Enabling Arctic Sentry: The Key Role for Maritime Autonomous Systems

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
02/25/2026

By Robbin Laird

On February 11, 2026, Allied Command Operations (ACO), which is responsible for the planning and execution of all NATO exercises, activities and operations, noted that they began Arctic Sentry.

The multi-domain activity will further strengthen NATO’s posture in the Arctic and High North as persistent NATO presence in the region grows.

“Arctic Sentry underscores the Alliance’s commitment to safeguard its members and maintain stability in one of the world’s most strategically significant and environmentally challenging areas,” said U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, Supreme Allied Commander Europe.

“It will leverage NATO’s strength to protect our territory and ensure the Arctic and High North remains secure.”

This builds on NATO’s growing focus on Arctic security and follows a meeting between U.S. President Donald J. Trump and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte last month in Davos, Switzerland, where the two leaders agreed that NATO should collectively take more responsibility for the defence of the region considering Russia’s military activity and China’s growing interest there.

The preparations for Arctic Sentry provided NATO planners with full visibility of Allied nations’ activities in the Arctic and High North. Moving forward, ACO will use Arctic Sentry to cohere these actions into one overarching operational approach to Allies’ increasing activities, which will enhance NATO’s presence there. 

These activities include, among others, Denmark’s Arctic Endurance, a series of multi-domain exercises designed to enhance Allied ability to operate in the region, and Norway’s upcoming exercise Cold Response, where troops from across the Alliance have already begun to arrive.

Arctic Sentry will be led by Joint Force Command Norfolk (JFC Norfolk), the Alliance’s newest Joint Force Command, whose area of responsibility, since December, now includes this entire region.

“In terms of NATO’s Joint Force Commands, Norfolk is the bridge between North America and Europe, defending the strategic approaches between the two continents and much more,” said Grynkewich, who received a briefing on Arctic Sentry planning from the joint force command there yesterday.

ACO and JFC Norfolk will collaborate with Allied Command Transformation and coordinate activities with the U.S. and Canada’s North American Regional Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), as well as with U.S. Northern Command and U.S. European Command.

NATO’s new Arctic Sentry activity is best understood as the High North successor to Baltic Sentry, carrying forward a model in which maritime autonomous systems (MAS) and other uncrewed platforms underpin persistent surveillance, critical‑infrastructure protection, and distributed deterrence in contested waters.

Together, these initiatives signal a shift from episodic presence to a web of manned and unmanned assets designed to monitor and shape the battlespace from the seabed to space, with MAS at the heart of that transition.

When NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte announced Baltic Sentry in January 2025, it was framed as a direct response to a rash of attacks and suspected sabotage against pipelines and telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea. The mission combined frigates, maritime patrol aircraft (MPA), and a “small fleet of naval drones,” and was explicitly tasked to bolster the protection of critical undersea infrastructure and improve the Alliance’s ability to respond to destabilizing acts. In practice, Baltic Sentry became an operational laboratory for blending traditional naval presence with new technologies, including uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs), surface drones, and AI‑enabled surveillance architectures.

A year later, Arctic Sentry emerges as a multi‑domain “enhanced vigilance activity” that extends this logic northward. Led by Joint Force Command Norfolk under Allied Command Operations, Arctic Sentry is designed to knit together national exercises, allied forces, and advanced sensors across the Arctic and High North. NATO documents and official commentary stress that the activity’s emphasis is on coordination, surveillance, and situational awareness rather than a large new permanent force posture, but planners also acknowledge that filling surveillance and infrastructure gaps will demand heavy use of drones and other uncrewed systems.

This continuity is not accidental. Defence24’s coverage notes explicitly that Arctic Sentry is “based on” Baltic Sentry and seeks to apply its approach to the broader Arctic theater, where Russian and Chinese activities, melting sea ice, and new sea routes are transforming the strategic environment. In that sense, Baltic Sentry is the prototype: a concentrated experiment in using MAS to protect underwater infrastructure and deter hybrid threats in a constrained sea. Arctic Sentry is the scaling effort, meant to apply the same manned–unmanned mix to a far larger, harsher, and more politically complex region.

Baltic Sentry’s stated mission was to enhance NATO’s presence and resilience in the Baltic Sea, particularly regarding critical undersea infrastructure. NATO’s launch announcement emphasized a blend of assets—frigates, MPA, “new technologies,” and naval drones—while stressing cooperation with national surveillance systems and industry through a Critical Undersea Infrastructure Network. The key innovation was not simply adding drones to an existing task group, but using them to thicken the Alliance’s underwater sensor grid and shorten the detect‑to‑act chain against shadow fleets and covert sabotage.

Open‑source reporting suggests that Baltic Sentry evolved over 2025 into a broader technology and concept‑development venue. American University’s analysis of Baltic Sea infrastructure security describes an operation that uses ships, aircraft, drones, artificial intelligence, and UUVs to monitor the seabed, map cable routes, and identify suspicious activity, including sanction‑evading “rogue vessels.” Stars and Stripes’ coverage of a U.S. destroyer joining Baltic Sentry underlines that the mission has expanded beyond pure infrastructure protection to include airspace defense and counter‑drone deterrence in the region. U.S. Navy P‑8 patrol aircraft and air‑defense frigates have been brought in to cope with repeated incursions by unidentified drones, linking the undersea security mission to a broader aerial and electromagnetic contest.

Within this construct, MAS play several distinct roles:

  • Persistent seabed sensing and cable surveillance. UUVs and bottom‑mounted sensors can patrol, map, and monitor critical cables and pipelines, signaling anomalies that might indicate tampering or sabotage.
  • Surface pickets and patrols. Naval drones and small USVs augment manned ships in tracking commercial and “shadow” vessels, extending coverage at lower cost and risk.
  • Data fusion and anomaly detection. AI tools applied to continuous data streams from MAS, ships, and MPA enable early detection of suspicious behavior such as loitering near cables or erratic navigation by under‑flagged vessels.​

Breaking Defense and others have argued that missions like Baltic Sentry should be used as proving grounds for combining manned and unmanned platforms in a “mesh” that can generate deterrent effects across the conflict spectrum—from day‑to‑day transparency and attribution to rapid response if sabotage is detected. In effect, the Baltic is where NATO has begun learning how to run a kill‑web‑style maritime surveillance architecture in practice, with MAS as key nodes.

Arctic Sentry, announced in February 2026, exports this model into a domain where the operational problems are more severe and the opportunities for MAS are greater. NATO’s Arctic security page describes Arctic Sentry as a multi‑domain activity that strengthens the Alliance’s posture by coordinating exercises, surveillance, and operations across the Arctic and High North, under the leadership of JFC Norfolk. It is categorized as an “enhanced vigilance activity,” aligning it with other regional frameworks like Baltic Sentry and Eastern Sentry.

Media and think‑tank coverage highlight three drivers behind Arctic Sentry:

  • Intensifying Russian military presence and dual‑use infrastructure across the Arctic, including bases, airfields, and a growing ice‑capable fleet.
  • Increased Chinese diplomatic and commercial engagement in the High North, including shipping, energy, and potential dual‑use scientific activities.
  • The political impetus generated by disputes surrounding Greenland and U.S. calls for NATO allies to assume more responsibility for Arctic defense.

NATO emphasizes that Arctic Sentry is not about building new permanent bases or deploying large increments of forces, but about “leveraging what we are doing much more effectively” and identifying gaps that need to be filled. Officials cite a heavy reliance on improved intelligence sharing, existing air and maritime assets, and drones to achieve persistent surveillance and rapid coordination across a vast, sparsely populated region with limited infrastructure.

Here, uncrewed systems become less an add‑on and more a structural necessity. CEPA’s “High Stakes in the High North” report argues that uncrewed systems—air, surface, and subsurface—are indispensable for NATO and its Arctic allies because they can extend domain awareness, enhance “deterrence by detection,” and multiply targeting options in an environment where manned patrols are costly, dangerous, and limited. The report notes that melting ice and new sea routes are opening corridors that adversaries can exploit, and asks how NATO can secure its northern flank and infrastructure when distances are vast and weather is punishing. Its answer is a maritime sensing mesh: a network of uncrewed platforms that widens detection windows, shortens response times, and enables near‑persistent monitoring of choke points, transit routes, and under‑ice approaches.

In this sense, Arctic Sentry can be read as the political‑military wrapper around precisely the kind of MAS‑enabled sensing mesh CEPA describes. By bundling exercises like Denmark’s Arctic Endurance and Norway’s Cold Response under a single umbrella, NATO creates a framework in which uncrewed systems can be systematically tested, integrated, and scaled across multiple national contexts. The activity’s focus on coordination and gap assessment creates an institutional demand signal: where human crews and legacy platforms cannot provide sufficient coverage, uncrewed systems become the default solution.

Uncrewed systems in Arctic and High North operations can be grouped into four broad operational roles that mirror, but also extend, their Baltic use.

