I think that the collaboration with ethical hackers is crucial if we want to secure western nations.
I would use the Pentagon's pilot bug bounty program as an example. They opened up their systems on the bug bounty platform, where ethical hackers could test the systems and report their vulnerabilities. The result was that the systems got compromised. The first report came in, I believe, in the first seven minutes and, in the first six hours, there were 200 to 300 reports. That means 300 security vulnerabilities, 300 security holes that an adversary could exploit to gain access to their systems.
Because of this collaboration, the Pentagon was more secure. I believe that it was Mr. Ash Carter who complimented the initiative and in a way concluded that they didn't realize how many good ethical hackers and how many good IT professionals there are who would like to help but don't have the opportunity to do so.
As the experience in Ukraine has shown, using crowdsourced intelligence, using crowdsourced efforts, is the key in such environments, especially in the cyber environment, to achieve desired results. Without it, I don't think it's even possible.