Catherine Sendak
Good morning, and good afternoon, all. My name is Catherine Sendak. I am the Director of the Transatlantic Defense and Security team here at the Center for European Policy Analysis. Thank you so much for joining us today for this press briefing, looking forward to the 2026 NATO summit happening in Ankara early next month. I’m absolutely thrilled to be joined by a handful of our wonderful experts here at CEPA, who can really speak to what we think is going to happen at the summit, the priorities, the outward dynamics that we know are playing a big part in this, and another year is upon us of another NATO summit. We know as of right now there’s going to be a big focus on the defense industry, including a defense industry forum as part of the NATO agenda, which should be very interesting. We’re going to be discussing defense spending, Ukraine, Iran, and the Middle East, and we know those are all expected to be touched on at the summit as well. I’m going to introduce our wonderful speakers, and then I’m going to turn it over to them for a general question to open us up. As you all know, this is an on-the-record press briefing. Before we get started, I’d like to outline that CEPA is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institution headquartered here in Washington, DC. Any opinions expressed by our speakers and panelists during the briefing are their views alone. If you would like to ask a question during the briefing, please submit the question via Zoom chat, which I will keep track of at the bottom of the screen, and we will do our best to get through as many questions as possible in the time that we have allotted. So, thank you all so much again for joining us. For speakers today, I’m going to go through them really quickly. We have David Cattler, who is a Senior Fellow here at CEPA, and most recently the director of DCSA at the Department of Defense. David, thank you so much for joining us this morning. We have Laura Galante, who is also a Senior Fellow here with us at CEPA, and was most recently the US Intelligence Community Cyber Executive at the Office of Defense and National Intelligence. Laura, thank you so much for joining us. We have Jason Israel, who is our Auterion Senior Fellow here at CEPA, and most recently, before this, he was the Senior Director for Defense Policy and Strategy at the US National Security Council under the Biden administration. And finally, we have Minister Jan Lipavský, a member of our International Leadership Council here at CEPA, and he was the Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2021 to 2024 and is currently a member of Parliament. So, thank you all so much for joining us. We really do appreciate it. So, as we get started, I wanted to ask a general, broad question for the group. Everyone’s dying to know what the expectation should be out of the summit this year, early next month. What do you think the outcomes are going to be? What do we need to be looking at? Perhaps, Minister Lipavský, we’ll start with you.
Jan Lipavský
Thank you very much. Thank you for organizing this event, and thank you for inviting me. So, speaking of the upcoming NATO summit, we can look at it through the lens of what will happen there and what will not happen there. We will not see any breakup of the alliance on the other side. I would say that this summit will connect quite a lot to what happened in The Hague, with the discussion on the 5% commitment, divided into 3.5% of heavy military expenditures and those connected to it. When I saw the public appearance of Mr. Hegseth at the last Defense Ministerial in Brussels last week, I think it’s clear from the tone of the United States, which is the most important member, that the diminishing role of the USA in European defense is not a novelty to us, but let’s say that now they are putting it under a certain timeframe, and they have a name for it, the debate on how the money is spent always ends up with military planning around capabilities. I would say again that now more than ever it’s more about practical commitments rather than big geopolitical discussions, because I think everyone understands, or at least the major players understand, that real things have to happen now, so we may use names like NATO 3.0 or whatever, but at the end of the day, it will be about Europe, especially European countries putting money into defense. I also have this one leading question, which asks about the possibility of EU funds and different kinds of EU projects being connected to NATO. I would say that the synergy will be there in a moment when that money is spent on capability targets. If not, then we don’t have synergy. If Poland buys what Poland needs to deliver to NATO planning, then there is perfect synergy. So, thank you very much for this opportunity, and, of course, I’m ready to answer any questions.
Catherine Sendak
Thank you so much, and thank you for pulling in the connection with the EU funding and resourcing for future capabilities. I think that’s an important point. Let me turn it over to Laura. Laura, we were talking about the potentially diminishing US role in Europe being a theme, and obviously, defense spending and the defense industry. What are your takeaways as we lead into this?
Laura Galante
What I’m going to be looking for as we go through this summit is the discussion around interoperability, the core function around both the kinetic side and the cyber side of the alliance. Is that discussion being animated by how you use AI to improve, or is there more risk around AI’s use within the interoperability elements of the alliance? When you look at the last year of where NATO’s gone, this conversation around how AI animates warfare is one that we haven’t had a full summit around yet, so you’re looking at what happened in Iran, you’re looking at what happened in Venezuela, and I think a lot of the turn within the alliance is going to be, how do we think through what parts of our technological advantage as an ally will ride on different technology systems that use AI? How do we do this in a way that allows ourselves to understand where we have control and then where do we find architectures that are interoperable between allies, so those conversations are what I’m going to be listening for, and I think if we come out of the summit in a couple weeks here, and the answers are we need a better plan for how cloud architecture plays into the alliance, we need a better understanding of secure data, not just secure cyber, those are the sorts of indicators that the alliance and the participants are really moving towards something that is the future concept for what collective defense looks like.
