, I think, if I may, I’ll probably kind of set out a context to this, which hopefully informs that question and kind of provides backdrop to a discussion. So I think, regardless of what has happened in Ukraine since February 2022, NATO, and indeed Western airpower, kind of come out of two long shadows. So the first one, which really now has been reset by the invasion, was the 30 years that we won the Cold War, which saw us conceptually and also physically disinvested. And the second, about 20 years long, was the impact of counterinsurgency, or counterterrorism campaigning – I was going to say globally, but most obviously in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and, indeed, against Islamic State.
So we had, in that 30 years, done a very fine job of perfecting a way in warfare that was probably first seen in 1991 in Gulf War One. But we’d also given our adversaries and our competitors, you know, a pretty good idea of our particular way in warfare. And they have spent that time looking at how they symmetrically and, to your question, increasingly asymmetrically counter it and secure advantage for themselves. So although I’ll chat about the air domain, clearly there’s a whole bunch of things here where you seek to exploit everything from social media, through to legal means, disinformation in areas, to kind of set the agenda in your favor.
So against that backdrop, and also noting, of course, that NATO, now a defensive alliance of 32 nations is, by necessity, and quite rightly, limited in exactly what it can do. What we need to be is increasingly imaginative in our posture, increasingly imaginative in where we see capability development going. And I’m sure we’ll probably return to that in a moment. But also making sure that, wherever possible, we are showing the agility in response, but also, importantly, exploiting our capabilities in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance to really understand what the landscape looks like that we’re confronting at the moment.
I think what is definitely true, and your question absolutely gets to this, is a kind of very mechanical series of responses, almost, series of kind of response options, plans that were unchanging, a lack of mental, let alone organizational, agility, are just the sort of things that are going to undo you. And they’re going to undo you and your current phase, where you’re most definitely seeking to message and deter, let alone, God forbid, if you ever actually have to get into a fight. So of necessity, I probably won’t go into too many specifics of what that looks like, but you will see against that sort of basing of staff in different places, responding in different ways to the things which we are seeing ahead of us, and also ensuring that we’re not being undone in other ways that will ultimately limit the employment of Western airpower, and space power, and the advantages it brings to the alliance. It’s kind of something which not only informs the day job, it informs it on a daily basis as well.
Col Slusher: Hey, sir, the importance of advanced air defense systems has come to the forefront since the conflict has started three years ago. What lessons has NATO learned from Ukraine’s use of air defense? And how might this shape the future development of NATO’s integrated air defense system?
Marshal Stringer: Yeah. I mean, it’s such a key question, Matt. Of course, one of the things that NATO’s air force has supported, and working hand-in-hand with our colleagues in in the land domain, in maritime, in space, and increasingly, of course, in cyber, have as a key task for all of the nations in the alliance is a defense of European airspace. Because if you’re defending your airspace, you are kind of defending the territory as well. And you’ll know NATO’s policy, quite rightly, of defending every inch of territory equally. I think it’s really important at the outset to say, just look at how – and your question kind of gets to this – just look at how the threat has changed.
So NATO, back in the late ’50s, recognized that its posture at that time, and its response, needed significant overhaul to, at that point, a Soviet threat that was manifesting itself in very different ways. Fast forward now to 2025, I think we’re in the same place. If we’d been having this chat 10 years ago, it probably would have been a discussion that was kind of comfortably around dealing with an air threat manifested by fighters and bombers. And there were surface-to-air missiles in here somewhere, and radars, and the C2, the command and control, that pulled it all together.
What we’re now looking at is a threat landscape that at one end is very cheap. One-way drones. You know, FPV drones with very simple warheads. They cost peanuts in the great scheme of things. And you can produce them in the thousands and thousands. And at the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got things like, you know, AS-24, an air-launched ballistic missile that’s hypersonic. It can travel very far, very fast, covers distance very quickly. And what we’re having to do, I think, is take our approach to integrated air and missile defense back to – almost back to first principles, given just how rapidly and how broadly the threat has evolved. So against that, what do you see? Well, if you can’t actually sense – if you can’t actually via various means, not just radar by the way, identify threats coming at you, there’s no point in buying a whole load more of various systems, or more fast jets, or whatever.
