NATO 75th Anniversary Special Report Notes

Introduction: Russia Threat Has NATO Returning to Its Roots

The North Atlantic Treaty, signed in April 1949 by 12 countries, aimed to unite efforts for collective defense and preserve peace and security.
The treaty states that an armed attack against one or more member nations in Europe or North America would be considered an attack against them all.
Seventy-five years later, NATO, now with 32 countries, is reemphasizing its commitment to collective defense.
This renewed focus addresses an increasingly complex security environment, including Russia's war in Ukraine and the rise of China as a strategic competitor.
U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Matthew Van Wagenen stated that NATO's strategic environment shifted dramatically after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
The invasion accelerated NATO's return to collective defense after 35 years, introducing new defense plans agreed upon at the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO shifted from collective defense to crisis management and out-of-area operations, including missions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Currently, NATO is entering a new era by ushering in the first collective defense plans of the alliance since 1989.
Rachel Ellehuus said the return to collective defense includes a new family of regional plans that rely more on in-place host nation forces and take advantage of the geography of each specific region.
The hope is that by asking countries to do things they would need to do for national or regional defense anyway, it will drive allies to meet the alliance's goal of spending at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense by 2024.
Two-thirds of the alliance will meet or exceed the 2 percent GDP mark this year, compared to only three nations in 2014 when that goal was agreed to, according to NATO.
The alliance's 2 percent goal became a topic of discussion after former President Donald Trump said he would not protect NATO members not meeting the threshold if re-elected.
Rick Holtzapple said that progress is being made, with even those allies not hitting the 2 percent target in 2024 increasing their spending and having credible plans to do so.
It is important for allies to not only meet the 2 percent goal but also spend the money wisely.
Holtzapple emphasized the need for allies to acquire, sustain, and deploy the capabilities they would be asked to provide under the plans.
Ellehuus mentioned that the U.S. Mission to NATO regularly monitors each ally's cash, capabilities, and contributions to align their message and determine where to push them.
Ellehuus does not recommend punitive measures for countries not meeting the 2 percent target, as these are national decisions.
Being concrete with allies' leadership about why 2 percent is needed and building a case has been effective, especially with the example of Ukraine and the challenges they've faced with ammunition, air defense, and adapting to Russian attacks.
The war in Ukraine shows how long it takes to build capability, with reconstitution and building taking five to 10 years.
NATO can't underestimate the value of peer pressure to get countries to meet the 2 percent threshold, with the United States playing a significant leadership role.
Alexander Vershbow noted that European allies have stepped up to provide Ukraine assistance, especially with the U.S. Congress stalling the national security supplemental.
There needs to be a new paradigm where European members contribute 50 percent of the minimum capabilities required for collective defense and take up the role of being the first responders to crises in Europe’s neighborhood.
This would address equity with the United States and be a practical necessity given the possibility of U.S. forces being drawn into an Asia-Pacific contingency.
Matthias Matthijs said that the status quo of the United States providing the lion's share of military capabilities for its European allies is no longer sustainable.
The European Union released its first-ever defense industrial strategy in March, calling for EU countries to spend at least half of their procurement budgets on products made in Europe by 2030.
Since 2022, 76 percent of EU weapons acquisition has come from outside of the organization, and 63 percent of that was from the United States.
Matthijs is concerned that European countries have become so reliant on the U.S. industrial base that neither side will show the necessary initiative to allow Europe to develop its own industry.
One example is that Germany approved a 100 \text{ billion}
euro special defense fund in 2022 to be spent over five years, but there is frustration in Europe with the lack of coordination, as much of the money was used to buy American fighter jets rather than develop a European industry.
Germany still has a small country, open economy mentality where they think whatever they do in Germany's interest doesn't have any repercussions for the rest of Europe, which it does.
The rising threat of China is not just a U.S. or Indo-Pacific matter but rather something NATO as a whole must account for.
Holtzapple stated that the United States faced some reluctance from a few allies about NATO worrying about China in the Indo-Pacific.
The U.S. successfully argued that China's activities in cyberspace, outer space, the maritime domain, supply chains, and transportation networks pose real security challenges to Euro-Atlantic security.
While NATO is not opening up an Indo-Pacific branch, the alliance is thickening its relationship with partner nations in the region such as Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand.
Partnerships beyond the Euro-Atlantic are about finding ways to cooperate with partners who have both benefits to gain and things to offer for NATO's security.
Potential adversaries are also forming global partnerships, noting how China has cozied up to Russia.
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin held talks in China in May, releasing a joint statement saying the two countries had entered a new era of comprehensive partnership and strategic interaction.
Van Wagenen noted the emergence of an axis of potential adversaries with Russia working with North Korea, China, and Iran.
NATO clearly knows what it has to do, which is not only defend its members but deter anybody from going to war with the alliance.
The goal is to make the cost calculus too high for anyone to fight the alliance or try to take any kind of NATO territory.