Catherine Sendak
Laura, thank you so much. Those are really excellent points. And how much of that focus is going to be on that technology, sharing, cooperation, and interoperability? It’s going to be very interesting over the course of the couple of days. Jason, let me turn to you on that point. Do you believe you know where that priority is in the defense industry? Do you think that’s going to be the hallmark of the summit, or where do you think this is going to go?
Jason Israel
Yes, thank you. Thanks so much for having me, Katie. Following up on Jan and Laura, I could not agree more with Jan’s comments about how the view on what the number and the amount of investment governments were making at The Hague, and then how it will be spent, will definitely be the headlines here. And then, moving to what Laura said, when we look at Ukraine, we see the scale and how rapid innovation can take place, but we also see that interoperability across platforms will be a challenge when you try to take the Ukraine model and put it onto NATO, so that is absolutely enormous. In summary, you want all of your robots to be able to talk to one another with secure data transmission, and that’s going to be a challenge for the alliance. And that actually brings me back to your original point, Katie, which is that there will be a NATO Summit Defense Industry Forum. For background, when we co-hosted the NATO 75 Summit in Washington, that was the first time we held a Defense Summit Industry Day. This is separate from the NATO Industry Forum, which happens every other year. It happened in Bucharest last November, then in Washington, and it happened again in The Hague. What’s different this year is that if you look at the number of hours, the majority of the summit’s full day on July 7 will be industry discussions and the leaders’ summit, which President Trump and all the other leaders of NATO are scheduled to attend. This will be more of a get-together, recognizing Article Five, that NATO is still important, and then moving on. But the key day will be the industry forum, so yes to interoperability, to looking together to how NATO can procure together, and then a note on what else I’m looking for, which will be headlines about the political discussions and the political disagreements, but I’m always on the record saying that, first of all, we are democracies and welcome disagreement within our nations, and you could compare that to autocracies that don’t. So within a group of democracies, you’re always going to see disagreements, and we have had throughout the history of NATO, which we could go down a long list when we have time, about things that NATO has disagreed on in the past, but in the meantime, the scale of things that we do together continues to increase. Rammstein just this past month had over 200 aircraft from 18 nations. Trojan Footprint was an exercise that was the largest US-led special operations exercise ever conducted in Europe, and while there are some examples of the US not participating in some of the exercises, that is not unprecedented either. And these aren’t symbolic events. I always say there are two things that military exercises do. One is a message to the world and to adversaries, but it also actually gets our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen getting to work together, as they would have to in combat. And I am actually a Navy captain in the reserve. Last week, I was at Naval Station Mayport, doing exercises, getting ships certified and ready for deployment, and it’s just part of that everyday work that NATO does. Under the headlines, there will continue to be a lot of progress. And then we can get on to this later, but one thing I always say is, when the NATO Summit gets together, and they make announcements and progress, it’s compared to what China and Russia are doing when it comes to trying to build any kind of partnership that they can and the numbers when you actually look at how the US is able to bring countries together and get countries around them and how we’re able to bring the NATO alliance together even amidst this dynamic political environment is absolutely enormous in comparison to what China and Russia can do when it comes to bringing other nations around them, so that’s always a key point, and things that I’ll be looking out for when I’m in Ankara.
Catherine Sendak
Thank you so much, Jason. I appreciate those insights, and you segue beautifully for me to turn to David as we talk about the things that are below the headlines that we know NATO is focused on and working on. David is a former Assistant Secretary General at NATO. You know how these things are put together, the inner workings, and how this actually comes to fruition. Would love your thoughts on where you sit today on what needs to come out of the summit next month.
Michael Newton
I think we may have lost David.
Catherine Sendak
Oh, have we lost him? We’ll come back to him with that pressing question. Let me turn to another topic here and to the Minister real fast, because I think this is a topic that we talk about all the time. Laura has mentioned this from a resilience perspective in some of her opening comments. I know your country is consistently the target of Russian hybrid actions, which we here at CEPA are calling shadow warfare. Just under that threshold, we’re seeing that continuing and even increasing in many respects. Where do you see that fitting into the conversation at the summit, if at all? How do you rank that in your priorities?
Jan Lipavský
Speaking of hybrid warfare, I would say that it’s important for NATO to recognize it as one of the threats that need to be tackled. Common capabilities are not something that I would see being built, so it’s up to the respective states to be able to recognize those threats and to be resilient enough when speaking of cyber warfare, information warfare, or different kinds of attempts to manipulate elections. I would say that the EU is partially able to build up some of those capacities, and in terms of NATO, it’s more about the exchange of classified information being gathered by secret services, which might be very useful. During my tenure, for example, we were able to use the attribution towards China, which had the email system of the Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs. So, in this regard, the information platform is very useful, and it’s very important that the definition of hybrid proof is always part of the conclusions and is recognized.