So you’ve got to get your ability to sense right. And I think you are seeing already from Ukraine, where very impressive use of very cheap acoustic sensors in the thousands, linked into their overall defensive – their recognized air picture, for the term we would use. You know, that’s already providing them with significant situational awareness that they wouldn’t have had before. And then that’s feeding into how they actually posture their forces. So I’ll come back to that in a moment. But sensing is the first thing.
You then got to get your command and control right. And, again, it won’t surprise anybody who’s interested in this field that C2 is another area that is offering opportunity, but that’s also actually demanding change at the same time. So again, it won’t surprise that we are doing a lot of work on what our command and control structures look like. Not just the IAMD, by the way, but IAMD is a key part of it.
Then that word “posture” again. Where do you actually put the forces? What can you use? What can you use most intelligently, as well? So we’re looking at that. And some of that, by the way, is – you know, it’s a no-money thing to do. As I said, it’s just changing where you’re putting stuff, what your alert states may be, where your first opportunity of an intercept might be compared to maybe where it was a few years ago. And then, of course, you do actually end up needing to buy some things that either go bang or do some further stuff for you non-kinetically in order to be using the whole thing together.
But one of the things I would say as well is – and this is – although NATO is a defensive alliance, part of airpower doctrine going back to really the start of airpower, military airpower, almost, there’s been not just a defensive side of what we would call ground to air but the offensive side of it as well. So somewhere in here against that threat landscape I described you can’t just sit there hoping to be continually reactive against munitions more than platforms that are coming at you in the thousands and thousands. So somewhere in here you’re going to have to be necessarily offensive to be defensive. You’re going to have to look at what your enemy can do and engage it almost at the enterprise level – you know, dealing with a manufacturer, dealing with supply routes, dealing with how they do their own command and control, because otherwise you’re trying to bank on having almost a bottomless magazine on your own side and also the sense and command and control to deal with what’s coming at you. So there is, for want of a better phrase, a bit of a ying and a yang here between offensive and defensive.
But I come back to, also, how you posture your forces. And I, again, can’t go into too many of the specifics, but I think if we look back at some of the things we actually did in the Cold War of the integration of forces across different domains, I think there are some really good sort of pointers – not adopt 100 percent, but pointers from history that we’re also going to find ourselves kind of revisiting and refreshing for the current threat.
Col. Slusher: Absolutely. You mentioned the alliance is going to need response options and a force that is ready to rapidly implement those.
You know, this conflict has also highlighted the importance of real-time communication and intelligence sharing. How has NATO enhanced its command-and-control systems – and you mentioned command and control as a function, but I’m referring to the systems – to ensure more effective coordination across those 32 members, as you mentioned, that is a help sometimes – I don’t want to call it a hindrance, but sometimes difficult to cross and interconnect? Can you speak to that?
Marshal Stringer: Yeah. So one of the things NATO was really good at during the Cold War was standardization. We had things called STANAGs, standardization agreements, and they applied all over the place and really helped with the interoperability across the alliance in many ways. And you know, maybe we’ll return to it. And we actually had digital STANAGs. We still do.
But again, coming back to, hey, you know, we won the Cold War, there’s no threat, we’re kind of distracted by other stuff, maybe our adherence to some of those STANAGs kind of drifted a bit, and I think it did. So one of the key bits of what we’re doing is making sure we get that back, so some good work there.
Second part: There’s a lot you can do when you standardized and agree your digital protocols. I mean, again, a lot of folk on this, Matt, will know things like Link 16, the various other links that we’ve had out there; will know about interoperability in both open and secure comms systems; which really have been the bedrock of our operations for over, you know, 30 years now at least, and built on what our – you know, our predecessors developed, really going back to World War II and onwards. So that’s always been a key element of airpower employment, and of course when I look at Link 16 use across the alliance, a number of other things which are commonplace, that’s obviously helping with this.
