NATO’s Military Reach expands into the Indo-Pacific

“So this is an important time for us to be able to coordinate on such things as resilience, countering disinformation, defense industrial cooperation and a range of other things,” Carpenter said, speaking at the Foreign Press Center in Washington ahead of the NATO summit, which opens Tuesday.

As multiple NATO members provide weapons and ammunition to Ukraine to fight Russia, warehouses in the Euro-Atlantic region are seeing their stockpiles shrink.

The idea is to tap the defense industrial bases of South Korea, Australia and Japan to quickly expand production capacity. South Korea and Australia were the world’s 10th and 16th biggest arms exporters, respectively, during 2019-2023, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Meanwhile, as part of a project to develop and produce a next-generation fighter jet with the U.K. and Italy, Japan recently altered its rules to allow international arms sales.

The prospective cooperation is a new development, Luis Simon, director of the Centre of Security Diplomacy and Strategy at the Brussels School of Governance, told Nikkei Asia. “While there have been some musings about cooperation in emerging disruptive technologies, the references to defense industrial cooperation are potentially far more substantial,” he said.

The shift draws heavily on the lessons of the Ukraine war. “The more compatible the ammunition, platforms, doctrines, technical standards and defense-industrial bases are, the easier it will be to generate the scale required to outmatch their competitors and prevail,” Simon said, “especially in a context of attrition and protraction.”

If realized, the cooperation would represent an important advancement in the relationship between NATO and its Indo-Pacific partners, he said, “from the political, declaratory level to something more concrete.”

The leaders of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand jointly attended a NATO summit for the first time in 2022, when the event was held in Madrid. They convened again at the Vilnius summit in Lithuania last year. This will be the third consecutive year that the partners attend, although Australia will be represented by Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, who doubles as defense minister.

In the past two gatherings, defense industrial cooperation was not mentioned as one of the topics discussed by NATO and its Indo-Pacific partners. Talks had centered on cyberdefense, emerging new technologies, maritime security, climate change and countering disinformation, according to readouts.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg speaks to reporters ahead of the Washington summit on July 5. NATO photo

Yet, deepening defense industrial cooperation is a trend the U.S. has been pursuing in recent years.

In a speech titled “The New Convergence in the Indo-Pacific” at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore last month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the U.S. and its allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific were “breaking down” national barriers and better integrating their defense industries.

“With Japan, we’re developing a Glide Phase Interceptor to counter hypersonic threats. With India, we’ve made historic progress on coproducing fighter-jet engines and armored vehicles,” he said.

In June, the U.S. and Japan held the inaugural forum of U.S.-Japan Defense Industrial Cooperation, Acquisition, and Sustainment (DICAS) to accelerate coordination toward codevelopment, coproduction and co-sustainment of munitions, ships and planes.

Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, said that the development is not surprising. The U.S. and its allies in Asia and Europe “are all looking to expand their defense industrial capacity and to do so as quickly as possible,” she said.

Ways to help each other include technology sharing, coproduction and joint ventures, Kavanagh said. The overlapping areas of need are precision munitions and air defense, and cooperation in these areas would be especially valuable, she said.

Among NATO itself, there have been talks on deepening defense industrial collaboration. The Vilnius Communique from last year included the creation of a Defense Production Action Plan to enhance such alliance-wide cooperation, looking to meet NATO’s capability targets.

The communique talked about “improving materiel standardization,” with an initial focus on land munitions. It is not clear if cooperation with the Indo-Pacific partners would include the adoption of NATO standards.

Defense Priorities’ Kavanagh said that America’s defense industrial base is under strain and any cooperation that helps U.S. allies become more self-sufficient is valuable for Washington.

At the same time, “U.S. allies in Europe and Asia should also have different priorities, with NATO focused on the threat from Russia and countries in Asia concentrating on China’s military aggression,” Kavanagh said. “Efforts to increase cooperation should not distract either set of allies from these distinct challenges.”