NATO Going Commercial to Develop New Tech

The war in Ukraine has shown how commercial technology can impact the modern battlefield, leading NATO to expand its partnerships with both traditional and nontraditional defense companies.
Rachel Ellehuus said the most significant change in recent years is the amount of time and effort spent working with the defense industrial base.
With NATO's focus on out-of-area operations, member nations' defense industries produced things just in time, with low stockpiles and little excess capacity.
NATO is now reprioritizing collective defense and working with its industrial base to reverse those trends and reinforce its deterrence and defense capabilities for an Article Five scenario.
At the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2023, the alliance initiated a new Defense Production Action Plan to increase industrial capacity across member countries and encourage multiyear, multinational procurement contracts to aggregate demand and address supply issues.
The plan is also designed to foster better standardization and interoperability.
Along with the traditional defense industrial base, NATO is looking to bring in nontraditional partners to increase the speed of innovation across the organization.
David van Weel noted that one of the key lessons from the war in Ukraine is the need for classical defense equipment in large quantities, as well as agile innovation to bring in new technology quickly.
In 2022, NATO established the Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic, or DIANA, modeled after the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and recently established an office near Helsinki, Finland.
DIANA aims to bring together innovators with cutting-edge technology to harness, develop, and adopt to outpace adversaries.
DIANA provides innovators with networking and learning opportunities to navigate the defense market, which can be tricky for inexperienced companies.
DIANA is looking for dual-use technologies with both civil and military applications, given most innovators are likely to be attracted to the civilian market.
DIANA began its first challenge program in June 2023, seeking proposals in energy resilience, secure information sharing, and sensing and surveillance, selecting 44 companies for an in-depth learning curriculum.
The chosen companies also have access to DIANA's network of 23 accelerator sites and 182 test centers to test their innovations.
DIANA was in the process of down selecting around nine companies to participate in the next phase of the program called "Grow,” focused on defense and security adoption and commercialization.
Van Weel said that these companies need money to scale and build into a solid product to solve problems.
That is where the alliance's other new initiative, the NATO Innovation Fund, can help.
The NATO Innovation Fund invests in deep tech-driven enterprises that can strengthen nations’ collective security and prosperity.
The NATO Innovation Fund has 1 \text{ billion}
euros and an construction, so we can hang up more sub-funds as more nations want to come in, or partner nations or maybe private companies at some point in time.
Canada wants to join the NIF.
NATO's new initiatives will only succeed if member nations participate in these new processes and invest in the technologies.
Ellehuus stated implementing plans laid out in the Defense Production Action Plan is up to individual countries.
Otherwise, if that doesn’t happen, the initiative will dry up at some point in time because these innovators want to make money and build their companies.
DIANA is also looking to expand its number of challenges from three to five next year and by 2025 intends to run up to 10 challenges per year, which will require growing the organization and increasing its funding, Hirani-Driver said.
Setting up DIANA is a risk
Ellehuus feels new momentum is growing across the alliance for greater collaboration with industry and implementing new processes such as the Defense Production Action Plan.
Initiatives like DIANA and the NATO Innovation Fund can ensure that even as we’re still getting col- lective defense right” in the present, “we’re investing in the capabilities of the future.