Also, of course, it’s right to recognize there are a number of different national air C2 systems or systems that nations use, so you got to make sure that all of those are not only interoperable where necessary with themselves but they plug into the overall NATO architecture. So we’re doing that.
Are there rooms for some improvement? Yeah, there definitely are, because in all of these things technology never stands still. So we put a lot of effort into how we review and where necessary overhaul parts of our architecture, and then that leads on to what our kind of overall NATO-level air C2 systems need to be capable of.
And if I can give an analogy – other ones are available, but I run with this one for now – what you don’t want to do is software development like in the – like in the ’80s and ’90s where the answer was one big program to try and do everything. You know, I think nations across the board, not just in defense and security, all have their kind of favorite, if I can call that – use that maybe notorious examples of where we spent fortunes on programs that never came to fruition.
So the analogy I would use, if what we’re trying to really generate here is a kind of the iPhone or the smartphone but it’s your hardware – which, by the way, you’re also routinely refreshing – but it comes with the iOS that allows you to hang the applications on it that you want to that are fitted to the air C2 task, don’t go for the one big thing on the iPhone, you know? That’s absolute nonsense. What you’re trying to do is develop/select the right things for you to use.
And I’ll go a little bit further on that if I may, Matt. If we get this right, two things, I think, will naturally happen from it which will be to everybody’s benefit.
The first is kind of at the – almost at the individual or the – or the low-level organization level, which is the user interface that we’re going to get – sorry to sound a bit geeky here, especially as a history graduate – but the user interface is going to be so intuitive – somebody was telling me the other day, you know, the example is buying stuff off Amazon, other websites, other websites are available. But the point is you don’t sit down to do a five-hour or a five-day course on how to order stuff online. It’s just easy because the interface with the user is easy. That’s what we need to be driving at as the default on all of our stuff.
The second thing that follows is if you take a sort of DevSecOps approach to the development of your applications, you really will generate and sustain that intelligent, imaginative ecosystem where there are multiple suppliers out there, you know, from the long-established software and other houses down to the two or three individuals in the garage with a brilliant idea. Of course, that demands real agility in how we contract that, to be honest, has perhaps not been a hallmark of the alliance in the past because it hasn’t really needed to. But if pace and agility are two key watchwords in what we – in what we have to do in the future, this would be an awesome place to start.
Col. Slusher: Absolutely.
I do want to switch gears, staying with the conflict but a different area: The use of drones and what a gamechanger that that has been. What do you see as the implications of drone warfare for NATO’s air operations both in terms of a threat but also as an opportunity?
Marshal Stringer: Yeah. So kind of back to those two long shadows in a way, what was coming the other way at the same time but kind of development and almost confluence of a bunch of – convergence of a bunch of technologies, which in parallel saw them effectively being democratized. So I first used this example back in 2017, so, you know, this is – this is kind of recent history we’ve come from. It’s not suddenly being revealed to us in 20-sort-of-23 or 2025. And that was, actually, if you look at the four traditional airpower roles, you know, of air superiority, of conventional strike, of intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance, of lift, actually – and if you put C2 in there, of using them as assist – then, actually, your drones netted to somebody with rudimentary means of C2 – could be as simple as a radio, because they were monitoring what the drone was doing from a laptop or a control system – allied to simple warheads being put into them, you could conduct most if not all of the airpower roles for the price of a drone, a laptop, and some imagination.
So we have seen that, you know, deepen, widen, whatever terms you want to use – certainly accelerate. And I think what you’re seeing in Ukraine, Matt, to your point, of course, is almost – not a preordained; nothing ever is, is it? But you could see the direction of travel here from a long way away.
Right, challenges. I kind of touched on one earlier. This now allows an adversary, no matter really how deep their pockets are, to come at us in ways that we never had to counter in the past. So the most obvious challenge, you know, we spoke about before, which is what that means in terms of how you deal with integrated air – the integrated air and missile defense response to that.
