NATO’s warfighting posture must hold Russia at risk

NATO is a defensive alliance. However, the continued erosion of Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific security demands NATO action. Drawing on the outcomes of the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague, allies must commit to pairing deterrence with a more muscular warfighting posture in the Arctic, Nordic, and Baltic regions, and developing a wartime communication strategy, if it is to prevent a war in which NATO seeks to prevail.

NATO’s deterrence posture

NATO’s ‘360-degree approach’ to deterrence and defence is one of the Alliance’s core tasks, based on an appropriate mix of capabilities, including nuclear, conventional and missile defence, cyber, and space defence capabilities; all serving the objective of preserving peace, preventing coercion, and denying adversaries any opportunity for aggression.

NATO has made significant progress in reinforcing its deterrence through a variety of military concepts and activities: NATO’s forward presence comprises multinational battlegroups in eight countries on the eastern flank, and a planned deployment of battalion-size troops in Finland; the Concept for Deterrence and Defence (DDA) and new NATO Force Model for regional defence plans boost warfighting readiness; the NATO Warfighting Capstone Concept sets out a long-term strategic military vision to 2040. Exercises in allied formations have grown in scope, for example in Steadfast Deterrence 2025, which designated Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) as NATO’s warfighting headquarters, and Steadfast Defender 24, which tested new defence plans with some 90,000 troops.

At the same time, considerable gaps remain; for example in troop readiness or the need for an 400% increase in air and missile defences. NATO’s presence in the European Arctic is limited, despite Russia’s growing military build-up and cooperation with China in the region. The current split operational control of the Baltic States by Joint Force Command (JFC) Brunssum and of the European Arctic and the Atlantic by JFC Norfolk leaves a question mark over the joined-up coverage and integration of the Nordics. NATO’s standardisation of equipment remains a challenge, with over 179 different weapons systems in Europe compared to 33 in the US. Attaining the target of spending 2% of GDP on defence spending has been an uphill battle for most Allies over the past decade. Europe’s defence industry remains fragmented following decades of underinvestment, and long-term orders are slow to come through. The changing nature of warfare imposes new requirements for mass precision, advanced dual-use technology, and cyber warfare. This is exacerbated by the US redeployment of forces from Rzeszow in eastern Poland—a hub for resupplying Ukraine, and media reports of a possible withdrawal of around 10,000 US troops from Poland and Romania at a time when NATO faces the prospect of war by 2030.

Russia’s warfighting posture

Russia has been in active warfighting mode against Ukraine for more than a decade, and delivered an ultimatum to NATO and the US in 2021, demanding that NATO withdraw from Eastern Europe and cease activities in Ukraine. Russian warfighting capabilities are increasing in all domains despite NATO’s reinforced deterrence posture, sanctions, and significant losses on the battlefield. In some areas, Russian capabilities are surpassing those of NATO. According to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, “Russia produces in three months as much ammunition as NATO in a whole year.”

The Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) General Christopher Cavoli recently briefed the US Senate in detail about how the reconstitution of the Russian military’s service members and industrial production was “growing at a faster rate than most analysts had anticipated, [...] with intent on gaining tactical and operational advantage for the future battlefield.” This aligns with the broader strategic aims of Russia: Moscow has not backed down from its military objectives in Ukraine and Europe overall. On the contrary, with support from China, Russia continues to bombard Ukraine, has increased defence spending to 8-9% of GDP, and continues to demand the revision of NATO’s enlargement policy. Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov remarked recently that the war in Ukraine will not end until NATO withdraws from the Baltic States.

Reality check

NATO’s current thinking is that, because Russia has not rolled tanks into NATO territory, deterrence has not failed. Nevertheless, there should be no surprise if Russian President Vladimir Putin changes his calculus and tests NATO sooner. One should not be complacent in thinking that NATO’s deterrence posture works as intended when, after three years of war, Russia continues to insist on achieving its military objectives in Ukraine, on NATO’s withdrawal to its borders of 1997, and continues to conduct hybrid attacks against NATO allies. It is concerning that NATO lacks comparable military capabilities during an active war in Europe, while facing the prospect of armed aggression before 2030, if not sooner. These are not hypothetical scenarios - German intelligence warned recently that Russia is looking to “test” NATO in the Baltics.

Allies must recognise the limits of their current deterrence posture if they are to change Putin’s calculus as he attempts to rewrite history. NATO must also understand that a failure to stop Russia now encourages future aggression. The weakness of NATO dates to 2008, when its flawed decision to promise eventual membership to Georgia and Ukraine—without saying when or how—gave Russia an incentive to attack Georgia and later Ukraine, and to launch hybrid attacks across Europe, raising the risk of war with NATO itself.