  • First, they serve as persistent domain‑awareness platforms. Long‑endurance UAVs, high‑latitude‑capable MQ‑9 or MQ‑4­‑type systems, USVs, and UUVs can watch shipping lanes, chokepoints, and under‑ice approaches far more continuously than manned patrols. CEPA notes that this persistent sensing enables deterrence by detection: if Russian or Chinese vessels know that their actions are likely to be observed, recorded, and shared across the Alliance, their freedom to conduct covert or ambiguous activities shrinks.
  • Second, MAS contribute to critical‑infrastructure protection. Just as Baltic Sentry uses UUVs and AI to monitor underwater cables and pipelines, Arctic Sentry can leverage uncrewed systems to surveil seabed installations, energy infrastructure, and emerging routes in places like the Barents, Norwegian, and Greenland seas. The combination of mobile UUV patrols, fixed sensor arrays, and surface drones provides a layered picture of the undersea environment, making it harder for adversaries to tamper with or map critical assets undetected.
  • Third, uncrewed platforms support targeting and fire support for traditional forces. CEPA’s analysis points out that uncrewed systems improve targeting options, allowing allied maritime and air forces to hold adversary assets at risk across greater distances and in more complex environments. In a kill‑web construct, MAS act as sensors and, in some cases, as shooters or electronic‑warfare nodes, cueing manned platforms and cross‑domain fires. This logic parallels U.S. 5th Fleet’s Task Force 59 in the Gulf and NATO’s Task Force X in the Baltic, which both use uncrewed systems to feed a common operational picture and drive more agile responses.
  • Fourth, MAS can enhance logistics, SAR, and resilience. While less emphasized in headline reporting, uncrewed systems can move supplies, support search‑and‑rescue, and monitor environmental hazards in regions where human access is difficult and dangerous. Scenario work on autonomous vessels in the Arctic underlines their potential to support safety of navigation, emergency response, and environmental monitoring along emerging sea routes, roles that directly reinforce NATO’s resilience and security objectives.

All of these roles are tempered by environmental and technical challenges. CEPA stresses that extreme cold, remoteness, limited communications, and unique logistical demands reduce reliability and increase sustainment burdens for uncrewed systems in the Arctic. NATO’s ability to turn MAS into genuinely transformative tools will depend on procurement speed, specialized infrastructure, doctrinal adaptation, and training tailored to Arctic operations. Arctic Sentry, by systematically organizing allied training and surveillance, offers a vehicle to address these integration and sustainment issues in a coherent way.

What ties Baltic Sentry, Arctic Sentry, and the broader MAS agenda together is a conceptual move from platform‑centric presence to network‑centric vigilance. Baltic Sentry demonstrated that protecting cables and pipelines in a constrained sea requires not just more ships, but a layered sensor web that fuses data from drones, UUVs, MPA, and national surveillance systems. Arctic Sentry takes that insight into a domain where the human footprint is thin and distances are vast, implicitly making uncrewed systems central rather than peripheral.

The CEPA report’s notion of a “maritime sensing mesh” maps closely onto this emerging NATO practice. In such a mesh, each uncrewed platform is a node that can share data, hand off tracks, and be retasked dynamically, supporting a wider kill web in which any sensor can inform any shooter across domains. Applied to the High North, this means that an underwater drone detecting anomalous activity near a cable, a USV tracking a suspicious surface vessel, and a high‑altitude UAV monitoring airspace all feed into a common operational picture that JFC Norfolk and national commands can act on.

Arctic Sentry’s design as an enhanced vigilance activity, rather than a one‑off showcase, suggests that NATO is moving toward making this mesh routine. By aggregating national exercises like Arctic Endurance and Cold Response into a coherent framework, the Alliance can iteratively refine how MAS are deployed, how data is fused and shared, and how gaps are identified and filled—whether by new sensors, different basing, or doctrinal adjustments. In that sense, Arctic Sentry is not just another exercise umbrella; it is an institutional mechanism for embedding MAS into the fabric of High North deterrence and defense.

Sources:

NATO and official documents

NATO. “NATO Secretary General Outlines New Activity ‘Arctic Sentry’ Ahead of Defence Ministers’ Meeting.” News article, 10 February 2026. https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/articles/news/2026/02/11/nato-secretary-general-outlines-new-activity-arctic-sentry-ahead.

NATO. “NATO Launches ‘Baltic Sentry’ to Increase Critical Infrastructure Security.” News article, 13 January 2025. https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/articles/news/2025/01/14/nato-launches-baltic-sentry-to-increase-critical-infrastructure-security.

News and analytical coverage of Arctic Sentry

Defence24. “NATO Launches the Arctic Sentry Mission.” 12 February 2026. https://defence24.com/armed-forces/nato-launches-the-arctic-sentry-mission.

NHK World-Japan. “NATO Launches ‘Multi-Domain Activity’ Focused on Arctic.” 11 February 2026. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20260212_N01/.

The Arctic Institute. “The Arctic This Week: Take Five – Week of 9 February, 2026.” 12 February 2026. https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/arctic-week-take-five-week-9-february-2026/.

Baltic Sentry, Baltic Sea security, and undersea infrastructure

American University, School of International Service, Transatlantic Policy Center. “NATO’s Need for Regional Cooperation in Baltic Sea Infrastructure Protection: Securing the Depths.” 31 December 2024. https://www.american.edu/sis/centers/transatlantic-policy/articles/20250424-securing-the-depths.cfm.

Naval News. “NATO ACT Deploys Unmanned Vehicles for Surveillance in the Baltic Sea.” 7 July 2025.

Stars and Stripes. “Navy Destroyer Joins NATO Baltic Sea Mission amid Growing Drone Threat from Russia.” 30 September 2025. https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2025-10-01/russia-baltic-nato-bulkeley-19285177.html.

Breaking Defense. “Baltic Sentry Mission Could Provide Proving Ground for NATO’s Underwater Drones.” 16 September 2025.

Militarnyi. “NATO Deploys Naval Drones in Baltic Sea.” 22 February 2025.

Arctic, High North, and uncrewed / autonomous systems

Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). “High Stakes in the High North: Harnessing Uncrewed Capabilities for Arctic Defense and Security.” 11 February 2026. https://cepa.org/commentary/high-stakes-in-the-high-north-harnessing-uncrewed-capabilities-for-arctic-defense-and-security/.

O’Shaughnessy, H., et al. High Stakes in the High North: Harnessing Uncrewed Capabilities for Arctic Defense and Security. Washington, DC: Center for European Policy Analysis, November 2025.

Military Times. “Unmanned Systems Key to Arctic Maritime Defense, Experts Say.” 25 January 2026.

Yahoo News. “Unmanned Systems Key to Arctic Maritime Defense, Experts Say.” 26 January 2026.

High North News. “Formidable Shield 2025: ‘One of NATO’s Most Important Deterrence Exercises This Year’.” 4 May 2025. https://en.highnorthnews.com/politics/formidable-shield-2025-one-of-natos-most-important-deterrence-exercises-this-year/109906.

Prism Scenario Series. “Geopolitical Implications of Autonomous Vessels in the Arctic Region.” 8 September 2025.

News and analytical coverage of Arctic Sentry

Defence24. (2026, February 12). NATO launches the Arctic Sentry mission. https://defence24.com/armed-forces/nato-launches-the-arctic-sentry-mission​

NHK World-Japan. (2026, February 11). NATO launches “multi-domain activity” focused on Arctic. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20260212_N01/​

The Arctic Institute. (2026, February 12). The Arctic this week: Take five – Week of 9 February, 2026. https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/arctic-week-take-five-week-9-february-2026/​

Baltic Sentry, Baltic Sea security, and undersea infrastructure

American University, School of International Service, Transatlantic Policy Center. (2024, December 31). NATO’s need for regional cooperation in Baltic Sea infrastructure protection: Securing the depths. https://www.american.edu/sis/centers/transatlantic-policy/articles/20250424-securing-the-depths.cfm​

Naval News. (2025, July 7). NATO ACT deploys unmanned vehicles for surveillance in the Baltic Sea.​

Stars and Stripes. (2025, September 30). Navy destroyer joins NATO Baltic Sea mission amid growing drone threat from Russia. https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2025-10-01/russia-baltic-nato-bulkeley-19285177.html​

Breaking Defense. (2025, September 16). Baltic Sentry mission could provide proving ground for NATO’s underwater drones.​

Militarnyi. (2025, February 22). NATO deploys naval drones in Baltic Sea.​

Arctic, High North, and uncrewed/autonomous systems

Center for European Policy Analysis. (2026, February 11). High stakes in the High North: Harnessing uncrewed capabilities for Arctic defense and security. https://cepa.org/commentary/high-stakes-in-the-high-north-harnessing-uncrewed-capabilities-for-arctic-defense-and-security/​

O’Shaughnessy, H., et al. (2025, November 30). High stakes in the High North: Harnessing uncrewed capabilities for Arctic defense and security [PDF]. Center for European Policy Analysis.​

Military Times. (2026, January 25). Unmanned systems key to Arctic maritime defense, experts say.​

Yahoo News. (2026, January 26). Unmanned systems key to Arctic maritime defense, experts say.​

High North News. (2025, May 4). Formidable Shield 2025: “One of NATO’s most important deterrence exercises this year”. https://en.highnorthnews.com/politics/formidable-shield-2025-one-of-natos-most-important-deterrence-exercises-this-year/109906​

Prism Scenario Series. (2025, September 8). Geopolitical implications of autonomous vessels in the Arctic region.​

On March 15, 2026, my new book on maritime autonomous systems will be released on Amazon.

 

 

 

The Fight Tonight Paradigm: Adapting to Compressed Timelines in Modern Warfare

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
02/19/2026

By Robbin Laird

The fundamental assumptions underpinning Western defense planning are collapsing.

For generations, democratic nations operated under the comfortable presumption that major conflicts would arrive with ample warning, years, perhaps a decade, to mobilize industrial capacity, train forces, and prepare society for war.

This strategic cushion has evaporated. The “fight tonight” paradigm represents not merely a shift in military doctrine, but a wholesale transformation of how democracies must conceive of national security, industrial policy, and even the cognitive capabilities of their citizens. The implications extend far beyond military planning rooms into the very fabric of modern society.

Professor Justin Bronk’s stark warning that Western democracies may have only two to five years to prepare for potential major conflict marks a dramatic departure from historical norms. This compression of strategic time stems primarily from the exponential military expansion of the People’s Republic of China, combined with increasingly aggressive actions that signal malign intent. The construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea, explicit support for Russian military operations, and the rapid modernization of Chinese forces create a threat environment fundamentally different from the relatively stable post-Cold War period.

