On Thursday (5 June 2025), NATO Defence Ministers endorsed the new NATO Science and Technology (S&T) Strategy. In help of NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept, the Strategy positions S&T as a central pillar for preserving NATO’s army and technological edge.
The S&T Strategy stresses the significance of science and know-how “to enable the Alliance to outperform strategic competitors and potential adversaries in inserting scientific knowledge and adopting emerging technologies across all NATO core tasks”.
It additional emphasises the function that defence and security-related science and know-how performs within the growth of capabilities and enhancement of army interoperability, in addition to within the additional reinforcement of societal, political and industrial resilience.
The Strategy units three mutually-reinforcing strategic objectives for the NATO S&T Enterprise:
- To “Anticipate and Invest”: notably via enhanced foresight and rising funding in vital S&T areas, comparable to AI, quantum and biotechnologies, and help for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) training.
- To “Safeguard and Protect” the NATO S&T Enterprise by serving to defend folks and concepts, whereas selling analysis safety.
- To “Orchestrate and Energize” S&T, together with by selling “denser, deeper and more agile coordination” and exploiting S&T outcomes throughout all NATO core duties.
The new Strategy supersedes the NATO S&T Strategy launched in 2018. It additionally takes accounts of the science & know-how macro developments that the Science and Technology Organization (STO) has recognized as vital for the Alliance for the following 20 years, and outlined in its 2025-2045 report.