Catherine Sendak
I think that’s a wonderful point, and how those actors work together is really going to be critical moving forward. Laura, if I can pick up on that from your perspective. We’re talking about information sharing and the critical nature of that as it relates to hybrid warfare and shadow warfare. From your perspective, are we ready as an alliance for the current challenges that we face in terms of the safety of information and digital sharing?
Laura Galante
I think it’s fair to say that NATO has come a long way in the last couple years, but in terms of how you think about the threat or attack surface that we’re dealing with right now, you’re dealing with a fused civil infrastructure and military infrastructure, so much of the data centers, undersea cables, airports, even rail in Europe and in the US are in private hands. And what you have here is a set of actions by not just Russia, which was laid out by the Minister, but also by China, Iran, and other proxy actors and criminal groups that are going after that private infrastructure. There isn’t a strong delineation between going after either a military airport or a civilian airport. A lot of the rails of how both data and logistics are flowing across the continent and in the US really are built on that same set of connective tissue, and China and Russia realize that, and Iran realizes that. And when you see a campaign, like that deemed Salt Typhoon, where there were telecommunications breaches across over 10 NATO countries that have claimed and joint advisories that they have been affected by these telecom breaches, of which Chinese contractors sponsored by the Chinese military and Chinese intelligence services have been conducting, you have a very different type of threat. This isn’t just something that you can wave your hand and say, “Oh, we see these incidents from Russia from time to time.” No, this is really about the stability of the alliance, the ability to defend against massive disruption on the civilian side, and then the ability to operate through it, and operating through the level of disruption that we are going to see, and that we are already starting to see on these converged digital systems, has to be the continued focus of NATO. That’s not a cyber problem, that’s an alliance problem. So that’s where I think we’ve got to continue to take the 5% spending conversation, and underneath that, the 1.5% focused on critical infrastructure, we have to marry it up to how you operate through disruption. What does resilience really look like? And then, to add one more step to that, Article Three is specifically around resilience. Article Five always gets all the attention, but Article Three is a really thoughtful way to say, “How do we do civilian military infrastructure protection? How do we think about that as an alliance?” The blueprint is there now. We have to operate in the moment that we’re living in, and really bring the alliance’s resources to bear to do this.
Catherine Sendak
Thank you, Laura. Such great points about how we need to do this as an alliance. I appreciate that. David, I see you’re back on the line, so I’d love to turn to you. I mentioned at the top, I think before you dropped off, that you know the inner workings of how one of these summits comes together. As a former Assistant Secretary General, I would love to get your thoughts on what you’re looking for as far as takeaways from the summit next month.
David Cattler
Yeah, sounds good, Katie. Can you hear me all right?
Catherine Sendak
Sure, please go ahead.
David Cattler
Okay, perfect. I think as the summit approaches, I expect we’re going to see three themes dominate. First, there will be continued focus on alliance adaptation. NATO spent the last several years transforming from a force optimized for crisis management to one that’s more focused on collective defense against peer competitors. Second, capability delivery, and this is a big challenge here, and that challenge is no longer just identifying what the alliance needs. The challenge is to actually field those capabilities at the speed demanded by today’s security environment. Third, an even bigger lift is technology and industrial resilience. Ukraine has demonstrated that military advantage depends not only on platforms and weapons, but also on the ability to innovate, to produce, to sustain, and to adapt faster than an adversary. So, I think the question for the Ankara summit is not whether NATO remains the world’s strongest alliance. I mean, obviously it does. The question is whether allies can translate political consensus, the increased investment decisions that they’ve made, and technological innovation into operational capability at the pace required by strategic competition. I think the most likely outcome of this summit will be continued movement towards a stronger, more capable, and more technologically integrated alliance. And I think NATO 3.0 was mentioned earlier. I think that means a lot of things to a lot of different people, so it would be helpful if the summit communicates, or in some of the speeches that are given around it, tries to make it a little bit clearer on what that means and what that’s going to look like, as the alliance moves from burden-sharing and burden-shifting. I don’t really expect a single headline announcement to define the summit, and what I would correspondingly expect to be communicated is actually going to be pretty brief. I expect progress across several key areas: defense investment, industrial capacity, innovation, adoption, and implementation of regional defense plans. The larger story is that NATO’s adaptation is becoming structural rather than episodic. The alliance is increasingly organizing itself around long-term competition rather than short-term crisis response. Katie, back to you.
Catherine Sendak
David, thank you so much for laying that out so clearly. It is really interesting to talk about how structural and institutionalized some of these things seem to be coming along within the alliance, which I think is really positive news. There have been several mentions of NATO 3.0. I would love to come back to the group at some point and get your thoughts on what that means for everyone going there. We already have several questions in the chat, so I want to make sure that we get to them. The first question is from Demian, from the New Voice of Ukraine, and thank you so much. We’ll start with your priority question, Demian. There were reports that NATO is considering holding annual summits less frequently in order to reduce face-to-face encounters with US President Donald Trump and limit the risk of disruption within the alliance. Given this, when do you expect NATO to hold its next summit after Ankara? And, Minister, maybe I’ll start with you. Maybe you’ve got some information for us on this account.