The implications of this temporal compression are staggering. Defense institutions built around five-to-ten-year planning cycles must now operate on timelines measured in months or years. Budget cycles, procurement processes, training programs, and force structure decisions all predicated on leisurely timelines become obsolete. More troubling still is the interconnected nature of modern strategic threats. A Chinese move against Taiwan would inevitably draw American forces from Europe, potentially creating opportunities for Russian aggression against NATO. Conversely, a major European conflict could embolden Chinese action in the Indo-Pacific. These are no longer isolated regional scenarios but interconnected global risks that could cascade rapidly, overwhelming response capabilities.

This reality forces an uncomfortable reckoning: military forces must be prepared to fight with what they have today, not what they plan to acquire tomorrow. The notion of a grace period for mobilization has become dangerously obsolete. Every capability gap, every procurement delay, every training shortfall represents not a future problem to be addressed, but a present vulnerability that could prove decisive in the opening hours of conflict.

Perhaps nowhere is the changed character of modern warfare more evident than in the brutal mathematics of air defense. The Ukrainian conflict has laid bare a fundamental asymmetry: defenders armed with expensive, technologically sophisticated systems face adversaries who can achieve strategic effects through mass employment of cheap, expendable platforms. The specific numbers are sobering. A $1.8 million interceptor missile engaging a $7,000 Shaheed drone represents not merely an unfavorable cost ratio, but a pathway to strategic defeat through financial exhaustion.

This economic reality creates an existential challenge for Western defense budgets. Adversaries have discovered that they need not match Western technological sophistication to achieve battlefield success. Instead, they can exploit the defender’s reliance on high-end systems by simply overwhelming them with volume. In a sustained conflict, the defender confronts a grim calculus: missiles and money will be exhausted long before the attacker runs out of cheap drones, loitering munitions, or cruise missiles. Victory through attrition becomes mathematically certain for the side that can sustain cheaper attacks.

Technologies like the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System offer a glimpse of potential solutions. By converting existing stockpiles of unguided Hydra rockets into laser-guided interceptors at a cost of $20,000 to $35,000 per shot, such systems begin to address the cost curve problem. Yet even these more affordable solutions cannot protect everything. The hard lesson from Israel and Ukraine is that comprehensive territorial defense is economically unsustainable. Nations must make stark choices about what to defend and what to abandon to enemy strikes.

The concept of “campaign critical assets” emerges from this reality. Major air bases, key ports, command and control nodes, and critical logistics hubs warrant protection by expensive systems like Patriot and THAAD batteries. Large civilian population centers, despite the obvious humanitarian concerns, generally do not determine military outcomes and thus cannot justify the expenditure of scarce interceptors. This triage approach represents a painful departure from idealized notions of comprehensive defense, but the alternative—attempting to defend everything—guarantees exhaustion of defensive capabilities within days or weeks of sustained attack.

The ability to fight tonight is meaningless without the capacity to fight tomorrow night, next week, and next month. This endurance depends entirely on industrial base resilience—a capability that has eroded dramatically in recent decades. Air Vice Marshal Rob Robinning’s observation that forces must be ready for sustained operations places the spotlight squarely on industrial mobilization, or rather, the current lack thereof. Matt Jones from BAE Systems articulates the central dilemma: waiting for crisis to justify investment leaves militaries with money but no time. Industrial capacity cannot be conjured overnight; factories, supply chains, and skilled workforces require years or even decades to establish.

Contemporary defense industrial models rely on assumptions of stable, peacetime conditions and globalized supply chains optimized for efficiency rather than resilience. These just-in-time approaches, while economically rational in peacetime, collapse catastrophically under wartime stress. When critical components are manufactured on distant continents or depend on parts from multiple countries, the entire production chain becomes vulnerable to interdiction, sanctions, or simple chaos. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a preview of this fragility in civilian sectors; the defense implications are far more severe.

True industrial resilience requires what some analysts call “sovereign capability”—not merely the ability to assemble systems domestically, but the deep engineering knowledge, specialized skills, and decades of accumulated expertise necessary to design, innovate, repair, and sustain complex military systems under pressure. This represents the submerged portion of the industrial iceberg, invisible in peacetime but absolutely critical during conflict. Building this capability is generational work that cannot be accelerated through emergency spending.

The workforce dimension adds another layer of complexity. Mike Pryor’s example of Boeing Defense Australia employing 900 active reservists illustrates a circular dilemma: these skilled workers are essential to defense production, yet their military obligations require them to deploy during crises, precisely when their industrial expertise becomes most critical. The specific case of the Wedgetail training system is instructive—if those reservists deploy, the ability to train new Wedgetail crews simply collapses. Nations face impossible choices between sending skilled individuals to frontlines or retaining them in supporting roles that enable the broader war effort.

Lieutenant General Susan Coyle’s emphasis on non-kinetic effects, space operations, cyber warfare, electronic warfare, and information operations, highlights another dimension of modern conflict that defies traditional planning assumptions. Dominance in these domains could prove decisive before conventional forces even engage.

Yet there exists a troubling mismatch between the pace of conflict and the speed of cyber operations. Developing and embedding sophisticated cyber weapons capable of, for example, disabling enemy air defense networks requires eighteen months to three years.

If strategic warning time has compressed to two years, many cyber capabilities designed for a hypothetical future conflict may be obsolete or incomplete when actual hostilities commence. This temporal mismatch forces a different approach to innovation and capability development. Lieutenant General Simon Stewart’s call to shift from platform-centric thinking to threat-informed approaches reflects this new reality. Rather than spending a decade designing the perfect single-purpose system, military organizations must develop rapid, iterative processes that can quickly combine and recombine existing capabilities to meet emerging threats.

The Australian MQ-28 Ghost Bat program exemplifies this philosophy, serving as a platform for immediate experimentation with multi-domain concepts. The key lesson from Ukraine reinforces this approach: operator experience drives innovation more effectively than engineering specifications. Getting prototypes into users’ hands quickly, learning what works and what fails in realistic conditions, and rapidly iterating based on feedback proves far more effective than traditional lengthy development cycles. This demands institutional cultures comfortable with experimentation, acceptable risk-taking, and rapid adaptation rather than perfection.

Air Marshal Stephen Chappell’s observation that advanced economies are “aviation nations” but “no way stitched up” for defense purposes reveals a massive untapped resource. Nations possess enormous civilian aviation capabilities, commercial airlines, maintenance facilities, logistics networks, skilled personnel, that could theoretically surge to support military operations during crises. Yet the mechanisms to rapidly pivot these civilian capabilities to defense needs largely do not exist.

Consider the resources available: major commercial carriers operate sophisticated maintenance and logistics operations, regional airlines provide distributed infrastructure, and civilian aviation employs thousands of pilots, engineers, and technicians with transferable skills. These represent strategic assets that remain largely disconnected from defense planning. Chappell’s proposal for structures like a National Aerospace Enterprise suggests creating coordinating mechanisms that could quickly harness civilian capacity when required.

The integration challenge extends beyond aviation. In every advanced economy, civilian sectors possess capabilities directly relevant to defense—manufacturing capacity, logistics expertise, engineering talent, communications infrastructure. The question is not whether these resources exist, but whether mechanisms are in place to rapidly mobilize them. Historical examples of wartime industrial mobilization offer lessons, but modern economies are far more complex and specialized. Creating frameworks that can smoothly transition civilian capabilities to defense purposes without waiting for crisis requires peacetime investment in planning, relationships, and infrastructure that currently receives insufficient attention.

Perhaps the most profound challenge identified in contemporary strategic analysis concerns not weapons systems or industrial capacity, but human cognition itself. John Blackburn’s research on what he terms the “pandemic of the mind” describes a systematic erosion of critical thinking in democratic societies, driven largely by technological dependencies and changing patterns of information consumption. Social media, algorithmic content curation, and the constant stimulation of digital environments train populations for quick reactions rather than sustained analysis or deep thought.

The statistics are alarming. Studies suggest declining literacy rates in some populations, with estimates that 40 percent or more struggle to engage with complex written material—precisely the type of content necessary to understand sophisticated strategic challenges. Artificial intelligence arrives in this deteriorating cognitive environment, potentially accelerating rather than reversing these trends. The distinction between augmented intelligence and artificial intelligence becomes critical here.

Augmented intelligence treats AI as a tool that enhances human capability while preserving human agency and judgment. Like having a brilliant but inexperienced assistant, such systems can analyze vast datasets, identify patterns, and accelerate certain tasks while humans retain direction, ethical oversight, and critical judgment. This approach actively prevents cognitive atrophy by requiring continued human engagement and thought. It represents AI in service to human flourishing and capability.

True artificial intelligence, systems that think independently and potentially exceed human cognitive capabilities across all domains—represents a fundamentally different trajectory. Researchers like Tom Hanson suggest this path leads toward transhumanism, where human and machine cognition merge through technologies like neural interfaces. Hanson’s timeline of ten to twenty years for widespread adoption places humanity in a critical bridge phase where choices made today will determine whether AI enhances or replaces human judgment.

The strategic imperative for democratic societies is preserving and strengthening human cognitive capabilities as the foundation for everything else, security, prosperity, and the wisdom to make sound decisions about powerful technologies. This is not about resisting technological progress, but about recognizing that human minds capable of critical reasoning, ethical judgment, and complex analysis remain the essential defense. In an era of AI-enabled information warfare, populations unable to think critically become strategic vulnerabilities, susceptible to manipulation, unable to distinguish truth from fabrication, and incapable of making informed democratic choices.

The fight tonight paradigm offers little middle ground. As multiple analysts conclude, the choice facing democracies is stark: adapt or accept vulnerability. The comfortable assumptions of the post-Cold War era—ample warning time, technological superiority compensating for numerical disadvantages, just-in-time efficiency, and the separation of civilian and military spheres—have collapsed. The threats are neither hypothetical nor distant; they exist now, manifested in military buildups, aggressive actions, and the demonstrated willingness of authoritarian powers to use force.

