NATO’s Ankara Summit from July 7-8 is unlikely to be remembered for what it announces. It may instead be remembered for revealing that NATO’s greatest challenge is no longer agreeing on strategy, but executing it.
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, begun assigning forces to those plans, prioritized cloud-enabled command and control, accelerated work on artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, and recognized that rebuilding the transatlantic defense industrial base is central to deterrence.
Taken together, these decisions represent the alliance’s most significant adaptation since the end of the Cold War. For NATO, capability has always depended on integration. The difference today is that integration must occur at the speed of technological change.
So, with strategic direction no longer the principal question, the 32 members will focus on delivery.
That represents an important shift. For much of the past decade, 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.
The measure of Ankara will therefore not be the length of its communiqué or the number of initiatives it announces. It will be whether NATO demonstrates that political consensus can become military capability quickly enough to preserve credible deterrence in an era of accelerating technological change.
Modern military advantage no longer belongs simply to those who invent the best technology. Increasingly, it belongs to those who can identify promising innovations, integrate them into operational concepts, scale production, and field capabilities faster than an adversary can adapt. Ukraine has repeatedly demonstrated this, but so too has Russia.
This is where the conversation about NATO often misses the point. Public debate still tends to focus on spending targets, new technologies, or headline procurement announcements. Those are inputs. But the measure of success is capability.
The alliance is not short of innovation. Across Europe and North America, governments, startups, universities, venture capital, and established defense firms are producing extraordinary advances in 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 adopt 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 — each with its own priorities, procurement processes, and budget cycles. Every weak link delays deterrence. That work spans NATO’s military authorities, national governments, industry, and procurement organizations, all of which must move in concert if innovation is to become interoperable military capability rather than isolated national success.
NATO’s next competitive advantage will come less from discovering breakthrough technologies than from adapting its institutions to absorb them faster than potential adversaries can adapt their own. The decisive variable is increasingly organizational rather than technological. Military advantage increasingly belongs to organizations capable of learning, adapting, and fielding new capabilities in weeks rather than years.
Ukraine has demonstrated that operational feedback can move directly from frontline units to engineers, manufacturers, and commanders 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, but that it must become significantly better at learning, integrating, and fielding innovation before future crises demand the same speed. This is likely to mean the military, manufacturers, and government officials are working far more closely to agree aims and ensure their rapid implementation.
NATO cannot — and should not — attempt to replicate Ukraine’s wartime decision-making. But it must absorb the underlying lesson: institutional agility has become a strategic advantage.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, NATO has understandably concentrated on rebuilding military readiness, strengthening deterrence, expanding force commitments, and restoring defense investment. Those efforts remain essential.
The next challenge is ensuring that these investments become integrated military capability rather than parallel national modernization programs.
That demands closer cooperation among all those involved. Interoperability increasingly depends not only on compatible hardware but on trusted software, shared data, resilient cloud infrastructure, and common operational systems.
None of this diminishes the importance of political leadership. On the contrary, the strategic decisions made since Madrid in 2022 have laid the foundations for NATO’s renewal. But the measure of success after Ankara will not be the length of the communiqué or the number of new initiatives announced.
It will be seen whether allies can demonstrate that political consensus can translate into military capability quickly enough to preserve credible deterrence in an era of accelerating technological change.
The alliance has made the difficult strategic choices. Now comes the harder task: transforming consensus into military capability before its competitors do the same.
David M. Cattler is a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a senior transatlantic security leader with more than 35 years of experience across the US government, NATO, and the Intelligence Community. Most recently, he served as Director of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), and was previously NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Intelligence and Security, the alliance’s senior intelligence official. Cattler is a graduate of the US Naval Academy and Georgetown University and was an MIT Seminar XXI Fellow.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