Jan Lipavský
Honestly, I don’t have information. I don’t want to mystify anyone.
Catherine Sendak
No, no, I appreciate that. If anyone would like to weigh in. As we know, summits have not always happened every year. That is not something that has always happened on the schedule. But perhaps, David, Jason, if you have any thoughts on this.
David Cattler
Yeah, I could go first, Katie, if that’s all right.
Catherine Sendak
Please, absolutely.
David Cattler
When I served at NATO, the summits alternated every other year. We had a leaders’ meeting in between, but we still had the same cycle of the chiefs of defense meetings, the defense ministerials, and the foreign ministerials. So, you still go through all of those same major milestones at the highest political levels across the alliance to then offer things for leaders to consider. I’m of the mind that a lot of the major decisions have already been taken by the alliance in just the last few years. You have the 5% commitment for spend, you have the capability targets, and now again, as I said earlier, one of the things that should be discussed at this summit is the results of the force planning, the way that will correlate into the regional plans, and so on. So, that’s still important for leaders to be briefed on, agree on, and share some guidance, but once those decisions are taken, the alliance will have charted a course for the next few years. So, I think there is a strong argument to be made that if there aren’t things that really merit bringing 32 leaders together, then maybe you don’t have the meeting on that frequency, but I would expect you’ve got major political change coming as well. If you just look at the United States with the presidential election coming in 2028, I would think that whoever the president is who gets elected in November of 2028 would expect that there would be a NATO summit at least in 2029, so you could go two years, maybe three years. I’m just speculating, but I think we need to see what they discuss about where they feel they are in the strategic decision-making cycle, and what remains that leaders need to pay attention to and give their guidance and approval. Back to you.
Catherine Sendak
I appreciate that, David. Jason, I don’t know if you want to weigh in on this.
Jason Israel
I would love to, and just following up with David, I think maybe one thing I could add, rhyming with my previous comment, is going back to when many of us would come together and put a summit together, which is a big lift. There is a big question about having that big summit annually, just as far as the capacity of the staff and putting it together. What really has changed? Can you state that because things have not changed, and NATO is still strong, you don’t need to have it every other year? In the premise of the question, there will certainly be headlines about why you would switch to every other, and whether that shows a weakness in the alliance of some kind. I would just say again, how are China and Russia looking at this? The fact that a NATO summit takes place, in my view, does not concern President Xi or President Putin. Just the fact that the meeting’s taking place, it happens. So, we often sit back and think, what are the actual things that come out of the summit or happen between summits that do really add to deterrence and really add to capability, and maybe keep those two people I named up at night, right? And so much more important than whether the meetings take place in the same format than they have is all of the things that we’ve discussed thus far, and I know we’re going to get down more into the detail, and I’m happy to move into some of the defense industry specifics about what we might see, but that’s my view when it comes to the periodicity of the meetings themselves.
Catherine Sendak
Yeah, thank you so much, Jason. Let me turn to Benedict Hollenstein from the Swiss newspaper twentyman.ch, and if I’ve botched that name, I apologize, Benedict. You had a question regarding the relationship of the Swiss Army and military with NATO, and so let me convey it here from NATO’s perspective. What role could Switzerland play in the alliance’s air defense architecture, and in particular, in countering drone capabilities? As we know, Swiss startups have played a leading role in some of these conversations and some of this work, so I would like to have anyone who would like to weigh in, because I think all of you could touch on this in a different way. Welcome, anyone, to chime in here.
Jason Israel
I can kick off and then turn it over to some folks. The developments in Switzerland have been absolutely fascinating throughout the last several years, particularly for those of us who have been working with Europe and NATO and seen the political changes that have occurred in Switzerland and Swiss public opinion on security cooperation evolving. We always use the term Swiss neutrality as a general term, but following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there has been a noticeable shift. I saw recent polling data that had just shown the continued trend of the Swiss still being relatively neutral, but overall moving toward more integration and interest in moving toward a more proactive NATO-aligned agenda. One thing that we follow closely at CEPA is export controls, and I would just say that one of the things I think about within that question is what Switzerland’s export controls and relationship with NATO look like. I think we’re going to see Switzerland feel the pressure, just like all nations are, including the US, of moving toward a more integrated defense industrial base across the alliance, so I’m looking closely at whether Swiss defense companies or just Switzerland’s policy in general are going to align their export controls a bit more around all the motivations for transatlantic integration that we’ve discussed thus far. Happy to get more into details, but definitely want to turn it over to my other Swiss-watching colleagues,
Catherine Sendak
David, John, or Laura? Anyone else want to chime in on this?