Adaptation requires simultaneous action across multiple domains. Militarily, forces must achieve genuine readiness with existing capabilities while developing rapid, threat-informed approaches to innovation. Economically, the cost curves of modern warfare demand affordable mass alongside high-end capabilities, with realistic triage about what can be defended. Industrially, nations must rebuild resilient defense industrial bases with sovereign capabilities and deep expertise, accepting that this work requires generational commitment rather than crisis spending.

The workforce dimension requires creative solutions to resolve the circular dilemma of skilled personnel needed simultaneously in uniform and in industry. Civil-military integration must move from theoretical possibility to practical reality, creating mechanisms that can rapidly harness civilian capabilities during crises. In the cyber and non-kinetic domains, iterative development and operator-driven innovation must replace lengthy acquisition cycles.

Most fundamentally, societies must invest in human cognitive capabilities as the foundation for all other forms of national strength. In an era of AI-enabled information warfare, critical thinking is not a luxury but a strategic necessity. The question posed at the conclusion of contemporary strategic analysis remains unanswered: What is the true long-term cost if nations focus exclusively on acquiring new weapons systems while neglecting continuous investment in industrial workforces and, most critically, in maintaining populations capable of sustained critical thought?

The fight tonight paradigm demands recognition that preparation is not a future activity but a present imperative. Every day of delay, every postponed investment, every capability gap left unfilled represents not a problem for tomorrow’s planners but a vulnerability in forces that may be called to fight this very night.

The compressed timelines, economic realities, industrial fragilities, and cognitive challenges are not predictions of a possible future—they describe the present strategic environment.

Adaptation cannot be deferred; the choice is now, and the consequences of failing to choose are becoming clearer with each passing day.

Fight Tonight: Combat Readiness at the Speed of Relevance

After Rafale? France Bets Big on India as Its Fighter Lifeline

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
02/18/2026

By Pierre Tran

Paris – President Emmanuel Macron started Feb. 17 an official visit to India, a few days after the defense ministry in New Delhi said it had given the green light for contract talks for a further batch of Rafale and missiles, with local media reports of a deal for 114 fighter jets.

“The procurement of (multi-role fighter aircraft) will enhance the capability of undertaking air dominance roles across the spectrum of conflict and significantly boost the deterrence capabilities of IAF with long range offensive strikes,” the ministry said in a Feb.12 statement. “The majority of MRFA to be procured will be manufactured in India.”

If New Delhi went ahead with a 114-strong order, that would be Dassault’s largest Rafale export deal, capping the contract for 80 fighters for the United Arab Emirates. The UAE  signed in 2021 that fighter deal worth €14 billion, with a further €2 billion for missiles.

The Indian statement followed authorization by the Defence Acquisition Council to open contract negotiations on the Rafale, with India requesting a government-to-government deal.

Rafale at Paris Air Show. Photo by Paul Grayson : Photeinos.com.

Such an intergovernmental deal was seen as underscoring the importance of Macron’s visit, which included his attending New Delhi’s high-level exhibition on artificial intelligence.

The Indian navy also sought a further order for 31 naval versions of the Rafale, financial website La Tribune reported Feb. 14, on top of the 114 sought by the air force. That naval requirement, if delivered, would bring the Indian fleet air arm to 57 carrier-based Rafale, as India ordered 26 French-built fighters for the navy last year.

The acquisition council also authorized procurement of missiles for the Rafale, anti-tank missiles for the army, and Boeing P-8I Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft for the navy. The total value of the wide ranging authorizations – known as “acceptance of necessity” – was reported to be $40 billion, including the potential Rafale order.

Uncertainty Ahead

In contrast to what looked like bullish prospects, a Feb. 10 newsletter from the CGT labor union at Dassault said the executive chairman, Eric Trappier, spoke of severe “instability” in the economy, with the “after-Rafale” prospect at the center of discussion.

A cancellation of the European future combat air system was expected, leading to a plan B, and in the meantime all studies were suspended, the note said. The company had stopped hiring for the design office due to uncertainty looming over future military programs, namely FCAS, Eurodrone, an uncrewed air combat vehicle, and Rafale F5, as well the end of studies for the latest Falcon business jet. The company ended recruitment to fill vacancies due to retirement, and would make internal staff moves.

Elsewhere, the company would recruit 200 staff this year, with new hires at four plants around the country and replacing retiring personnel. The Rafale order book accounts for 10 years of work.

Trappier was speaking Feb. 10 to the economic and social committee, in which union representatives sit.

India ordered in 2016 36 Rafale, worth some €7.9 billion ($9.3 billion), for the air force, and April last year ordered 26 of the naval version for the Indian navy’s two aircraft carriers.

Dassault has doubled monthly production to two Rafale a month since 2020, and has said it was ready to build three or four a month in the coming years.

Foreign deals boost the company’s order book and cash holdings, at a time when France was bowed under national debt. French debt totalled €3.3 trillion, or 114 percent of gross domestic product, last June, Reuters reported. Debt payment is expected to hit more than €100 billion by 2029.

But France is the backer for future fighter programs, requiring billions of euro in investment.

India Counts

Macron’s three-day visit to India was “absolutely important,” said Tara Varma, managing director of strategic foresight and director of the Paris office of the German Marshall Fund, a U.S.-based think tank.

Macron and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi have a “close personal relationship,” she said, adding that France and India have strong ties in military cooperation. That has widened to broader cultural, scientific and other areas, and there was opportunity to grow those links.

India needed to diversify arms procurement, as more than half of its military equipment was of Russian origin, she said. There was also strong Israeli, U.S. presence in Indian kit.

Macron, who met Modi at Mumbai, western India, was accompanied by the armed forces minister, Catherine Vautrin. Vautrin met her Indian counterpart, Rajnath Singh, and attended the formal opening of an Airbus Helicopters assembly plant for its H125 helicopter, with the local partner Tata Advanced Systems.

Chief executives of French large, medium, and small companies, including Dassault, Safran, and Naval Group, were on that trip, pointing up strong business interest in India.

Meanwhile, India is under western pressure to slash imports of Russian crude oil, shipped over on a “shadow fleet” tankers of dubious origin and doubtful safety standard.

Trump cut U.S. tariffs on Indian imports to 18 pct from 50 pct after New Delhi pledged to end import of Russian oil, and buy more American energy and goods.

A Fighter Market

The contract talks with India will come in the wake of the reported downing of the Indian air force Rafale by a Chinese-built Chengdu J-10 fighter of Pakistan in May last year, in an armed clash between the two neighbouring nations.

A prospective order of more Dassault fighters can be seen as pointing up close ties between India and France, and the family controlled company, dating back to the 1950s. New Delhi’s policy of non-alignment in the Cold War meant India effectively operated two air forces, flying French- and Soviet-built fighters to show its independence in the third world.

A former executive of the aeronautics industry said the German industrial partner in Eurofighter Typhoon had led the consortium’s bid in the Indian fighter competition, as India fell in its assigned part of the world market.

Britain, Germany, Italy, and Spain are the four nations backing Eurofighter, with Airbus, BAE Systems, and Leonardo as industrial partners.

The allure of the Indian market can be seen with Lockheed Martin pitching an upgraded F-16, rebranded as F-21, and U.S. President Donald Trump offering the F-35. Russia has pitched its Sukhoi Su-57, with media reports the Su-75 Checkmate fighter also on offer.

Meanwhile, the Bangladesh air force signed Dec. 9 last year a letter of intent with the Italian partner, Leonardo, for talks on a potential order for the Eurofighter Typhoon, news agency Reuters reported. That would be Bangladesh’s first procurement of a western-built fighter if the Typhoon deal were sealed.

Make in India

A key Indian requirement was local production of the Rafale, with the defense minister calling for up to half the content of the fighter to be “India-made,” the Times of India reported Feb. 18. Rajnath also called for Rafale’s Safran M88 engines to be built and serviced in India.

New Delhi has called for deals to be conducted under its Make in India policy, in a bid to boost the national economy.

Dassault said in June last year it had signed four production agreements with its Indian partner Tata Advanced Systems for local production of the Rafale fuselage, with the first fuselage to be delivered in fiscal year 2028. Two fuselages were to be built a month, once the line was working at the new Hyderabad plant.

The plan was for Dassault to build some 30 fighters in France, with the remaining units to be built in India, to meet that request for technology transfer and local assembly.

Safran Electronics and Defense signed a memorandum of understanding with its Indian partner Bharat Electronics to set up a joint venture to build in India its powered smart bomb, dubbed Hammer, Times of India reported. That powered bomb, known as armement air-sol modular in France, was used by the Indian air force in its Operation Sindoor against the Pakistan services, the report said.

Note: Rafale photo from the Paris air show.

Photo by Paul Grayson : Photeinos.com

From Crisis Management to Chaos Management: AI and the Collapse of Strategic Predictability

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
02/17/2026

By Robbin Laird

For decades, national security establishments have organized around crisis management or the structured response to disruptions within fundamentally stable systems.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, though terrifying, operated within understood parameters: known actors, measurable capabilities, calculable escalation ladders.

Even the most dangerous moments followed a logic that skilled diplomats and military planners could navigate.

The system bent under stress but retained its essential shape.

That era is ending.

My work over the past several years has documented a profound shift from crisis management to what I call “chaos management” or operating in environments where the fundamental parameters are themselves in flux, where traditional indicators fail, and where the velocity of change outpaces institutional adaptation.

The OpenAI paper on AI and international security, published in February 2026, provides the technical substrate for understanding why this shift is not merely evolutionary but represents a phase transition in the character of strategic competition.