Let me give you an obvious opportunity there as well and maybe broaden the answer just a little bit. Another truism of military airpower is it kind of has got more and more expensive over the years as well. You know, it’s not too long ago where people were saying that, you know, defense inflation would take you to the point where you had this remarkably capable thing but you only had one of them. So I think one of the things that drones but also a bunch of related technologies give you is what my boss would talk about as real opportunities in the high-low mix.
And without going into areas which, again, I can’t do – so I kind of make it a bit hypothetical – alongside those expensive things which give you, you know, a level of capability, a level of access to an enemy target set that otherwise you wouldn’t have, there are a bunch of things that really don’t cost a lot at all – actually, some of them aren’t drones at all, but some of them will use drone technology to give you the effect you require – where actually, put together and packaged imaginatively with some pretty high-quality mission planning, by the way, attached to it, one of the things these do mean, again – you know, hypothetical example – but whereas my traditional operational analysis would say I might need to send kind of eight high-end standoff weapons to achieve the effect I’m after, by packaging intelligently, by using a bunch of these other capabilities including drones and the things they can do to you, I only need to send two or three. So now look at the effective de facto increase in mass I’ve achieved, let alone the weapons effectiveness increase on the stuff that – back to my earlier point, because it is expensive you can’t buy in the numbers that, you know, bottomless wealth would allow you to do, or indeed you haven’t got the industrial capacity to do – so whilst there a real challenge too, there’s a real opportunity here.
And to broaden that example a little bit more, it does worry me a little bit that our language in and around air forces still ties things like generations to platforms. So when we say fifth generation, how many people conjure up an F-22 or especially an F-35? And when we say sixth generation, how many people are thinking of things like NGAD, stuff that China is knocking out, or things that our European programs like FCAS and GCAP? My sense is we should be talking more about what sixth-generation warfare looks like. And of course, while high-low mix is needed shorthand, the reality is that’s kind of stratified at various levels.
As an aside and back to the IAMD point, Matt – and maybe we’ll come on to it – that kind of thinking also perhaps changes how you posture stuff, what you buy, and what it might give you in terms of an opportunity at dealing with those drones in a much cheaper way with much more shot opportunities and a much earlier chance to engage than perhaps our current approach to IAMD gives us.
Col. Slusher: Yes, sir. Thank you for that.
And let’s pivot just slightly from unmanned systems, meaning drones, to manned systems. So, given the extensive use inside Ukraine of both cutting-edge and older aircraft, how do you foresee the future of airpower evolving in NATO? Do you think there will be a greater emphasis on advanced technology? And you touched on that with the higher generation of manned aircraft. Do you see that there is a role for legacy systems also in future conflict?
Marshal Stringer: Yeah. Matt, it’s kind of tempting to give you an answer that’s one letter and two digits and say B-52. So, you know, that sense of, no, I must always have something that’s new and flashy and giving me an edge in the here and now, well, that is always going to be true to a point. But equally, what we’ve also seen, that, you know – well, like, I gave you the B-52 example. I mean, talk about a platform where, because you’ve got kind of some of the basics right – range, payload, et cetera – you know, look at what that continues to give you. So, actually, that – you know, if you get – almost get the design principles right, you can continue to find utility in it. You can continue to refresh in what it gives you in an overall – in this case, an overall airpower mix.
But I think we’re definitely seeing that, you know, the current generation of – you know, back to that generation word again. What we would lazily call fourth generation – things like F-16s, Eurofighters, Rafales, et cetera – by dint of continual upgrade of systems; and, by the way, continued imagination – in fact, you know, a key – a key part here – continued imagination and innovation in how we employ, and thus, you know, the importance here of capability development.
You will always, I think, see continued utility. And air forces need to be really careful, particularly when their no matter what resources get constrained, that we don’t keep arguing for ever-expensive and flashy things. Yes, we need a fair number of them, but let’s make sure we’re finding the continued utility for the stuff we’ve got.