David Cattler
Yeah, I’ll just say briefly: I agree with Jason, and I will add that I’m well aware that the intelligence and security services in Switzerland bring great capability. They also have a really well-developed think tank community that works quite well across the European continent, which could really add to the debate. I would go back on Jason’s point and stress that that question of interoperability and the arms shipments would have to be discussed, because there were some issues in 2022, if memory serves, about ammunition use for weapon systems that are purchased by other nations, and you really can’t have that within an alliance architecture and framework, so if the cooperation is going to get deeper, then I would imagine there’d be some pretty serious discussions about what that means politically and industrially for them to come in more closely than they are.
Catherine Sendak
Great, thank you. So, moving on to Murray Brewster from CBC News in Canada. Thank you for your questions. How do you believe the recent use of US capability withdrawal from crisis planning plays out at the summit, and is there a consensus assessment among allies, as German officials claim, around the timeline that Russia could be ready to challenge NATO in some form by 2029? Minister, maybe I’ll turn to you on the second question on Russia’s ability to challenge NATO in that timeline.
Jan Lipavský
So, this is one of the points that have been discussed in the last six months, given the fact that Ukraine was able to stop Russian advances, and now we cannot support the Ukrainians’ strategic deep strikes into Russian territory and Crimea without fuel. And the front line, which is stalled, is changing, and the result of those changes might be that Vladimir Putin will be seeking some kind of aesthetic solution or escalation in a different kind of theater to continue the image of the war, and that might be the Baltics. We know that Russia is planning to have a strong military culture in the Baltic states. The question is whether Russia will do something or not, but I would say that we are living in times when things that are possible are also happening. So, the fact that we don’t like it and we don’t want to see it doesn’t mean that, for example, Vladimir Putin won’t decide to test NATO, and this might be a different scenario. Many of them begin under the red line, a different kind of hybrid warfare, a different kind of destruction in the C domain, in the electromagnetic domain, in informational warfare, things like that. So, I would say that this concern is quite relevant, and of course, in combination with what Peter Hegseth said, that the USA will do a revision, and that they’re looking for ways to be less present in Europe. If I should paraphrase it this way, this should concern us as Europeans, because it will put quite a lot of pressure on us. So, the question is, how will we produce the new weapons? What is the capabilities industry? I think it’s not only money, and much of that was already mentioned. I would say that we have to prepare, and we have to continue to prepare for such a scenario as European countries, and definitely do it on a NATO platform, because the NATO platform is the readiest platform to coordinate our defenses.
Catherine Sendak
Thank you so much. I think that’s such an important point to make: how this is going to all play out over the next six months, exactly to your point, and what Russia is preparing itself to be capable of doing in the future? Turning to the first part of the question from Murray on the US capability withdrawal from crisis planning. I think that speaks to a bigger question, Murray, if I may, to that specifically, but also some general news over the past year or so of US participation in things, or the true presence in Europe decreasing. Would love to hear from our speakers on Murray’s question of how you think those conversations are going to play out at the summit? Is the US force posture or US participation in things going to be touched upon? David, maybe I’ll start with you.
David Cattler
A few things to say up front. The US is not pulling out of crisis planning. What the US is saying they’re doing is shifting the resources that they’re willing to contribute to those that are deployed or otherwise immediately available should NATO find itself involved in a crisis, and I think it’s important to start there with that clarification and provide another one, which is that these aren’t permanently binding. This isn’t like these are the only pieces you can put down on the board at all. Once a crisis begins to unfold, many allies choose to contribute more capability and more forces over time, depending on the direction, the intensity, and the anticipated duration of a conflict. It’s just, what do you have on the day that the situation unfolds? I think it’s important to take a nod to the second part of the question, which is to say that I’m not aware that NATO published anything publicly. There’s been some discussion in German media, in the last week in particular, about 2029 and Russia being ready, but I agree with the previous speaker as far as to do what, what scenario are we really talking about here, but I think it’s fair to say, based on my discussions with any of a range of Europeans, that the closer you are to the Eastern Front with Russia, the more you feel like they could do something on a smaller scale, on a shorter timeline, that would put great strain not just on that individual nation, but on the alliance’s political and military decision making and corresponding response. So, I think Europe has been very upfront about the capabilities they rely on from the United States when it comes to crisis response, and those all tend to be very high-end things that the United States does very well. Special operations forces, high-intensity logistics, larger-scale command and control, aerial refueling, and ballistic missile defense. There are a number of core capabilities that Europe is looking to either develop on a more rapid scale or grow on a more rapid scale to take over for the United States, and that’ll be part of that burden-shifting discussion. So, we have to see what comes out of this, and for me, the big takeaway will be the timeline. How much time is NATO actually affording itself to be sure that Europe can provide similar capabilities to defend in an immediate crisis response, and what seems to be discussed and coming out in public about what any limitations might be, or caveats on further provision of capability and response time from the US, or from any other nation that chooses to contribute a smaller amount or less capability upfront?
Catherine Sendak
No, I appreciate that, David. Jason, did I see you?
