NATO: How Shall We Transform?

NATO’s Ankara Summit of July 7-8 will be remembered for revealing that NATO’s greatest challenge is no longer agreeing on strategy but simple technical implementation thereof.

David Cattler, senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) with 35 years’ experience across the US government, NATO, and the intelligence community, discusses this in his article.

Over the past four summits, the alliance has largely settled its strategic direction. Allies have committed to significantly higher defense spending, agreed ambitious new capability targets, approved regional defense plans, and even begun assigning forces to those plans. They have also prioritized cloud-enabled command and control, accelerated work on artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, and decided to rebuild their common defense industrial base.

Taken together, these decisions represent the alliance’s most significant adaptation since the end of the Cold War. For NATO, development capability has always depended on integration. The difference today is that integration must occur at the speed of technological change.

In a recent past, NATO’s central task was rebuilding political consensus after years of underinvestment. Today, the alliance’s credibility increasingly depends on whether it can transform those political decisions into military capability at operational speed.

Today NATO is not short of innovation. Continuous work is under way in the fields of autonomy, artificial intelligence, cyber capabilities, cloud computing, sensing technologies, and advanced manufacturing. NATO’s scarce resource is no longer innovation itself, but the ability to use it at alliance scale. Innovation adoption has become a strategic capability.

Delivering alliance capability is inherently more difficult than fielding a national program. New technologies must satisfy military requirements, prove interoperable, mature into common standards, attract industrial investment, and ultimately be incorporated into national procurement decisions and NATO operational plans.

They must also earn the confidence of political leaders, military commanders, and industry partners across all 32 sovereign nations within the bloc – each with its own priorities, procurement processes, and budget cycles. Every weak link delays deterrence.

NATO’s next competitive advantage will come from adapting its institutions to absorb breakthrough technologies faster than potential adversaries can adapt their own. Military advantage increasingly belongs to organizations capable of learning, adapting, and fielding new capabilities in weeks rather than years.

Thus, Ukraine has demonstrated that operational feedback can move directly from frontline units to engineers and manufacturers within weeks rather than years. Every successful innovation immediately generates new countermeasures, requiring another cycle of adaptation. The lesson for NATO is not that it should replicate Ukraine’s wartime model.

NATO cannot – and should not – attempt to replicate Ukraine’s wartime decision-making. But it must learn the underlying lesson: institutional agility has become a strategic advantage.

After the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, NATO has understandably concentrated on rebuilding military readiness. The next challenge is ensuring that these investments become integrated military capability – working for the whole alliance rather than individual countries.

Will allies manage to demonstrate that political consensus can translate into military capability quickly enough? Perhaps they will, but this takes coming to terms. And practice shows that the 32 countries in the alliance are too diverse to promptly solve problematic issues.

Original publication: https://cepa.org/article/nato-summit-deliver-or-die/