A modern Maginot line is the last thing Nato needs

Receive free Nato updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Nato news every morning.

The writer is executive director of the Aspen Security Forum, a bipartisan foreign policy conference

In the run-up to the second world war, France built vast, expensive fortifications along its border with Germany, which became known as the Maginot Line. The flaws in this strategy were soon revealed when Germany attacked in the spring of 1940 using blitzkrieg — a tactic that punched through Luxembourg and Belgium, and then into France by driving around the Maginot defences, rendering them useless.

Nato militaries are dangerously close to replicating such failures today. For decades, these armies have relied on expensive, hard-to-produce materiel such as aircraft carriers, fighter jets and precision munitions like Himars long range rocket launchers, whose missiles can cost $100,000 a shot. Nato armies also rely on a vast array of bespoke satellites and communications systems to target and fire precision-guided munitions. But the war in Ukraine has shown just how potentially vulnerable this kit is — or how easy to circumvent — especially during a fast-moving conflict.

Two issues stand out. First, expensive precision missiles and other military hardware can be defeated fairly easily. In Ukraine for example, Russia has jammed GPS along nearly all the 1,200km front, rendering the US-donated Himar launchers and the Excalibur precision shells far less accurate than they should be. The Ukrainians have sometimes gone weeks without hitting a target due to Russian jamming, according to recent reports.

In a fight over Taiwan, the US military worries that China would try to take out its satellites or even the 31 satellites on which the world’s entire GPS system depends, thus rendering many state-of-the-art western weapons systems useless. 

Second, inexpensive, easy to replace commercial technologies have proved themselves to be an essential part of Kyiv’s war effort. Necessity is the mother of invention and the resourceful Ukrainians I have spoken to emphasise that one of their most effective weapons is actually a “first person view” commercial drone — a toy drone normally used for gaming and controlled by virtual reality goggles.

The Ukrainians creatively repurposed these drones with commonly available parts and added explosives. One colonel in Kyiv recently said that drones “play a part in more than 70 per cent of Russian casualties”. Modified drones can cost as little as a few hundred dollars yet reliably destroy expensive targets that are not as agile, even occasionally a Russian T-90 tank that costs up to $4.5mn, yielding massive and unexpected benefits. 

But despite these entrepreneurial efforts by Ukrainian fighters, the US and its allies are so far making few efforts to acquire inexpensive, commercially available technologies such as modified drones, or to make communications satellites harder to defeat. They are stymied in part by lobbying from traditional defence contractors, which has resulted in overspending on kit which takes years to build and quickly becomes defunct.

The US Department of Defense — and its European partner militaries — also have an “innovation adoption problem”, according to a bipartisan defence commission that warned about the dangers of the painfully slow, risk-averse procurement process. 

Some small-scale efforts are under way to solve the problem, but they are not enough. For example, the Pentagon official in charge of space procurement, Frank Calvelli, recently indicated that the US should switch to using smaller, commercially available constellations of satellites. This hasn’t happened yet, but would be a prudent step and it cannot occur fast enough.

Both Nato and Washington have created small entities to experiment with disruptive technologies such as Nato’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic and the US Defense Innovation Unit. But these programmes are often underfunded outliers rather than steps towards a more fundamental shift away from slow, bureaucratic procurement.

The courage and ingenuity of Ukrainian soldiers who are adapting technology on the battlefield has taught us all a valuable lesson. Not least that great power conflict — with Russia or China — is no longer unthinkable. This week in Vilnius, Nato members reaffirmed their commitment to defending each other, modernising their forces and achieving the 2 per cent defence spending pledge. The worst outcome would be to invest those funds in a modern Maginot line of expensive, vulnerable defences. We must learn from Kyiv, and spend better.