![]() We now have to think and plan long-term, after decades of discretionary operations and crises ‘of the day’. The NATO 2030 reflection process and the NWCC’s 20-year horizon attest to this. ![]() We are starting to understand the nature of this long game much better. Moreover, China is setting its ambition to develop the world’s leading military by 2050, including expeditionary capabilities. Non-state actors, terrorist groups and organisations, such as al-Qaeda, have proven their longevity and adaptability, and new ones are likely to emerge. The belligerent nature of Russia is likely to persist. We face long-term, dynamic and persistent competition from multiple directions. Time: stop thinking about near-peer competitors as a short to medium-term problem.Together, this package of the best and most forward-looking, forward-leaning military-strategic thinking is a progressive approach for a new generation. In early 2021, NATO leadership adopted the NATO Warfighting Capstone Concept (NWCC) produced by ACT to serve as the Military North Star of the Alliance towards 2040. In 2020, General Tod Wolters presented to Allies the Concept for the Deterrence and Defence of the Euro-Atlantic Area (DDA). In 2019, Allied Chiefs of Defence agreed a NATO Military Strategy. To this end, we need to start thinking, organising and acting differently, so that we can offer better military advice while expanding the operating and decision space for political authorities. We need to get ahead of the ever more complex anticipated threat curve, or risk losing our freedom of decision and action. In light of the increasingly boundless, simultaneous, and persistent challenges, the Alliance needs to become more anticipatory and proactive. However, defensive does not need to equate to passive. We have adopted an unambiguously defensive approach, for good reason, and we will maintain this approach. ![]() Since the end of the Cold War, our Alliance has been successfully adapting to changes in the strategic environment. These developments are becoming increasingly feasible operational realities of warfare and must be considered as we shape the future NATO strategy. Lethal autonomous weapons systems are likely to challenge longstanding ethical and legal norms. Losing control of satellites and the electromagnetic spectrum could degrade Alliance capabilities. High-end decryption capacities could make secure communications as open as the front page of a newspaper. Quantum sensing could make oceans ‘transparent’. New technologies and capabilities are already beginning to turn speculative fiction into reality. Potential strategic competitors seek to undermine the Alliance’s political and military-strategic objectives by deploying increasingly sophisticated strategies, often through coordinated political, military, economic, and information efforts. Our Alliance has to cope with state and non-state actors that fundamentally oppose, seek to alter or even destroy the rules-based international order and the system of values that NATO was established to protect. The Alliance no longer has any real sanctuaries or ‘rear areas’ that some form of threat, attack or malign activity cannot penetrate. The boundaries between peace and conflict, political and military, strategic and tactical, kinetic and non-kinetic are blurring. The environment NATO faces is fluid, global and complex, and the further to the future one looks, the more uncertain it becomes.
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