Jason Israel
Just one quick note, following up on David, whom I agree with, is just a reminder that the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO is a US military general, and there was just going to be integration from the top, just based on that. And there was a discussion last year about whether that would remain the case. It’s still the case, and so just across all elements of strategy and planning, there’s integration simply based on that.
Catherine Sendak
I appreciate that, thank you. So, the next question is from Anne Bauer, from Los Hechos. Laura, I think I’m going to turn to you on this, on the AI sovereignty defense tech interoperability angle, but welcome all to chime in as well. Isn’t the priority of this summit a clear signal of the American engagement with NATO and Ukraine? The last speeches of the American government were only about threatening our European allies. How do you ask for industrial cooperation if you threaten your allies all the time? I think that was her question. So, Laura, as you turn to this about interoperability, about tech cooperation, how do we get above some of the political noise that we’re hearing?
Laura Galante
Yeah, thanks, Katie. And I might try to weave in Tabitha’s good question here, too, about the focus on industry and the defense industry taking such a prominent role, like Jason laid out here, in Ankara. On Ukraine, I do think the symbolism alone is huge here. It is the dominating factor on the agenda, so you’re very much not wrong about the question, and I think that is a strong signal that allies are going to take from this. I think the fact that it has stayed on the agenda as long as it has also shows us a continued commitment here. Let me take one of the pieces around Ukraine that I think gets missed a little bit here, and I actually think it’s the angle that industry has been hammering home in a bunch of other fora, whether it was back in Munich or Davos, or what have you, and it’s this. What Ukraine has been incredibly good at is battlefield adoption, and we talk about it in terms of how good the drones have gotten and the ability to get more rapid cycles against Russia. We talk about targets in a very tactical battlefield sense, but the bigger picture here is Ukraine, in a lot of ways, is the blueprint for a more effective way to operate in AI-fueled warfare, and the way that that will look is the ability to sense whether it’s air, sea, or cyber, sense your domain, use commercial tools and adapt them where needed, cheaper, faster cycles, and then plug intelligence that you’re either receiving from the outside or internally into your system, and iterate on that loop of sensing, tech use, and intelligence is going to be the muscle memory that builds towards a more adaptive advantage in modern warfare. That’s what Ukraine is symbolizing in all of these different ways, and the question is going to be, how do you take some of those lessons around military capability and the speed of action and implement them across the alliance? The other piece on Ukraine is the question that was posed a little bit earlier by Murray, I think, around German officials saying, “Get ready for 2029 for a full Russian challenge to NATO.” Russia is already challenging NATO, and I know we say hybrid warfare, shadow warfare; Russia’s actively contesting systems in the alliance all the time, so this is what it will look like from here on. We will be in a rare moment if we have such a physically and visually poignant moment to read to understand warfare in the future, and today, you are going to feel warfare below the threshold that many of us grew up seeing and remembering and that the alliance was built on, and we need better ways to continue to talk about how that risk plays out and how you defend against it, and there’s a lot to learn from how Ukraine’s done that.
Catherine Sendak
Laura, thank you so much, and thank you for weaving Tabitha’s question in here too. Let me rattle it off, because I’d really like to get Jan’s perspective on this as well. So, from Tabitha Reeves from National Defense Magazine, could you talk more specifically about how this upcoming summit is focusing on the defense industry? Why the increased focus now, and what are leaders hoping to see from the industry? Minister, if I can turn to you, from where you are, what are you hoping to see from industry, either from the forum or in general for the alliance?
Jan Lipavský
So, I think everyone understands that in the fifth year of the Russian war against Ukraine, it’s not only about dedicating the budget to build up armies, but you need to have a real industrial capacity, because military strength is just a function of your state’s economy and what you are able to produce in time and in quality. It was already mentioned how rapidly Ukraine was able to develop new weapons; it is also a valid point for Russia. We compare the Shaheds from a few years ago, cheaply running technology, now it’s quite a sophisticated weapon, flying higher, flying faster, having a bigger payload in multiple ways, how it’s able to communicate, and all of these things are fueled by China, which observes that quite a lot. So, any future big war will mean that you have to adapt your technology, but very practically. Many states are trying to find a way to prepare weapons for their armies, and when you put the money into that, you will have the weapons, which will not only come on time but will also be relevant in a technological sphere. This means that we have to bring industry into the game, give them some kind of way to know how things will happen, and be in touch with them. This will also be the way in which, for example, new union factories are being built, and how everything is being financed on the side of the industry, so this is quite a relevant, timely, and difficult discussion.
Catherine Sendak
Thank you so much. And that interplay between industry and government is so critical, and I think the good news is there’s a recognition of how you can’t treat everything separately. So, thank you so much for that overview. I think that was really important. Jason, I see your hand. Please.