Crisis management presumes several conditions that shaped Cold War-era thinking and persist in contemporary doctrine:

Stable baselines: The “normal” state of the system is known and relatively predictable. Crises are departures from this baseline, dangerous but temporary.

Bounded uncertainty: While specific events may surprise, the range of possibilities is constrained. Nuclear yields, missile ranges, submarine patrol areas—these could be estimated with useful precision.

Observable indicators: Intelligence communities developed sophisticated methods for detecting threats. Satellite imagery tracked missile deployments. Signals intelligence monitored communications. Human sources provided insight into intentions.

Measured timescales: Even rapid developments, a mobilization, a blockade, a weapons test, unfolded over days or weeks. There was time for deliberation, consultation, messaging through back channels.

Human-centric dynamics: The key variables were human decisions, organizational processes, and political calculations. These could be slow, irrational, or opaque, but they operated at human speed with human constraints.

The shift to chaos management reflects the erosion of each of these conditions.

This isn’t about increased complexity alone.

Complex adaptive systems have always characterized international relations.

It’s about the velocity, opacity, and fundamentally different character of change when general-purpose AI enters the strategic environment.

The OpenAI framework identifies three pathways by which AI reshapes international security.

Each pathway maps directly onto mechanisms that transform crisis management into chaos management.

  1. Temporal Compression: When Planning Horizons Collapse

The first mechanism is the radical compression of timescales for both threat development and operational decision-making.

Consider the submarine detection scenario from the OpenAI paper. Current defense planning assumes that advances in undersea sensing will follow historical patterns, incremental improvements requiring large-scale investments, observable research programs, and deployment timelines measured in years. This allows for structured responses: investment in countermeasures, diversification of deterrent forces, diplomatic initiatives to manage transitions.

If AI compresses a century of materials science and signal processing into a decade, this planning paradigm fails. The threat materializes faster than acquisition cycles can respond.

But more fundamentally, the predictability of the threat environment collapses.

Defense planners cannot know whether their platforms will remain viable for five years or fifty.

Uncertainty of this magnitude doesn’t just complicate planning. It makes traditional planning frameworks incoherent.

This is chaos management: operating when you cannot reliably project even the basic parameters of the competitive environment into the near future.

My field research with Marine Corps aviation transformation, particularly at exercises like Steel Knight 2025, revealed similar dynamics at the tactical level. The integration of digital interoperability, autonomous systems, and AI-enabled decision support is already compressing decision cycles in ways that stress existing command structures. Marines speak of the challenge of “going quiet to think” when adversaries can exploit any pause. AI doesn’t merely speed up familiar processes. It changes what kinds of operations are feasible and forces adaptation to tempo that exceeds comfortable human cognitive bandwidth.

The OpenAI paper extends this to strategic competition.

When AI enables “planning depth” that crosses critical thresholds or the ability to see consequences beyond an adversary’s horizon, the nature of strategic interaction changes.

One side can set traps the other cannot avoid. Deception becomes asymmetric.

The slower side isn’t just disadvantaged; they’re operating in a fundamentally different game.

  1. Structural Opacity: The Failure of Traditional Intelligence

The second mechanism is the breakdown of observable indicators that have historically provided strategic warning and enabled crisis management.

The erosion of secrecy discussed in the OpenAI paper represents more than an intelligence problem. It’s a challenge to the entire architecture of strategic stability.

Arms control regimes from SALT to New START depended on transparency and verification. Confidence-building measures worked because capabilities could be observed, counted, and limited through agreement. Even adversaries could develop shared understandings of the strategic environment.

AI threatens this in two directions simultaneously. First, it may enable inference of protected information from ostensibly unclassified data. If AI can reconstruct classified deliberations from patterns in public statements and observable actions, or discover “technological secrets” through autonomous research in datacenters, then classification systems become porous. The information landscape becomes fundamentally less controllable.

Second, and perhaps more destabilizing, AI-driven breakthroughs may occur with minimal observable signature. The OpenAI paper emphasizes this: major advances in cryptanalysis, materials science, or algorithmic efficiency could happen entirely within secure computing facilities. There’s no missile test to satellite-image, no procurement program to track through supply chains, no observable deployment that provides warning.

This is the essence of chaos management, functioning when your primary mechanisms for understanding the strategic environment have become unreliable.

Traditional crisis management assumes you can see threats developing and calculate responses.

In a chaos environment, the first indication of a breakthrough may be its operational deployment, or worse, its exploitation against you.

My work on European defense transformation and NATO adaptation has revealed similar patterns. The hybrid warfare environment, combining conventional forces, cyber operations, information warfare, and economic coercion, already challenges traditional indicators and warnings. AI acceleration amplifies this by orders of magnitude. When advances can be both rapid and opaque, the distinction between peacetime competition and wartime preparation blurs beyond recognition.

  1. Threshold Effects: Discontinuous Strategic Transitions

The third mechanism involves discontinuous changes in capability that invalidate existing strategic calculations.

Crisis management frameworks assume marginal changes. One side develops a better tank, faster aircraft, or more accurate missile. The other side responds with countermeasures or symmetric capabilities. The competition is continuous, advantages can be measured and countered incrementally.

The OpenAI paper highlights the possibility of “threshold effects” where AI capabilities improve abruptly rather than gradually. This isn’t about linear scaling. It’s about phase transitions. A model that can plan five moves ahead operates in the same conceptual space as one that plans seven moves ahead. But a model that can reliably plan fifteen moves ahead when adversaries can only plan seven creates qualitatively different strategic possibilities.

The paper frames this through “spiky AI” or systems with extraordinary capabilities in narrow domains. We’re already seeing this in cyber operations. AI models demonstrate capability jumps in code analysis, vulnerability discovery, and exploit development that don’t follow smooth improvement curves. Anthropic recently disclosed disrupting the first AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign. The threshold from “AI-assisted” to “AI-orchestrated” operations isn’t gradual.

Applied to broader strategic competition, threshold effects create the conditions for what the OpenAI paper calls “false stability.” If capabilities improve gradually, nations can adapt incrementally. But if capabilities improve in jumps, if there are discrete thresholds where compute resources or algorithmic improvements suddenly enable qualitatively different operations, then the period of apparent stability is illusory. The system looks stable until it suddenly isn’t.

This is chaos management: operating in a strategic environment characterized by potential discontinuities you cannot reliably predict or prepare for through traditional planning methods.

One of the most troubling aspects of the crisis-to-chaos transition involves the potential for democratic disadvantage. The OpenAI paper notes concerns raised by national security leaders about authoritarian governments exploiting AI “without democratic accountability.”

In crisis management frameworks, democratic deliberation is valuable. Time for debate, legislative oversight, and public scrutiny improves decision quality and builds legitimacy. The Cuban Missile Crisis, for all its dangers, allowed for careful deliberation within ExComm and consideration of alternatives.

In chaos management environments, these strengths may become vulnerabilities. If AI-enabled decision compression rewards speed over deliberation, if opacity favors systems that can integrate AI into surveillance and control without legal constraints, if institutional adaptation requires top-down coordination rather than democratic consensus-building, then authoritarian systems may possess structural advantages.

My research on European defense and NATO burden-sharing has documented the challenge of coordinating 32 democratic nations with different threat perceptions, budget cycles, and domestic political constraints. Adding AI acceleration to this environment amplifies the coordination problem. China’s civil-military fusion strategy and Russia’s increasingly centralized security apparatus may prove better suited to rapid AI integration, not because authoritarian systems make better decisions, but because they can make faster decisions and implement them without the friction of democratic process.

Yet this may prove shortsighted.

Crisis management succeeded in part because democratic systems, despite their slowness, produced more robust and adaptive responses.

The question for chaos management is whether the same holds when tempo increases by an order of magnitude, or whether new institutional forms are needed that preserve democratic accountability while enabling speed.

The transition from crisis to chaos management demands fundamental rethinking across several dimensions:

Resilience over optimization: Traditional defense planning optimizes for known threats or the “threat-based” approach that dominated post-Cold War acquisition. Chaos management requires resilience to unknown and rapidly-evolving threats. This means redundancy, diversity, and adaptability rather than efficient specialization. My work on Marine Corps Force Design 2030 suggests this shift is underway tactically, but strategic-level adaptation lags.

Continuous adaptation over periodic planning: Crisis management uses planning cycles, PPBE, QDRs, five-year defense plans. These presume a future you can plan toward. Chaos management requires treating strategy as continuous rather than episodic. Organizations must adapt in real-time to an environment that won’t stabilize long enough for traditional planning cycles to complete.

Distributed authority over centralized control: When decision cycles compress below the time required for centralized approval, authority must be distributed. This is already evident in concepts like Distributed Maritime Operations and the kill web frameworks emerging from my research on autonomous systems. But extending this to strategic decision-making raises profound questions about risk, accountability, and the role of human judgment.

Transparency as a strategic asset: If secrecy becomes less maintainable due to AI inference capabilities, the value of transparency as a stabilizing mechanism increases. This seems counterintuitive but reflects a deeper shift—in chaos environments, coordination with potential adversaries to avoid inadvertent escalation may matter more than temporary advantage from concealment.

International coordination mechanisms: The OpenAI paper emphasizes the need for “coordinated, large-scale effort” comparable to the arms control architecture built during the Cold War. But chaos management may require more dynamic mechanisms, not treaties negotiated over decades but adaptive regimes that can evolve as AI capabilities shift.

My work on Coast Guard transformation illustrates these challenges at a service level. The Coast Guard operates in an environment that already exhibits chaos characteristics: diverse mission sets, resource constraints, rapidly evolving threats from asymmetric actors, and requirements for continuous presence rather than episodic crisis response.

AI offers the Coast Guard enormous potential, enhanced maritime domain awareness, improved search and rescue coordination, more effective drug interdiction.