Russia, China Threats Boosting NATO Members, Partnerships

NATO has placed greater emphasis on working with sympathetic nations in regions like Eastern Europe or the Indo-Pacific where threats to the alliance’s interests are growing.
NATO allies and partners account for about 2 billion people, or one-quarter of the world's population.
The Partnership for Peace program is one of four frameworks within the organization, along with the Mediterranean Dialogue, the Istanbul Cooperation Initia- tive and partners across the globe. The program was launched in 1994 and the first formal structure for partners to work with NATO
Russia was the first member of the Partner- ship for Peace program, but members suspended partnership with Russia after it invaded Ukraine in 2014.
Becoming a partner is open to “any nation wishing to share in its core values,” Bruåsdal said — an open door policy anchored in Article 10 of its founding treaty.
NATO “really respects” partner nations’ authority when defining their involvement
Once objectives are established, partners gain access to certain of the organization’s processes, pro- cedures and structures normally reserved for members, to include a Partnership Cooperation Menu of approximately 1,400 activities.
Daniel Fried said in an interview that partnership means “a basis to engage in military and security cooperation,” giving these nations’ militaries access to and liaison abil- ity with NATO and in turn giving it the ability to extend its security cooperation with the free world.
Partnerships “knit together the free world’s countries in an era where you have rising cooperation of autocracies
Just as NATO is under no obliga- tion to defend South Korea against China, the alliance has no obligation to defend partner Ukraine from Russia’s unprovoked invasion.
Ukraine’s history and partnership with NATO has made support easier because “it was easier to understand tactics and procedures
From 2015 to 2021, nearly one-third of the 40 some countries supporting the NATO-led Operation Resolute Support were partner nations.
As we face new challenges, we must adapt and develop new ways of working coop- eratively together. One effort the alliance hopes will maximize partner involvement is a new framework called the Partners Augmentation Forces to NATO. The new framework will create a pool of partner nation forces that can contribute to alli- ance members without being restricted by the organization’s requirements.
Unlike NATO’s force model, where speed is a factor, partners “don’t have to commit to say, ‘My forces can be there in 30 days.’ It is an overall commitment in which partners can contribute across the spectrum of our force generation.” The model allows partners to highlight their strengths, which is a benefit to NATO as well, Wright said.
Slovakian Air Force Brig. Gen. Martin Remes said what the NATO family ultimately offers is a “mass of people” that can help each other protect the same values, “our common grounds we believe in.”
The content of the new agreements is somewhat broad, Barnes said — a “high-level policy document” drafted by the partner and NATO. He said nothing earth-shattering will be found in New Zealand’s new agreement, but it’s fundamentally a document that “just gives [part- ner nations] the ability to access things that are relevant to them.”
Roy Blewett said agreement is a “[working] together in order to try and tackle them in the best way possible, because there’s no point in us trying to deal with the issue, a global issue, in one way, and everybody else trying to deal with it another way.”
Article 5 states “an attack on one is an attack on all” members.
Because at the end of the day. This is [NATO’s] core values versus other types of values