US President Donald Trump’s reluctance to get tough with Putin gives Russia confidence in attacking Ukraine and beyond. Trump’s willingness to repeat Russian narratives and resume trade signals to Putin that NATO is weak and divided. If Putin sways Trump into blocking Ukraine’s NATO accession as a “root cause” of the war, it will create a precedent to invoke Baltic-Nordic NATO membership as grounds for a future conflict. Would Trump risk the US stock market over an incursion into Narva in Estonia, or Kybartai in Lithuania, especially after sealing multi-billion trade deal with Moscow? If President Trump excused Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians as a mistake, he could similarly dismiss as a misunderstanding a potential incident in a NATO country that was once part of Soviet territory. The US is in NATO, but Putin knows that Trump does not have faith in its shared values.

The reality is that Putin is so committed to continuing his war in Ukraine that he left the US-brokered peace process in tatters, exposing the diplomatic weakness of both America and Europe. The conscription of another 160,000 men, combat training for high schoolers, growing ties with China, and a military build-up near Finland suggest that Russia may test NATO amid Europe’s hurried rearmament and American retrenchment of its European deployments. Meanwhile, China enables Russia’s destruction of European security by diplomatic cover, through the export of dual-use goods, support for Russian weapons manufacturing, and with Chinese volunteers on the frontline. Beijing continues to learn from Russian war experience in Europe, enabling it to threaten stability in Asia.

Perceptions

All of this matters because Russia has never, in its history, attacked an adversary stronger than itself. Yet NATO does not perceive its own weaknesses, giving it a false sense of strength. The Alliance’s self-confidence stems from the Euro-Atlantic area, reflecting an image put out by NATO itself and mainstream Western NATO-centric academia. According to such accounts, NATO is “the most powerful and successful military alliance in history” or “stronger than ever”.

Understanding NATO through the lens of its adversary in wartime Europe should give the Alliance a more realistic perspective to judge its own behaviour. The concept of “warfighting”, although embedded within NATO’s military plans, seems absent from NATO’s strategic communications and Western academic discourse. NATO must seize the initiative and shift from reacting to events through repairing damages caused by them, to shaping reality with a higher warfighting posture and strategic communications so that, if the decisive moment arrives, NATO has a vision of victory.

NATO’s warfighting posture

To affect a change on the adversary, NATO must shape the environment to its military advantage. Drawing on regional defence plans and recently adopted targets for capability, resilience and defence spending decided at the NATO Summit 2025, allies must pair deterrence with a higher warfighting readiness, both to better defend the Arctic-Nordic-Baltic region, and as a wartime communication strategy. The objective is to make clear to any potential adversary that:

• NATO has the capability and political will to follow through with war.
• NATO’s warfighting readiness is not just a matter of will or choice but a commitment to act.
• NATO is committed to the costs and consequences of a short or a long war.
• NATO will interdict low and high-level violations of NATO’s space at short or no notice.
• Testing NATO in any domain on any front will incur devastating consequences for an adversary.

With war on NATO’s doorstep, this requires a shift by Allies to a wartime mindset—incorporating military forces, capabilities, infrastructure, wartime communications, and a whole-of-society approach—to be ready to fight and win a war if necessary. It entails urgent integration of NATO’s patchwork presence and divided command structure in the Arctic-Nordic-Baltic region to adapt flexibly and fast to the evolving threat environment. High readiness troops must be placed under a unified warfighting command, with border fortifications erected starting with the Baltic Defence Line, new infrastructure for military mobility constructed, and an air-and-missile defence Sky Shield developed and deployed. NATO should stage regular (un)announced military-civil patrols, inspections, and exercise real-war simulations in the region with joint airpower, warships, submarines, drones, high-tech equipment, logistics, a whole-of-society approach to war, and nuclear sharing, to demonstrate its readiness to fight and win.

NATO’s warfighting posture also means shooting down missiles and drones that violate NATO’s borders in order to uphold allied security and set boundaries for adversaries. Due consideration should also be given to recognising hybrid attacks against NATO assets as acts of war. They include assassinations, disinformation campaigns, GNSS jamming and spoofing, and attacks on critical infrastructure such as cables, pipelines, railways, cyber infrastructure. Setting and enforcing boundaries will plant a menacing uncertainty in the adversary’s mind and gradually shift Putin’s calculus, as China watches and backs off.

There is no need to wait until NATO is given a bloody nose. NATO must pair deterrence with higher warfighting readiness in the Arctic, Nordic and Baltic frontlines, and develop a wartime communication strategy to win a war before it ever starts.

The author would like to thank Paul Taylor and Chris Kremidas-Courtney for their valuable comments on an earlier draft. A short version of this text has been published as part of the EPC Compendium: Countdown to the NATO Summit in The Hague: priorities and expectations in 2025.

Maria Martisiute is a Policy Analyst with the Europe in the World Programme at the European Policy Centre.
 

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