Jason Israel
Oh, just a very quick follow-up to Jan on what we’re looking for when it comes to the defense. Very specific announcement that I think you’ll see, there’s already a website on it, but it’s called the NATO Front Door for Industry, and NATO will be announcing this, but it’s basically an AI-enabled tool that will allow all the companies around the world that are asking, “How can we get integrated into the NATO procurement cycle?” This will be a tool that allows them to provide information on what they can offer, and then when there are requests for information or requests for proposals, that information will automatically go out to those companies, and then ideally they can get their technology into the testing pipeline. So, that’s just one particular area that I think you’ll see an announcement about, and that companies will be very interested in across the alliance, because one question we all get often from companies that have defense technology is, “How can we get our technology evaluated and tested?”
Catherine Sendak
Thank you so much, Jason. And thank you for recognizing what NATO is putting out here on that front. Let me turn to Stuart Smith from Feature Story News. Are the imminent resignation of the UK Prime Minister, the resignation of former Defense Secretary John Healey, and the ongoing lack of a UK defense investment plan issues for this summit? Has London lost any remaining reputation for being able to deliver on its commitments? And I did hear that the plan is going to come out before the summit, so we’ll see if that actually happens. But welcome any of our speakers to weigh in on the impact of UK politics on this summit.
Jan Lipavský
If I may say that it weakens the position of the UK because they are not delivering on the budget, they have a prime minister and resignation, so any words from them on such occasion will be weaker than it could be if both of them would be different, but on the European scale of things, the UK remains, and will remain for a long time, one of the strongest militaries and clear voices offending Russian imperialism, so in the long term, I would not worry, but that’s how I see things.
Catherine Sendak
Great, thank you. Would anyone else like to weigh in on this question?
David Cattler
I’ll just add, I think it will obviously be the subject of a lot of discussion behind closed doors, especially in context of the other decisions that have already been made by the Alliance in just the past few summits, again the 5% spending commitment, the capability targets, now we have the capability delivery plans, and we’ve got the regional plans that need to be discussed, and in some ways agreed. You’ve got this whole discussion of burden-shifting in the backdrop, it’s going to be NATO 3.0 or however they decide to package it, any nation that arrives at the Ankara summit is significantly below 5% or even worse, still below the whale’s target, is going to have a very tough time of it, I would imagine, in public and in private, but especially in private when they get together to talk about this, because if you buy into all of the various premises that are coming together here, you have a significant Russia threat. It manifests not just in Ukraine, but in lower-intensity hybrid warfare, sub-threshold, however you want to characterize it, against a range of allies, and they’re testing those allies and the alliance with that behavior. You also agree that time is of the essence. Time is of the essence because you’ve got to have credible military capability to back up your deterrence and defense, and there’s a war that’s still raging, the biggest war on the European continent since World War Two, that requires a lot of input from a munitions perspective and other military capability perspectives to be sustained. Now is the time to have a clear plan about how to move forward with real military spending and capability delivery on a real timeline, so if the new Prime Minister is seated, new Defense Minister seated beforehand, I imagine they’re going to get quite a number of pointed questions about what the direction of travel is, how quickly can you gather solid political consensus and move, but I think you’ve got to keep your eyes wide open. You don’t just snap your fingers and have a massive expansion of defense industrial production capacity. So the plan will be important, but what will be even more important to see is a sustained political consensus and approvals for the budget for the military acquisition to meet those capability targets, the commitments to the others in the alliance, and then real equipment showing up on the timeline, and that’s not something that the new Prime Minister is going to be able to solve between now and the summit, or even in a few months to follow.
Catherine Sendak
Absolutely, thank you. And we would argue that we’re already many years behind some of these processes, so I appreciate that, David. The next questions are from Nurai Taylor from Signal Media. I think I see Laura and David’s names all over these. I’ll start with the first question. One of the central lessons of 9/11 was that critical intelligence existed but never reached the right people in time. Twenty-five years later, as NATO prepares to meet, we are sharing more data and moving it faster than ever. Are allies actually making better, faster decisions together, or just moving more information? And where is the biggest gap today between what can be shared, what can be integrated, and what commanders can act on in real time? Laura, maybe I’ll start with you.
Jan Lipavský
I think that the intelligence has to be gathered by someone, and the biggest capabilities are on the US, and this is one of the critical components of US capabilities, which are being provided into NATO, among many others, which Europe has no way of quickly replacing and speaking around building the all the infrastructure you have to have for such intelligence, so even though there is a lot of exchange, at the beginning is someone who is able to gather, assess, and analyze it, and I think this is the biggest challenge which European states or NATO states have. If there is any change, more information doesn’t mean that you understand it better. So, I would see this as a very basic approach.
Catherine Sendak
Thank you. Laura, over to you.