But integration faces all the challenges of chaos management: how to build trust in AI-enabled systems, how to maintain human oversight when operating tempo increases, how to adapt acquisition and training faster than the threat environment evolves.

The Coast Guard’s strategic role in major power competition, Arctic operations, infrastructure protection, partnership-building, positions it at the intersection of traditional law enforcement and emerging strategic competition. The service’s experience may offer lessons for managing the crisis-to-chaos transition at higher levels.

The OpenAI paper concludes that much of the argument about AI timelines has collapsed to the difference between two years and ten years, both short compared to institutional change timescales. This is precisely the challenge chaos management addresses: how to function when you know major change is coming but cannot predict its precise form or timing.

The shift from crisis to chaos management isn’t about abandoning structure for improvisation.

It’s about building different kinds of structures—resilient rather than optimized, adaptive rather than static, distributed rather than centralized.

It requires accepting that we cannot return to the comfortable predictability of Cold War-era crisis management, where baselines were stable and futures were calculable.

My research across Marine Corps transformation, European defense adaptation, and Coast Guard modernization documents this transition at multiple levels. The OpenAI framework provides the technical explanation for why this transition is accelerating and why traditional approaches are inadequate.

The question isn’t whether we prefer crisis management or chaos management. The choice has already been made by technological and geopolitical forces beyond any single nation’s control.

The question is whether we can build the institutional capacity, strategic frameworks, and international mechanisms to manage chaos before events force reactive decisions under the worst possible conditions.

In this sense, the shift from crisis to chaos management represents the central strategic challenge of our era.

AI doesn’t merely add another variable to existing frameworks. It transforms the fundamental character of strategic competition.

Those who adapt their thinking accordingly will shape the future.

Those who cling to crisis management paradigms will find themselves overtaken by a reality they no longer understand.

Note: I am publishing my new book on chaos management in May along with an omnibus edition which includes the two books which precede the chaos management book.

AI and International Security: Beyond Weapons to the Foundations of Power

Atlantic Lightning 26-1

Posted on | by Robbin Laird

U.S. Marines with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 542 and VMFA-251, Marine Aircraft Group 14, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, conduct maritime strike training during Atlantic Lightning 26-1 at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, Jan. 29, 2026.

Atlantic Lightning 26-1 is a tactical aircraft exercise focused on Marine Air-Ground Task Force and Joint Force integration and distributed aviation operations, including offensive and defensive counter-air, suppression of enemy air defenses, close air support, and expeditionary operations.

MARINE CORPS AIR STATION CHERRY POINT, NORTH CAROLINA

01.29.2026

Photo by Lance Cpl. Michael Robinson 

2nd Marine Aircraft Wing

U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Samuel Fowler, from Massachusetts, an F-35C Lightning II jet pilot with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 251, Marine Aircraft Group 14, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, conducts preflight checks during Atlantic Lightning 26-1 at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, Jan. 29, 2025. Atlantic Lightning 26-1 is a tactical aircraft exercise focused on Marine Air-Ground Task Force and Joint Force integration and distributed aviation operations, including offensive and defensive counter-air, suppression of enemy air defenses, close air support, and expeditionary operations. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Michael Robinson)
U.S. Marines with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 542 and VMFA-251, Marine Aircraft Group 14, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, conduct maritime strike training during Atlantic Lightning 26-1 at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, Jan. 29, 2025. Atlantic Lightning 26-1 is a tactical aircraft exercise focused on Marine Air-Ground Task Force and Joint Force integration and distributed aviation operations, including offensive and defensive counter-air, suppression of enemy air defenses, close air support, and expeditionary operations. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Michael Robinson)
A U.S. Marine Corps F-35B Lightning II jet assigned to Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 542, Marine Aircraft Group 14, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, takes off during Atlantic Lightning 26-1 at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, Jan. 29, 2025. Atlantic Lightning 26-1 is a tactical aircraft exercise focused on Marine Air-Ground Task Force and Joint Force integration and distributed aviation operations, including offensive and defensive counter-air, suppression of enemy air defenses, close air support, and expeditionary operations. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Michael Robinson)
U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Samuel Fowler, from Massachusetts, an F-35C Lightning II jet pilot with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 251, Marine Aircraft Group 14, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, conducts preflight checks before flight operations during Atlantic Lightning 26-1 at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, Jan. 29, 2025. Atlantic Lightning 26-1 is a tactical aircraft exercise focused on Marine Air-Ground Task Force and Joint Force integration and distributed aviation operations, including offensive and defensive counter-air, suppression of enemy air defenses, close air support, and expeditionary operations. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Gavin K. Kulczewski)
A U.S. Marine Corps F-35B Lighting II jet assigned to Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 542, Marine Aircraft Group 14, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, takes off during Atlantic Lightning 26-1 at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, Jan. 29, 2025. Atlantic Lightning 26-1 is a tactical aircraft exercise focused on Marine Air-Ground Task Force and Joint Force integration and distributed aviation operations, including offensive and defensive counter-air, suppression of enemy air defenses, close air support, and expeditionary operations. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Gavin K. Kulczewski)
U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Michael Robinson, from Florida, a combat photographer with Marine Wing Headquarters Squadron (MWHS) 2, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, photographs F-35B Lightning II aircraft during Atlantic Lightning 26-1 at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, Jan. 29, 2025. Atlantic Lightning 26-1 is a tactical aircraft exercise focused on Marine Air-Ground Task Force and Joint Force integration and distributed aviation operations, including offensive and defensive counter-air, suppression of enemy air defenses, close air support, and expeditionary operations. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Gavin K. Kulczewski)
A U.S. Marine Corps F-35C Lightning II jet assigned to Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 251, Marine Aircraft Group 14, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, conducts flight operations during Atlantic Lightning 26-1 at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, Jan. 29, 2025. Atlantic Lightning 26-1 is a tactical aircraft exercise focused on Marine Air-Ground Task Force and Joint Force integration and distributed aviation operations, including offensive and defensive counter-air, suppression of enemy air defenses, close air support, and expeditionary operations. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Gavin Kulczewski)

AI and International Security: Beyond Weapons to the Foundations of Power

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
02/16/2026

By Robbin Laird

In February 2026, a team from OpenAI published what may become a landmark document in the emerging field of AI geopolitics.

“AI and International Security: Pathways of Impact and Key Uncertainties” represents something unusual: a major AI laboratory attempting to map how its own technology could reshape the global balance of power.

Drawing on interviews with former Secretaries of Defense, National Security Advisors, and senior officials from national laboratories, the paper makes a striking argument. AI’s most significant effects on international security won’t come from autonomous weapons or cyber operations, but from how it transforms the fundamental structures that underpin national power.

The authors, led by Jason Pruet and including OpenAI’s Chief Economist, frame their analysis through historical precedent. They point not to specific weapons systems but to general-purpose technologies that restructured the foundations of military power. The marine chronometer enabled precise longitude determination, making naval forces effective in waters where they’d previously been helpless. The electric telegraph collapsed command-and-control timelines in the mid-19th century. Even the humble stirrup is credited with reshaping medieval warfare and social institutions by changing how mounted combat worked.

This framing is deliberate and consequential.

Much of the public discourse on AI and security focuses on near-term applications: swarms of autonomous drones, AI-enhanced cyber attacks, or algorithmically-targeted disinformation.

The OpenAI paper doesn’t dismiss these concerns but argues they miss the larger story. As Paul Kennedy showed in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, long-run shifts in economic strength and general-purpose technological advantages have historically mattered more than specific weapons for determining who dominates the international system.

The paper’s central provocation is this: private sector spending on AI development may now exceed the military R&D budgets of nearly every country in the world. This means governments will gain access to AI-enabled capabilities, particularly scientific acceleration, generated by an effort comparable in scale to their own defense research enterprises.

But they won’t control the timeline, the priorities, or the fundamental characteristics of these systems.

The analysis organizes AI’s impacts across three dimensions, each associated with critical technical uncertainties that urgently need resolution.

  1. Deterrence and Force Projection: The Compression of Military Science

Consider this scenario from the paper: AI increases the rate of progress in undersea sensing technology by a factor of ten. By 2040, we have capabilities that wouldn’t have been expected until the end of the century. Before the last of twelve planned Columbia-class nuclear submarines has its first deployment, the state of science will have surpassed that at its planned end-of-life by fifty years.

This matters because submarines carrying ballistic missiles provide a crucial leg of nuclear deterrence for several NATO countries and Russia. Their value rests on being difficult to detect. If AI dramatically accelerates progress in quantum magnetometry, signal processing, or materials science relevant to detection, strategic stability could erode faster than acquisition and planning cycles can adapt.

The paper cites ongoing research using generative AI for discovering high-temperature superconductors, materials that could make distributed submarine detection platforms practical. While no breakthrough has been confirmed, the possibility illustrates a broader point: we have no organizational structures, culture, or experience preparing us for a century of military science occurring every decade.

The key uncertainty here isn’t whether AI can improve specific systems. It clearly can. The question is: Will AI markedly accelerate fundamental scientific discovery in areas relevant to military power?

The span of expert opinion ranges from skepticism (AI may even slow scientific progress by encouraging reliance on flawed but predictively accurate theories) to Microsoft’s CEO declaring a goal to “compress the next 250 years of chemistry and materials science progress into the next 25.”

Current security plans were developed assuming historical rates of scientific progress.

Radical uncertainty about whether that assumption still holds makes it impossible to assess whether our defense architecture remains viable.

  1. Resources for National Power: When Computing Becomes Strategic

The paper’s second pathway examines how AI reshapes dependencies on essential resources.

Could computing capacity become as strategically critical as rare earth elements, uranium deposits, or oil reserves once were?

This question has immediate implications for the balance of power.