And if I may kind of bridge from that, Matt, to the broader point, and certainly something that we have been doing here in AIRCOM – and it kind of almost comes back to across all of your questions, really – somewhere in all of here is the importance placed, I think, on capability development. It’s not really that long ago at all that NATO AIRCOM wouldn’t have been thinking like that. You know, there was a sense that, well, that’s what individual air forces do. There’s obviously a massive voice in all of this for the U.S. and the USAF, not just the USAF. And that will continue to be the case, of course. But actually, what we’ve increasingly seen, I think, is the need to be really championing capability development, experimentation in kind of all of its forms.
And therefore, it’s not a surprise that AIRCOM held its first-ever weapons and tactics conference in 2023. We held our first-ever high-end air exercise under the banner of Ramstein Flag last year. And the next one, Ramstein Flag 25, will be run mainly, but not exclusively, out of the Netherlands in early April of this year. And we’re looking at what we can do synthetically as well. So that sense of capability development through, again, imagination, the experimentation of it, both live and, increasingly, I think, in the synthetic worlds as well, this is kind of something which, if we weren’t focused on before too much, we most definitely are now.
Col. Slusher: Sir, how would you say that the conflict in Ukraine has reshaped NATO’s approach to deterrence, particularly with regard to airpower? What role do you see NATO’s air forces in preventing future escalations or conflicts?
Marshal Stringer: Yeah. You know, here’s a health warning: I would say this, wouldn’t I?
But, you know, just in simple physics, airpower gives you the ability to crunch time, speed, and distance problems like just about nothing else. It also, used imaginatively with the other domains, poses just a world of challenge to an adversary.
So what you want to have are forces that not only have the technical capability, but – not only you have the capacity, you know, the numbers that you need of them, but those two Cs underpin, you know, the crucial pillar in deterrence, which is credibility. So I think, you know, if I look out across all of NATO’s air forces, whether it’s the refresh of current platforms, which it’s procurement of new ones – across the board, by the way, not just – I’m not just talking fighters here; you know, key enabling stuff – ISR, tankers, airlift, the munitions, et cetera – you know, that has got to be a key element in all of this.
The other thing I would say, Matt – and sorry again, kind of riffing on your question just a little bit and linking back to what I was just talking about – one thing we’ve also got to ensure we do here is operate at the speed that matches what we’re seeing in terms of adaptation in the air-and-space environment as well. So, back to how do you retain credibility in your deterrent posture, you don’t do that by being very good at building the things you’ve always done that might not be appropriate to the threat landscape that you’re seeing.
So back to imagination and innovation here: How do you come up with ways of using what you’ve got already that are different, but that an opponent looks like and goes, I wasn’t expecting to see that and I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to counter it? Because, back to how you deter and the need to deter, none of us want to get in a fight with anybody. That’s a failure, complete failure. So, therefore, best you design forces that – back to credibility – are designed to win in any fight, because you will therefore deter by default. You know, you get that for free as part of your focus on winning if you needed to. That’s the kind of thing that deters.
But what that also leads to is – and I touched on it a moment ago – the integration across domains, what NATO will brigade under the term multidomain operations. So this is more than just being quite good at the joint stuff that we did in the past. It’s genuinely across all five domains. It’s the imaginative employment of special forces. It’s what you do with your other levers of alliance power away from the classic military ones. So bringing all those together in harmony, in the here and now, is essential, I think, from the pinning of deterrent posture as well.
I’ll just give one final thought on that as well. What you also need to make sure you can do is not have a kind of cliff edge between conventional and then there’s this massive spike to what nuclear looks like. And again, you’ll forgive me for not going into detail here, but I think one of the things we have to ensure for our own governments, by the way, let alone the alliance as a thing in its own right, is we’ve got to provide a variety of deterrent options as well that gives our politicians, you know, the certainty and the reassurance that there are things that, if your opponent is seeking to escalate, mention sort of hybrid and destabilizing activities right at the start, that allow us to provide a series of possible responses where any adversary looks at it and goes: What’s going to come back at me is just not worth any potential reward that I might seek from activity. And again, you know, we’re back to almost classic deterrence theory here, but certainly, given that edge, a really quite rapidly evolving threat landscape.
