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- A NATO research group examines how the alliance could respond to potential crisis scenarios.
- It provides NATO leaders and decision-makers with analyses and recommendations.
- BI spoke with the group’s director about her team’s work and the scenario she’s most worried about.
A NATO research group has been examining some of the most potentially catastrophic scenarios facing the alliance, including a possible Russian attack.
The NATO Defense College in Rome looks for early signs, dubbed “weak signals,” that could lead to significant events that threaten the alliance.
“We’re looking for something that changes, that takes a different direction than expected or anticipated,” Florence Gaub, the director of the Research Division at the Defense College, told Business Insider.
Here are some of the potential scenarios Gaub’s team is studying.
Strategic foresight
The Research Division’s daily work includes library research, interviews with NATO officers, brainstorming sessions, and scenario exercises with NATO and member-state officials to identify these so-called weak signals and devise potential responses.
“The weak signal is, of course, in strategic foresight, the holy grail because if you spot a trend very early, you buy yourself a lot more time to respond to it,” Gaub said. “Scenarios also have the benefit of decreasing the element of surprise and reducing response time.”
Such work has become increasingly important in recent years as NATO has faced a rapidly evolving security environment, with the Russia-Ukraine war looming on its eastern flank, President Donald Trump’s return to the White House raising questions over the US’s future in the alliance, and China’s ever-expanding global influence.
Gaub said her team’s current areas of research included the potential detonation of a nuclear warhead in space, panic triggered by speculation of a DNA-gene-editing bioweapon, a war between Egypt and Ethiopia over the Nile, Russia using acoustic weapons against peacekeeping forces stationed in Ukraine, and Russia testing NATO with a missile attack on one of its members bordering the Black Sea.
While some may say such scenarios seem unlikely, Gaub pointed to the “What if Russia and China became allies” scenario exercise held by the EU Institute for Security Studies at the 2020 Munich Security Conference.
At the time, “a lot of Europeans and Americans were saying, ‘That will never happen,’” Gaub, who previously served as deputy director at the EUISS, said. But people in Asia and Russia were saying, “‘It’s already happening,’” she added.
Two years later, Russia and China signed a “no-limits” partnership.
The Research Division is also working on a scenario exercise in the Indo-Pacific, but Gaub declined to provide further details due to its classified nature.
While most of the division’s reports are published on its website, some publications and briefings are classified to avoid triggering “unnecessary drama” and pushback and to ensure that Beijing and Moscow do not have easy access to them.
One such example is a scenario looking at how Russia may imagine a nuclear war. Gaub said releasing a report on this subject would “unnecessarily” scare the general public and that it would nevertheless be a difficult scenario to write on, given that the only historical precedents — the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 — occurred when the US was the only nuclear power.
“The world that we live in now, with more than one nuclear power, changes the game,” Gaub said. “If one state uses a nuclear weapon, it will confront the situation where other countries with nuclear weapons can respond. That makes the scenarios so much more speculative.”
The Russian threat
Gaub’s main concern at present is that a Russian hybrid attack on a NATO member state could prompt the triggering of the alliance’s Article 5 — which stipulates that an armed attack against one or more alliance members in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all — but that allies would not respond.
Russia is suspected of having carried out dozens of hybrid attacks on NATO in recent years, ranging from arson and signal jamming to assassination attempts and hacks.
No member state has so far triggered NATO’s Article 5 in response to such attacks, which Gaub said were “increasing” and “becoming more and more aggressive.”
“The one thing everybody at NATO is afraid of is calling the day on Article 5 and discovering that not all allies are on board,” she added.
Such fears may have been heightened in recent months as Trump, who has repeatedly criticized European NATO members’ defense spending, has said that the US would not defend allies who didn’t pay enough for their own defense.
The most effective way to undermine NATO’s cohesion is to engineer a situation that is “ambiguous to outsiders” and “clear to insiders,” causing disagreements within the alliance, Gaub continued. “Then, you have the perfect storm.”
She added that her team was not a “prediction machine,” although she said its forecasts were more than 60% accurate.
“We should never raise the expectation that we’re going to be accurate on everything, especially when you’re looking at black swan scenarios,” Gaub said. “We’re in the business of low probability, high impact, so ideally, none of what we see potentially happening should happen.”