Laura Galante
I’ll focus on the biggest gap today. I want to go back again and stress that private infrastructure, especially in mobility, transport, and digital, are the key areas where allies are getting constantly attacked, whether it’s cyber concentration risk disruptions around technology that they have, these are the soft underbelly that is constantly being targeted, and we’ve gone from where that used to be more episodic, to something that is much more permanent, and it’s a contestation that’s happening all the time, and the change that you need in how you use intelligence in order to defend against that shift from episodic to persistent has to happen, not just in government intelligence services, but also has to be recognized by where the targets are getting attacked at these critical infrastructure companies and in entities. As much as allies want to share and do good intelligence processes, collection, analysis, and dissemination between each other, the real gap is the ability to push critical intelligence out to these infrastructure providers and take infrastructure providers’ inputs of what they’re seeing back into the system and use that to understand what the threat is, and it’s that two-way street that we have to develop. I saw the second part of your question is around how you use AI and intelligence analysis. The real opportunity for a lot of these private critical infrastructure companies, or ones that have some state backing, is to use some commercial capability to better, more quickly sense, understand, and analyze the threats that they’re seeing to their companies’ networks, to their grid, to their partners, to the equities that they have in their supply chains, so we have to utilize AI in a commercial sense to be able to build that intelligence capability on the private side, and then funnel it into alliance capabilities and government capabilities.
Catherine Sendak
Thank you so much, Laura. I want to just pick up on that and turn to David on the blind spot portion of Nurai’s question: between you using AI outputs, how does that inform what gaps remain in terms of taking advantage of the speed and scale that these systems provide?
David Cattler
Yeah, thanks, Katie. I’m a little biased, and uncharacteristically for a career intelligence officer, I’m going to be more optimistic than those who preceded me and say that I led intelligence and security for NATO from 2019 to 2023. This is not an intelligence problem. There’s plenty of data. You have 32 allies with 85 intelligence services. They all have militaries. They’re all contributing a tremendous amount of data. Yes, the US contributes the majority. It’s also because the US spends massive amounts of money and has massive capability in the space, but one thing I think is critically important to point out is that every nation does contribute. They often contribute the very best they have in terms of data and personnel service experts, whatever the case may be, and I can give you firsthand feedback at the strategic level to the higher-level operational level. So, for the things that NATO needs to do for strategic decision-making, political and military, when they meet together, they have what they need. Could it be better? Sure. We’re in a constant process of improvement, but it’s night and day different in 2026 than it was in 2019. I think a lot of the concerns from the framing of the question really get into the area that Laura touched on. I just tweak it a little bit and say that what NATO needs is a cloud-enabled data pool, rapid data distribution operations at the edge, corresponding communications, and AI processing in a lot of locations to be able to deal with that data distribution, that understanding and use at speed, and that’s a challenge for just about every military right now, but I think this alliance really needs it if it wants to take their war fighting capability to the next level. What do I see as some of the big challenges? Well, with 32 different nations, they will all adopt AI in different ways. How are you proposing to use AI to achieve political consensus when information is brought to the table? Are you proposing to automate? I can guarantee you that not every capital will subscribe to that for national security purposes or for deterrence and defense purposes. Even within that, what are the ground rules, etc? So I will end my intervention here by saying I think a lot of this is going to come back to interoperability, and the thing that those experts are going to have to wrap their brains around is that historically interoperability was really more about common procedures, comms doctrine, but I think increasingly it’s going to be in data software, cloud architecture, AI-enabled systems, and digital infrastructure, because if you can’t share that information securely and rapidly, you’re just not going to realize the benefits of fielding these new technologies, so the takeaway I would give you here is that interoperability is becoming a software problem just as much as it has historically been a hardware problem for the NATO alliance.
Catherine Sendak
Great, thank you so much. Well, that hour has sped by, so we are almost at time. I would like to highlight a couple of things before I turn it over to my colleague, Michael, to close us out here. And thank you all so much for your questions and for being on the line. First, my colleague Michael has posted several reports and products that CEPA has put out around these issues, including the report Unleashing Defense Innovation and one that we did last year on the cloud and NATO digital resilience. So, we welcome you all to take a look at that, and please let us know if you have any questions or comments. And Laura so wonderfully alluded several times in this conversation to the focus on resilience, that 1.5% spending on infrastructure – what does that actually look like in practice in terms of intelligence, critical infrastructure, and cyber? To that end, CEPA will be in Ankara on the sidelines of the NATO summit coming up early next month, and we will be co-hosting a panel at MSC Allies in Ankara on exactly these issues on July 7. So, please keep us in mind if any of you all are traveling to Ankara for the summit, and I just want to thank you all so much again for joining us. Thank you so much to our speakers. What wonderful comments and insights you all have provided. And with that, let me turn it over to Michael. Thank you so much.
Michael Newton
Thanks, Katie. Thank you to all of our speakers, and thank you to everyone for attending. As usual, we will be sending out a recording and transcript from this event, as well as information about the events that Katie mentioned, and also our experts who will be in Ankara. Laura, Jason, and a few others will be there, so if you guys would like to connect with them, please let me know, and I can loop you in via email. And if there are any other requests, please reach out to press@cepa.org. So, thank you very much. Have a great day. Goodbye.
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.
