NATO and its Indo-Pacific partners — Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand — will discuss defense industrial cooperation when they meet on Thursday, according to a senior U.S. official.
Michael Carpenter, senior director for Europe at the U.S. National Security Council, said on Monday that the security of Europe is intertwined with that of the Indo-Pacific — a concept often mentioned by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
“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.
