NATO turns data into defense advantage

Data is now decisive in warfare

Jean Charles Ellermann-Kingombe, NATO's assistant secretary general for cyber and digital transformation, says the ability to master and manage data is now a decisive factor in military victory or defeat.

Permission, not technology, is the bottleneck

Ellermann-Kingombe says the real obstacle to data-sharing is not technology but permission: classification boundaries, national rules and trust decisions between NATO's member nations.

“The bottleneck is often not technology, but permission: classification boundaries, national rules and trust decisions.”

AI as military decision advantage

Once data is well managed, AI becomes an enabler of military effectiveness. Modern operations generate volumes of data no human organisation can process unaided at the speed required.

What AI can do for commanders

AI can fuse information, detect patterns, support planning, prioritise scarce resources and accelerate staff processes, providing commanders with better insight, earlier warnings and more resilient options.

Data fuels software-defined defense

AI can only reliably accelerate defense mission outcomes if built on vast, relevant and quality data. Data is the fuel powering the shift to software-defined defense, delivering military capability through flexible, modular software.

NATO Edge 26 in Izmir

NATO Edge 26, the Alliance's annual defense innovation show, will be held in Izmir, Türkiye, in November and is expected to attract over three thousand participants and more than two hundred seventy technology partners.

Data scattered across five domains

Defense data naturally lives wherever operations happen: across land, sea, air, space and cyber domains, stored in different formats like images, audio transcripts, documents and geospatial data across thousands of different mission systems.

Complexity of thirty-two nations

Building a common operational picture across the digital environments of thirty-two NATO member nations requires multi-intelligence fusion of massive volumes of data held in disparate systems, from legacy databases to cloud platforms.

Data mesh architecture as solution

A data mesh approach manages data where it originates and lives, without moving or duplicating it, so it can be searched, queried and analyzed from multiple access points across the entire environment including allied partners.

Data stays under national control

Because data stays under the control of the nation or system that owns it, access can be governed by policy at the source, with classification boundaries and national rules enforced where the data lives.

Open standards enable interoperability

A data mesh approach relies on open standards that enable defense organizations to connect systems never designed to work together, from legacy platforms to dispersed infrastructure, so data stays findable and effectively analyzed.

NATO-industry cooperation is vital

At a time of great geopolitical uncertainty, with data increasingly considered a primary defense asset, NATO members face growing pressure to turn it into operational advantage before adversaries do, requiring closer NATO-industry cooperation.