If meaningful AI capabilities require vastly more computing than currently deployed, only the United States and perhaps China could develop truly transformative systems.

Other nations would face technological stagnation unless international agreements emerged or they would become increasingly dependent on the few countries controlling frontier AI.

Conversely, if the barriers are lower, smaller states or even non-state actors might access capabilities that currently require superpower-scale resources.

The distribution of power would flatten in unpredictable ways.

The paper frames this through a game-theoretic lens: asymmetries in AI computing capacity create incentives for preemption. Imagine two nations, one leading in AI development. If AI provides gradual benefits (“Case 1” in the paper), the nation that’s behind has little reason to attack. They lose more from conflict than from falling somewhat behind.

But if AI provides abrupt, decisive advantages (“Case 2”), the weaker side faces a Cuban Missile Crisis-style dilemma: strike before the window closes, or accept permanent inferiority.

According to economic modeling cited in the paper, if AGI requires only 2,500 times the computing used for today’s largest training runs, it could double global productivity in three years. That’s not a distant possibility. It’s potentially within current investment trajectories.

Yet we have no established metrics for tracking “National Inference Compute” or “Compute Mobilization Latency” comparable to how we monitor nuclear stockpiles or military readiness.

  1. Understanding the Environment: The Erosion of Secrecy

The third pathway may be the most unsettling: AI’s potential to fundamentally undermine secrecy, the bedrock of military and diplomatic planning.

The paper distinguishes between “social secrets” (deliberations, decisions, plans) and “technological secrets” (physical principles, algorithms, designs that can be discovered independently).

AI threatens both.

Statistical methods already allow remarkably strong inferences about human behavior from seemingly innocuous data. In an extreme limit, AI might reconstruct what was said in closed-door cabinet meetings without any spies or leaks, simply by analyzing patterns in subsequent actions, public statements, and observable outcomes.

Technological secrets face different threats. The paper notes that Britain’s GCHQ independently discovered public key cryptography years before it appeared in open literature but kept it classified. Things like cryptographic algorithms or physics applications in weapons can be discovered by anyone smart enough—or any AI capable enough. If AI systems can make such discoveries autonomously within datacenters, protected information could be exposed without any theft of blueprints or human espionage.

The historical parallel is sobering.

Shor’s algorithm for breaking encryption via quantum computing was published in 1994. It took until 2015 or twenty years for NIST to begin developing post-quantum cryptography standards. Even then, the concern about “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks meant encrypted data captured today might be vulnerable to future quantum computers.

But organizational change takes time.

Even with trusted quantum-resistant algorithms available, it would require years for institutions to fully transition.

With AI advancing at current pace, we may not have twenty years between threat identification and deployment of countermeasures.

The paper emphasizes an urgent need for large-scale studies quantifying frontier AI models’ impact on both scientific discovery and the ability to infer protected information.

What emerges from these three pathways is a portrait of profound technical uncertainty. The paper documents interviews with senior national security leaders struggling with this reality. As Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan (ret.) put it: “The problem is massive uncertainty. Decision-makers are torn between claims that ‘this will end the human race’ and ‘this can’t add 4 digit numbers’.”

This uncertainty creates what the authors call “false stability” or a period where inaction seems prudent because the future is unclear.

If we don’t know whether AI will accelerate science, provide decisive advantages in strategic planning, or undermine secrecy, costly adaptation measures seem premature. But if these capabilities arrive suddenly, the result is reactive crisis decision-making under extreme time pressure, exactly the conditions most likely to produce catastrophic miscalculation.

The paper draws an explicit parallel to the early Cold War, when a spectrum of powerful new technologies (nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, satellite reconnaissance) required decades of work, new disciplines, and extensive collaboration between political leadership and technical experts to build stable deterrence frameworks.

Even with that effort, there were harrowing close calls and considerable luck. Finding ways to navigate the AI transition, the authors argue, will require comparable large-scale coordination but the current institutional landscape is radically unprepared.

Former Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig captured the adoption challenge: “The impact of AI on the military is not predominantly dependent on the technology, but on the assimilation process. If I put a bounteous feast in front of you but your jaw is wired shut, you can’t eat.”

The paper’s core contribution is identifying specific technical uncertainties whose resolution would most improve our ability to navigate the AI transition.

These aren’t predictions but rather a framework for interpreting new information as it emerges:

  • Scientific acceleration: Systematic measurements of how frontier reasoning models actually affect R&D productivity across domains relevant to military power.
  • Compute requirements: Better understanding of the relationship between computing resources and meaningful capability thresholds.
  • Diffusion dynamics: How quickly advantages in AI erode through algorithmic improvements, espionage, or independent development.
  • Inference from data: Whether AI can reconstruct secrets from unclassified information or publicly observable patterns.
  • Planning depth: At what scale AI-supported strategic planning crosses thresholds that change operational feasibility.

The authors emphasize that AI laboratories bear responsibility for providing this technical foundation, not because they’re responsible for international security, but because political and military leaders cannot make informed decisions without understanding what AI can and cannot do.

Several themes emerge that should concern anyone thinking about major power competition in the AI era:

  • Compression of timelines: If AI accelerates R&D by even a factor of five, current acquisition programs will be obsolete before completion. The Columbia-class submarines mentioned earlier are planned to operate until the 2080s. If the science of detection advances fifty years faster than expected, deterrence assumptions collapse.
  • Asymmetric transparency: AI may create a world where authoritarian states gain advantages in surveillance and control while democratic institutions struggle with legal constraints, civil liberties concerns, and the need for public debate. Yet those constraints may ultimately produce more robust systems. The paper doesn’t resolve this tension but flags it as critical.
  • Strategic surprise without warning: If major breakthroughs happen inside datacenters with minimal observable signatures, traditional intelligence indicators fail. There may be no “Sputnik moment” or no visible launch that alerts competitors. The first sign could be deployment.
  • The alliance problem: If only a few nations can develop frontier AI, alliance structures may strain. Why maintain expensive defense commitments to countries that lack the technological base to contribute meaningfully? Conversely, AI-enabled prosperity might strengthen alliances by increasing the stakes in preserving stability.

The OpenAI paper arrives at a curious moment. By the authors’ own account, we’re past the point where we can dismiss AI’s impact on international security as speculative. Current systems already demonstrate capabilities relevant to the pathways they describe.

Yet we lack coherent programs, organizational structures, or even shared vocabulary for addressing these challenges at scale.

The span between credible expert estimates from “normal technology” to “superintelligence creates decisive advantage” is so wide as to preclude coherent planning.

This is the paper’s central warning: we cannot afford to wait for certainty.

The sooner critical technical uncertainties are resolved, the more time exists for measures to preserve stability.

Whether through arms control frameworks adapted for AI, transparency regimes for compute capacity, international agreements on limits to certain capabilities, or entirely new institutional arrangements, managing the transition will require what the paper calls “a coordinated, large-scale effort.”

That effort doesn’t yet exist.

What does exist is a growing recognition that AI represents not just another technology to integrate into existing security frameworks, but a force that may require rethinking those frameworks entirely.

The marine chronometer didn’t just improve navigation. It changed which nations could project power and where.

The question facing us now is whether AI will prove similarly transformative, and whether we can build the understanding needed to navigate through a world of chaos and survive and thrive in the anarchy of the moment.

I will focus on this aspect of the challenge in my follow-on article to this one to be published later this week.

The Dynamics of Change for Europe in the Evolving Global System

Posted on | by Robbin Laird
02/13/2026

Recently, Lt General (Retired) Preziosa published two essays in European Affairs in Italian which we are including in translation after this overview of his analysis of Europe’s position in the evolving global system.

His argument rests on a fundamental proposition: the Russian-Ukrainian war represents not a regional conflict but a critical node in a systemic transformation of the Euro-Asian order. His framework reveals how Europe faces not military defeat but strategic marginalization unless it transforms economic power into coherent geopolitical purpose.

The war’s significance extends far beyond Kyiv because it operates within what Prezioa identifies as an “asymmetrical triangular system.” The United States retains military and technological dominance, China commands economic mass with global ambitions, and Russia maintains nuclear capabilities despite limited economic foundations.

These three powers are interconnected through industrial chains, technological supply routes, critical raw materials, and missile postures that link the Baltic, Black Sea, and Indo-Pacific into a unified strategic space.

When Washington redirects attention toward the Pacific, European security balances shift.

When Europe fails to compensate with autonomous capacity, deterrence becomes asymmetrical.

Preziosa argues that Russia cannot defeat the entire West militarily, yet it can steadily increase European costs over time. China, meanwhile, benefits from Western preoccupation and Russian resilience without direct intervention, avoiding unilateral strengthening of American deterrent credibility.

This dynamic suggests that Ukraine’s final outcome may depend less on negotiations in Kyiv or Brussels than on implicit adjustments between Washington and Beijing regarding global competition management. Should the conflict threaten world economic or financial stability excessively, pressure for a structured freeze would intensify. driven not by European will alone but by systemic calculations among major powers.

For Europe, this presents an existential question of agency.

If the Euro-Asian order gets redefined primarily through U.S.-China competition, Europe risks becoming an object of balance rather than a subject shaping it. A Euro-Asian compromise might freeze the conflict without resolving root causes, subordinate European security to extra-European priorities, and reduce Ukraine to a variable in global stabilization.

The real choice facing Europe, Prezioa contends, is between constructing balance as an active participant or accepting balance defined elsewhere.

This challenge emerges from a historical miscalculation.

After 1989, Europe interpreted systemic imbalance as permanent suspension of geopolitical competition. American superiority made power dynamics less visible while economic integration advanced faster than strategic integration.

Security was outsourced while markets became the Union’s organizing principle.

Globalization and digital transformation expanded European societies’ awareness of international crises, yet this broadened perception failed to generate strategic capacity.