NATO Ready for Battle, but Lacks Stamina, Report Finds

NATO has made significant strides toward forward defense and deterrence since adopting a back-to-the-future strategy at its Madrid Summit two years ago.
A recent report found the alliance is prepared for war as long as it’s short.
The report, "Is NATO Ready for War?" found the alliance has made "substantial progress" since 2022 on defense spending, forward defense, high-readiness forces, command and control, collective defense exercises and the integration of Sweden and Finland.
Sean Monaghan said NATO is ready to fight tonight, but may not be ready for a protracted war, which would likely expose gaps requiring allies to spend more, boost industrial capacity, address capability gaps and bolster resilience.
The report said defense spending questions are fueled by burden sharing and ally contributions.
In 2014, NATO heads of state and government agreed to spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense by 2024.
Monaghan said the 2 percent target probably isn’t enough.
NATO has also moved toward a new force model, replacing the NATO Response Force with a three-tiered force structure aimed at boosting deterrence and defense.
Challenges remain to the model’s goal of boosting its 40,000 deployed troops in 2022 to 300,000.
John Deni said NATO has most of tier 1 covered because it’s made up of in-place forces such as Poland, but as the forces grow with tiers 2 and 3, they get heavier in composition and the allies continue to struggle.
The larger the force, the more niche capabilities are sacrificed, meaning increased risk.
Deni also expressed concern about NATO’s ability to meet timelines and doubts surrounding its ability to apply its yardstick with rigor.
Cynthia Cook said analysis of the defense industrial base revealed policymakers are finally giving the defense industrial base the attention it deserves because of the difficulty in supporting Ukraine.
Support to Ukraine revealed challenges in production capacity and the ability to surge production.
Implemented the Defense Production Action Plan unveiled at the Vilnius Summit last year, which called for the removal of barriers to defense trade and investments in the resiliency of the defense industrial base.
Changes to the defense industrial base take time, and heritage systems and production methods constrain timely progress.
The organization’s ongoing support of Ukraine presents competing demand signals for allies.
Assessing NATO’s readiness against both Russia and a looming threat from China will be at the top of the agenda and support to Ukraine and the trade-offs necessary to strengthen defense and deterrence.
NATO may be ready to “fight tonight,” but a closer look at long- term consequences “becomes a competition in resilience and pre- paredness, industrial capacity and supply chains.
Christopher Cavoli said NATO has reoriented its plans and force generation to deterring Russia, and if deterrence fails, the alliance has the plans and forces in place for high- intensity conflict with Russia.
“We have been building out a strate- gic concept and then the enablement ofthat strategic concept for the deterrence and defense of the Euro-Atlantic area,” “What we’ve done is turn those into concrete plans — traditional, classi- cal operational plans — that describe how we’re going to defend specific areas of the alliance and what we’re going to use to do it and what the sequence of events is.
We have the right number of troops forward right now, we’ve been practicing at large scale our ability to reinforce.
largest post-Cold War exercise involving more than 90,000 troops.
Asking nations not what they would make available, but what they wouldn’t make available Several allies have contributed their entire military force struc- ture, saved just a tiniest amount, to NATO’s plans,” he said.
Authority to declare up to alert state yellow before going to the North Atlantic Council
he alliance and the individual nations continue to study the war in Ukraine to develop new tech- niques and technologies, he said.

To Maintain NATO Unity, Stay Calm, Play Long Game

NATO remained vibrant for 75 years showing its true strength.
Members will need to continue adapting to evolving external threats and internal political conditions
NATO remains indispensable to the defense of Europe, and there is no substitute for U.S. leadership.
Members—including the United had misunderstood the significance of Russian’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Doing little to prepare for a wider war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin may have not seen the U.S. being able to respond or respond feebly.
European fear that a second Trump administration would withdraw from NATO.
Yet few Europeans would actually prefer to confront a nuclear-armed Russia without their North American allies at their side.
The accession of Swe- den and Finland was a major boost
What appears new — or at least more blatant — is the willingness of some members to use their lever- age within NATO to pursue their own policy goals at the expense of their allies
Turkey sees itself on the cusp of becoming a global power and is no more interested in taking orders from Moscow than it is in subordinating its interests to Wash- ington or Brussels
So , how to handle NATO’s internal challenges?
First, don’t give in to every demand. Put aside sentimental appeals to unity engage in the sort of transactional diplomacy that Ankara and Budapest play
We should also not hesitate, the next time the leader of a NATO ally threatens to shut down U.S. military facilities, to call their bluff and pack up.
U.S. security ties with the Philippines improved after we shut down our air and naval bases in the 1990s.
wind down the all-American precense at Iceland’s Naval Air Station Keflavik, led to a rotational program. Several NATO allies, including the U.S. now share responsibility for Iceland’s defense.
There is more to rebuilding a capable NATO than passing robust defense budgets NATO spending targets in GDP are a bellwether. Once a budget is authorized it can take years. Time in the mud to raise train equip and season a military force. No time to lose.