Col. Slusher: Thank you for that, sir.
And we’ve got time for one more question, and I think almost everything you’ve said kind of feeds into this. So, given the nature of this warfare that we’re seeing unfold in Ukraine, how do you envision NATO’s air doctrine evolving over, say, the next 10 years in order to keep pace with the rapidly changing landscape of modern warfare?
Marshal Stringer: Yeah. I think there’s a great kind of nature-and-character discussion here. You know, the nature of warfare is kind of consistent, but, boy, is the character changing fast.
I think the tenets of what we do, you know, came back to those core airpower roles. You know, what doesn’t go away? Well, Ukraine has shown what happens if neither side is able to achieve the necessary level of air superiority. If that – if that had been the case for either side, I genuinely don’t believe would have been, you know, almost to the day three years into this conflict.
And, by the way, you really do want to achieve air superiority, because otherwise you are condemning yourself to the kind of attritional – you know, awful attritional fight that we’ve seen over the last three years and that level of casualties. It’s, frankly, horrific. So that’s not going to change.
Imagination in how we go about affecting that most definitely is. We’re already seeing that anyway. I think we’re going to put a greater premium, an ever-increasing premium really, on the integration of kinetic and non-kinetic. And I think, if we’re being honest with ourselves about the level of nations let alone the level of NATO, where we’ve done that most recently in conflicts elsewhere, it’s probably been episodic. It’s been kind of spikes of activity. It’s not necessarily been at default level. So I think that is most definitely going to be a key factor.
What’s going to power that? Amongst other stuff, ever-increasing moves towards autonomy, AI and machine learning, really human-machine teaming, the ability to genuinely operate at machine speed. And again, I’ll be blunt on this, Matt. That is going to have to force some overdue discussions, you know, at a society level, not just a political one, really – not because I think we’re throwing our values out; quite the opposite. Indeed, I think there’s a very strong case to be made that says if some of those technologies reduce the risk to your forces, let alone reduce the overall level of casualties, is it actually amoral or immoral not to employ them?
So I think there needs to be a very vibrant discussion – I’ve said this for a few years now – on the appropriate use of that and what nations are content with, because if we don’t, we really do – again, I’ve said it before, but we run the risk of developing technologies that we don’t have the permissions to employ.
I spoke about agility, pace, and imagination earlier. Those are only – you know, on one level, of course you do. We’ve always been like that, haven’t we? Well, yeah, we were, but maybe we just got a bit comfortable for 30 years. So we’re going to have to reimagine that. That, by the way, brings us into thinking about risk in ways that are much more balanced against opportunity, intended consequence, and benefit than I think they’ve allowed to have become over the last few years. So that’s a really important discussion to have here as well.
And then the other thing we’re really going to have to do – and I spoke about it earlier – we’re going to have to be continually testing, and experimenting, and validating, and never being happy with what we signed off on yesterday. You know, again, grade-three word that I always use, Team GB in the Olympics in 2012, better never stops. You know, you’re never going to get to the place of perfection here. And link that back to deterrence. You have to be continually iterating what you’re doing so your opponents know that you are serious. And it will make them think more than just twice about doing anything against you. Matt, let me say, the nature stays the same, but always the character of the games change.
Col. Slusher: I can’t agree more, sir. With that, I want to thank you so much for your thoughts and your insight today. Very meaningful and helpful. And especially for all that you do for the alliance. So thank you so much, sir. And it’s good to see you again.
Marshal Stringer: Yeah. My absolute pleasure, Matt. Thanks very much.
Col. Slusher: That wraps up our episode on the Air and Space Domain, part of the Conflict in Focus: Lessons from Russia-Ukraine Series. We will continue exploring lessons from other key domains in the weeks ahead. Find this episode and more on YouTube and at CSIS.org. Thank you for watching.
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