NATO Futures workshop

Key findings and action points

Key findings

NATO must address the worst-case and plan accordingly. The growing worldwide pressures on US forces and resources present a systemic test of NATO’s ability meet the full range of its critical deterrence and defence functions in an increasingly difficult strategic context. Deterrence by denial should not be underestimated for its impact on Russian thinking, especially given Moscow’s surprising ability to regenerate forces. However, in a worst-case scenario of US military capabilities being occupied in Asia along with concurrent crises in the Middle East, Europe, and the Arctic, NATO would face acute vulnerabilities.

Given the pan spectrum nature of risk and threat across information, sabotage, destabilisation, disruption, cyberwar, and coercion as well as the potential for hyperwar (both conventional and nuclear), the maintenance of credible deterrence and defence will only be assured with partners, most notably the EU, and a radically reconceived European pillar of the Alliance. The transition to this reconfigured Alliance must begin immediately and at pace.

In particular, Europeans must prioritise mitigation of the most acute vulnerabilities that would arise if US defence contributions were unavailable.  Foremost amongst these are strategic enablers such as persistent and resilient C4ISTAR, heavy lift, and air-to-air refuelling.  European must address these and other key capability gaps that would arise from a lack of access to US military assets on as urgent a basis as possible.

Technology will make a fundamental contribution to the ability of the Alliance to meet these challenges, and NATO must exploit technology to offset some of the requirements for mass. NATO efforts to do so will be informed by key judgements regarding science and technology trends: technology is increasingly developed and drawn from the private sector; individual technology should not be considered in isolation as it is the combination of new technologies that produces disruptive effects; AI driven autonomous systems will be particularly impactful; the breadth of technology change is as important as the pace; and the increasing importance of human-machine interactions will be a complex feature of future warfare.

Action points

• Develop for the 2026 Summit a transition plan to the NATO Future Force. NATO needs a plan to provide for an orderly transition to European primary responsibility for defence and deterrence along with European delivery of the necessary capabilities, with key milestones for 2030 and 2035. The January 2025 Alphen Group Atlantic Charter 2025 provides one such substantive roadmap in what is a fast-evolving tableau. In the transition plan to this new transatlantic division of labour Europeans should prioritise mitigation of the most acute vulnerabilities that would arise if US defence contributions were unavailable, notably strategic enablers.
• Integrate new technologies into legacy systems. The Committee of National Armaments Directors (CNAD) should lead an Alliance-wide Strategic Audit to better exploit technology to strengthen deterrence and defence requirements and to harmonise investments and improvements across the Allied defence, technological and industrial base. Development of technologies that are close to a level of maturity, such as autonomous ground vehicles, are key to the urgent transition needed and should be accelerated, with interoperability by design strengthened. Allied Command Transformation (ACT) should collaborate more closely with Allied Command Operations (ACO) on near term warfighting needs.
• Develop plans for strengthening resilience across NATO membership. NATO should build on ideas regarding resilience from its 2024 summit in Washington DC, including the pledge to integrate civilian planning into national and collective defence planning. These initiatives should be linked to SACEUR’s Family of Plans. They should be part of a broader shift in focus from protecting NATO territory to protecting NATO citizens modelled on Nordic concepts of total defence. New institutional, regional and national measures to build partnerships with citizens represent a critical need for NATO, EU and national governments in order to mobilise citizens, counter disinformation/misinformation and defend democratic values. The role of the private sector (including industry) in resilience should be enhanced in NATO’s resilience planning.
• Forge deeper collaborative public private partnerships (PPPs). With innovation increasingly driven by the private civilian sector and not automatically funded by defence budgets, governments need to address the defence procurement constraints in the way of working with these companies. Deeper connections are needed to identify the civilian built infrastructure that could have military applications and the capacities that the private sector could make available to the military in times of war, based on Nordic models of Total Defence. Overall, procurement processes need to become more flexible and rapid. NATO could make better use of the CNAD to build bridges with industry.
• Assess detailed lessons from Ukraine. Military operations in Ukraine constitute a remarkable test bed for much of NATO’s transition needs, such as integrating new technology into existing platforms, managing PPPs, and finding new ways to deliver at volume and at pace. For example, Ukrainians are applying software updates to weapons systems on a weekly or even twice weekly basis.
• Deepen the EU-NATO relationship. EU has the institutional framework to address societal resilience, and a NATO-EU strategic partnership would possess all the levers needed across hybrid warfare. The EU has also become a player in defence infrastructure and technology; NATO and EU should ensure that efforts in these areas are properly coordinated. To facilitate improved interoperability across Allied forces, issues need to be addressed around the question of how the EU can best incorporate into its rearmament effort defence technologies from non-EU, Allied sources.
• Make NATO exercises even more “full spectrum”. NATO exercises have come a long way in terms of real-world effect, but there is more to do. Military mobility, mobilisation of society including the private sector, and NATO-EU cooperation all constitute critical focal points for expanded exercises to strengthen defence and deterrence.
• Explore and operationalise new defence funding solutions. The creation of a Defence, Resilience and Security (DSR) Bank could exploit the bond markets to secure triple A credit loans to finance defence spending. The DSR Bank should start operations in Europe, then enlarge to North American Allies and subsequently to Asian democracies. It could ultimately generate trillions of dollars/euros for defence investment.

Introduction

Wilton Park and The Alphen Group (TAG) organised this one-day workshop at NATO Headquarters to deliver actionable recommendations for moving from NATO today to NATO Futures. The meeting assessed the effects needed so that the Alliance can affordably meet the threat challenge and ease the burden of Europe’s security and defence on the United States.

The premise of the meeting was that NATO must begin to urgently confront a worst-case scenario in which US capability is unavailable for European defence and security due to a major crisis/conflict in Asia along with potential simultaneous crises in the Middle East and the Arctic. A core theme of the workshop was how NATO could transition to ensuring deterrence and defence in Europe with only very limited, if any, US conventional military capability. Recommendations were shaped to inform the run-up to the 2025 Hague Declaration with a view to significant delivery by the 2026 Summit.

Workshop participants consisted of TAG members, NATO and EU officials, and private sector representatives. The discussions drew on the reports of the three Wilton Park/TAG Future War/Future Defence conferences (Future War and Deterrence 2022, Future War Strategy and Technology 2023, and Future Defence, Deterrence and Resilience 2024) together with the TAG Atlantic Charter 2025.  These documents validated and confirmed NATO Science and Technology Trends 2023-2043 and Volume 1 of Science and Technology Trends 2025-2045. 

The core message of these previous initiatives was clear: given the spectrum of vulnerabilities adversaries are exploiting across the hybrid, cyber and increasingly hyper-fast war spectrum, open societies need a new holistic approach to security, defence, deterrence and resilience.  This approach will be based on the mantra that power projection is impossible without demonstrably capable people protection.