NATO Members Dial Up Defense Spending

Direct contributions are akin to condo association dues paid by mem- bers to fund NATO’s civil and mili- tary budgets and the NATO Security Investment Program, which includes infrastructure and command-and- control systems, among other things.
Those three common fund- ing areas totaled 3.3 \text{ billion}
euros in 2023. Of that, the United States chipped in around 16 percent — the same as Germany — or roughly 566 \text{ million}, which is about the cost of a littoral combat ship.
NATO indirect funding is what member nations spend on their domestic defense to build forces and capabilities that can be made available to NATO if it launches an operation.
The indirect funding is where the “2 percent” rule comes from
there are countries well above the target
Histor- ically has not dictated to countries what to buy with defense spends.
Those plans evolved from NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept, heav- ily informed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
The biggest gap the alliance needs to close right now? It’s just one word: enablers.

Politics of War Color Poland’s Record Defense Budgets

Poland doubled its defense budget in response to the conflict in Ukraine, buying heavily for the United States, seeking not just new weapons systems but also peace of mind.
Poland shares a border with Ukraine, Russia and Belarus
The show’s high attendance was reflective of a military moderniza- tion effort announced in a strategic review released by the Polish Ministry of Defence in 2016, intended to stretch across 2032. Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine changed that
Minister of Defence said the confer- ence was a “very important event and very significant one for Poland from the perspective of our economy,” but also a “pivotal event” for “our part of Europe” and the world, he said. He had “no doubt whatsoever” that increasing the level of defense spending will prevent “another great global war.”
$48.7 billion in defense spending, up from $41.5 billion in its 2024 budget.
Poland’s budget proposal for 2025 includes 48.7 \text{ billion}
in defense spending, up from 41.5 \text{ billion}
in its 2024 budget.
Traced back to end of cold war when country became independent again the fall of Soviet union.Poland’s obsession was really To fix its compass to the West. Aligning itself to the West and away from Russia was a guarantee of deeper integration with Western structures and alliances, “and in par- ticular, the United States was seen as the security guarantor of Poland If the Poles feel that the United States is going to be their number one ally and rescuer “if a war breaks out on that Eastern front, then you’re going to want to have as much compatibility and interoperability with that ally
*recent procurement deals with the United States have included a 4.6 \text{ billion}
contract for 32 Lockheed Martin F-35A jets, 10 \text{ billion}
for 96 Boeing Apache helicopters, hundreds of Abrams battle tanks and a 2 \text{ billion}
Foreign Military Financing direct loan agreement announced in July.
*. If they partner with U.S. firms, espe- cially in areas of communica- tions and IT, they can increase their information sharing Because of the existing gaps, com- munications companies have “a lot of interest within Europe

Summary:

Return to Collective Defense – NATO is shifting back to its original purpose, focusing on deterring threats like Russia and China. This shift includes the first collective defense plans since 1989, emphasizing regional cooperation.
Defense Spending Goals – NATO expects all members to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense by 2024. Two-thirds of alliance members are meeting or exceeding this target.
European Defense Autonomy – The EU’s new defense strategy encourages European nations to spend half of their procurement budgets on products made in Europe by 2030 to reduce reliance on U.S. military support.
China’s Growing Influence – While NATO isn’t forming an Indo-Pacific branch, it’s strengthening ties with Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand to counter China’s cybersecurity and military expansion.

NATO’s Tech & Innovation Strategy

Defense Innovation Accelerator (DIANA) – Modeled after the U.S. DARPA, DIANA connects NATO with tech companies to rapidly develop military solutions.
NATO Innovation Fund – A €1 billion fund investing in deep-tech defense startups.
Military AI & Cybersecurity – NATO is integrating AI-driven warfare technology and increasing its focus on cyber defense.