The gap between accelerated public debate and long-term decision-making contributed to internal fragmentation.

Contemporary international order has become what Preziosa calls “densified”, more compressed through energy, technological, financial, and logistical interdependencies. Localized conflicts produce systemic effects across supply chains, energy markets, and deterrence credibility.

Within this densified system, Europe’s stance remains uneven not because of irreconcilable value differences but due to divergent threat hierarchies. Poland prioritizes deterrence against Russia through geographical proximity and historical memory; Germany favors systemic stability through industrial structure and political tradition.

The structural problem lies not in this plurality, natural among sovereign states, but in insufficient cognitive convergence to translate economic weight into strategic power.

Preziosa sees the Ukrainian war as a potential evolutionary threshold where external pressure could transform into institutional consolidation, similar to how European integration historically advanced through systemic crises.

The appropriate response requires neither NATO separation nor consensus-free institutional expansion, but rather transformation of economic weight into strategic coherence through industrial resilience, integrated critical supply chains, credible deterrence capabilities, and aligned technology-security policies.

Ultimately, Preziosa emphasizes that European geopolitical position remains undefined, determined by capacity to integrate perception, power, and political purpose.

Europe cannot merely adapt to triangular dynamics among the United States, China, and Russia.

It must help shape the systemic incentives determining its stability.

Its relevance depends on transforming economic interdependence into organized power and demonstrating maturity through institutional consistency, not claiming centrality by historical tradition.

The Russian Ukrainian War and the Global Strategic System

The Russian Ukrainian war cannot be interpreted as a conflict confined to the European space, but as a critical node in a broader strategic system. The Baltic, Black Sea, and Indo-Pacific are not separate theaters, but rather interconnected compartments of a competition that concerns access, power projection, control of logistics corridors, and credibility of deterrence. What happens in Kyiv does not stay in Kyiv: it affects the global allocation of resources, the missile system, and the strategic priorities of the great powers.

The Baltic Sea is where the strength of Article 5 and the depth of European defense are measured; the Black Sea is where the territorial and maritime divide between Russia and the West is concentrated, with implications for energy and control of shipping routes; the Indo-Pacific is where the systemic competition between the United States and China is played out, directly affecting America’s ability to sustain its long-term commitment to Europe. These areas are linked by industrial and technological chains, the circulation of critical raw materials, competition in semiconductors, medium- and long-range missile postures and, above all, the global distribution of US strategic priorities. If Washington focuses its attention and capabilities on the Pacific, the European balance shifts; if Europe does not compensate with greater autonomy and industrial capacity, deterrence becomes asymmetrical. The war in Ukraine is therefore also a function of the global distribution of American priorities.

The international order is neither fully bipolar nor multipolar in the classical sense. It is an asymmetrical triangular system: the United States remains the dominant military and technological power; China is the main systemic competitor, with economic mass and global ambition; Russia is a nuclear power with significant military capabilities, but with a more limited economic base that is heavily concentrated in the energy and military sectors. In this scenario, Russia cannot realistically prevail against the entire West, but it can increase European costs over time; the United States cannot ignore European security, but considers the Indo-Pacific a strategic priority; China does not intervene directly in the conflict, but benefits from a busy West and a Russia that has not collapsed, allowing it to avoid a unilateral strengthening of American deterrent credibility.

It follows that the final outcome of the Ukrainian war may depend less on the negotiating table in Kyiv or Brussels and more on an implicit adjustment between Washington and Beijing regarding the management of global competition. If the European conflict were to become excessively destabilizing for the world economy or international financial stability, pressure for a structured freeze would increase—not only because of European will, but also because of the systemic calculations of the major powers.

For Europe, the issue is existential. If the Euro-Asian order is redefined primarily in the context of US-China competition, the risk is not direct military defeat, but strategic marginalization. A Euro-Asian compromise could, in principle, freeze the conflict without resolving its root causes, subordinate European security to extra-European priorities, and transform Ukraine into a variable of global stabilization. The real alternative for Europe is therefore not between war and peace, but between being a subject in the construction of balance or an object of a balance defined elsewhere.

This implies a structural choice: developing autonomous deterrence capabilities, industrial resilience, integration of strategic value chains, and internal political cohesion. Not to emancipate itself from NATO, but to make Europe an indispensable player in the final architecture. If the Russian-Ukrainian war is the first chapter in a redefinition of the Euro-Asian order, its conclusion will not only be a territorial agreement, but a new set of incentives among the great powers. In this context, European stability will depend not only on its relationship with Russia, but also on Europe’s position in the global strategic triangle and its ability to influence the overall configuration of systemic incentives.

Published in European Affairs in Italian on February 2, 2026

https://www.europeanaffairs.it/blog/2026/02/06/lordine-euro-asiatico-come-sistema-integrato/

From Economic Power to Strategic Coherence: Europe’s Challenge in the Global Triangular System

Europe today does not face an immediate risk of military defeat. There are no conditions for a direct confrontation that would call into question its territorial integrity. The risk is more subtle and structural, namely, failing to define its geopolitical place in the Euro-Asian order that is currently being redefined.

The war in Ukraine is not an isolated regional conflict. It is part of a systemic competition linking the Baltic, Black Sea, and Indo-Pacific regions, intertwining security, industrial supply chains, missile postures, technology, and the allocation of US strategic priorities. The central question is not only how the conflict will evolve, but what configuration of incentives will emerge from its outcome and what role Europe will be able to play in that configuration.

After 1989, Europe interpreted a systemic imbalance as a suspension of geopolitical competition. American superiority made the dynamics of power less visible, but no less real. Economic integration advanced more rapidly than strategic integration. Security was largely outsourced, while the market was consolidated as the organizing principle of the Union.

At the same time, globalization and digital transformation have profoundly changed the cognitive environment. European societies are now better informed, more connected, and more sensitive to international crises. However, this broadening of perception has not translated into greater strategic capacity. The gap between accelerated public debate and long-term political decision-making has contributed to internal fragmentation and a certain difficulty in sustaining coherent policies over time.

The contemporary international order is not ‘smaller’, but more densely packed. Energy, technological, financial, and logistical interdependencies have compressed the strategic distance between actors. In this context, localized conflicts produce systemic effects. The war in Ukraine is a prime example: a territorial conflict with global repercussions on supply chains, energy markets, financial stability, and the credibility of Western deterrence.

Within this densified system, Europe’s stance remains uneven. The European Union has significant economic clout, but has not yet fully harmonized its perception of threats. Poland, due to its geographical position and historical memory, prioritizes deterrence against Russia. Germany, due to its industrial structure and political-strategic tradition, has long favored systemic stability and economic interdependence. These are different risk hierarchies, not irreconcilable differences in values.

The structural problem does not lie in plurality, which is natural in a union of sovereign states, but in the absence of sufficient cognitive convergence. Without a shared assessment of threats and the costs of inaction, economic power does not automatically translate into strategic power. Deterrence requires capability, but also cohesion of intent.

The war in Ukraine may therefore represent an evolutionary threshold. Historically, European integration has made progress in response to systemic crises. The current phase offers a similar opportunity: to transform external pressure and perceived vulnerability into institutional and strategic consolidation.

This dynamic is part of a broader picture of competition between the United States and China. Washington increasingly identifies the Indo-Pacific as a long-term strategic priority. Beijing observes the European theater in relation to the global distribution of resources, the configuration of technological supply chains, and the credibility of American security commitments.

If the United States were to progressively reallocate capabilities to the Pacific, Europe would be called upon to assume greater responsibility for its own security balance. If China continued to strengthen its economic and technological mass without assuming direct military costs in Europe, the global balance would gradually shift. In either case, European inaction would constitute an implicit strategic choice.

The appropriate response is neither separation from NATO nor institutional expansion without political consensus. It requires the transformation of European economic weight into strategic coherence. This implies strengthening industrial resilience, protecting and integrating critical supply chains, developing credible deterrence capabilities, and aligning technology policies with security objectives.

The dimension of political leadership is fundamental. In a densified system, leadership is not measured by reactive crisis management, but by the ability to maintain strategic direction under pressure. It requires consistency, clarity of objectives, and a willingness to bear short-term costs to preserve long-term stability.

Europe’s geopolitical position is not predetermined. It will be defined by its ability to integrate perception, power, and political purpose. The continent that experienced the extreme consequences of the absence of strategic balance in the 20th century carries with it a historical responsibility: not to claim centrality by right of tradition, but to demonstrate maturity through institutional consistency and decision-making capacity.

In a denser global order characterized by triangular dynamics between the United States, China, and Russia, Europe cannot limit itself to adapting. It must help shape the systemic incentives that will determine its future stability. Its relevance will depend on its ability to transform economic interdependence into organized power and credible leadership.

Published in European Affairs in Italian on February 9, 2026

https://www.europeanaffairs.it/blog/2026/02/09/leuropa-nellordine-globale-densificato-dalla-forza-economica-alla-potenza-strategica/

Protecting undersea Infrastructure in the Baltic Sea.

Posted on | by Robbin Laird

Off the coast of Gotland, Sweden, scientists from the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) are deploying cutting-edge acoustic sensors to see if they might help NATO Allies detect and respond to sabotage of underwater pipelines and data cables. One key trial involves using ballast anchors to replicate the acoustic signature of an anchor drop – a method suspected in recent incidents of seabed interference. This research supports the development of tools to detect, track, and assess such events in real time.

The month-long mission also marks a milestone as NATO operates in newly accessible waters alongside its newest Allies, Sweden and Finland. The Baltic’s complex seabed and dense infrastructure provide an ideal test environment.

NRV Alliance, based in La Spezia, Italy, is NATO’s floating laboratory, operated by CMRE scientists and crewed by the Italian Navy.

SWEDEN

06.21.2025

Natochannel