By Robbin Laird
In 2020, Murielle Delaporte and I published a book examining what we termed “the return of direct defense” in Europe. Our central argument challenged conventional thinking about European security: defending Europe in the 2020s requires moving beyond traditional military deterrence to embrace a broader strategic concept that places infrastructure, resilience, and supply chains at the center of the contest with 21st-century authoritarian powers. Five years later, events have validated this analysis in ways we could not have fully anticipated.
The transformation we described represents a fundamental shift in how democracies must think about defense. Infrastructure—ports, energy networks, data cables, telecommunications systems, transport corridors, and digital platforms—is no longer merely the backdrop to military operations. It has become both target and weapon in a long-term strategic competition between liberal democracies and authoritarian states that understand power operates across multiple dimensions simultaneously.
From Cold War Templates to 21st Century Threats
The late Cold War model of European defense was architecturally elegant in its clarity. NATO planned around a central front in Germany, clearly defined flanks, and the integration of massive nuclear and conventional forces to deter a Soviet armored thrust westward. The infrastructure of defense—bases, depots, communications networks—mattered enormously, but primarily as the physical substrate supporting armies, air forces, and nuclear arsenals. The threat was identifiable, the geography was stable, and the Alliance’s mission was unambiguous.
Today’s challenge bears little resemblance to that framework. Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and the parallel emergence of China as a system-shaping power revealed an authoritarian toolkit that operates across a far broader spectrum. Contemporary Russia exploits the newly independent states around its “window to the West” not through massed armor columns but through cyber operations, information warfare, energy dependency, and the strategic ownership of critical assets. These instruments allow Moscow to influence European decision-making and constrain policy options well short of open warfare.
China’s approach differs in execution but shares this fundamental logic: economic penetration, gray-zone activities, and targeted control of infrastructure reshape the external environment without conventional military campaigns. Both powers have learned to weaponize interdependence, turning the openness of liberal market economies into strategic vulnerabilities that can be exploited for political effect.
The Infrastructure Challenge: Cyber Penetration to Leveraged Acquisition
When we examined the “infrastructure challenge” in our book, we argued that it represents one of the central strategic shifts reshaping contemporary warfare and deterrence—not an afterthought to “real” military planning. The authoritarian toolkit extends from sophisticated cyber penetration of networks to what we termed “leveraged acquisition”: the systematic purchase or control of critical assets and connectivity nodes inside liberal democracies.
Chinese and Russian actors, often operating through ostensibly commercial entities, acquire stakes in ports, logistics hubs, energy companies, telecommunications infrastructure, data centers, and high-end manufacturing facilities. This creates enduring political and security leverage from within target societies. The threat is not simply espionage or intellectual property theft; it is the capability to threaten disruption or denial of crucial services during a crisis, to shape elite decision-making through economic dependency, and to gain operational insight into European patterns and vulnerabilities.
This connects directly to the broader concept of hybrid and gray-zone operations. In this operational model, lethal military force often serves as a supporting element while influence over infrastructure, information systems, and supply chains constitutes the main effort. Infrastructure is no longer neutral terrain—it has become a principal battlespace in great power competition.
The security implications cascade across multiple domains. A telecommunications network owned or substantially controlled by Chinese entities creates surveillance opportunities, data integrity risks, and potential denial of service during a crisis. A port facility in which Russian-linked companies hold significant stakes offers insight into military and commercial logistics flows while providing leverage over regional transport networks. Energy infrastructure that creates dependencies on authoritarian suppliers becomes a political weapon, as Europe discovered painfully after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
NATO, the EU, and the Dual Alliance Problem
The return of direct defense creates what we characterized as a “dual alliance problem.” NATO, with its focus on military capabilities, exercises, and collective defense commitments, cannot alone address vulnerabilities in energy grids, data networks, transport corridors, or medical supply chains. The European Union, historically weak on traditional defense matters, holds crucial instruments for infrastructure regulation, economic security, and coordinated crisis management. Neither institution can solve the problem in isolation.
The 2014 shocks—Russia’s seizure of Crimea and the mass migration flows from the Middle East and North Africa—exposed fundamental European weaknesses in controlling borders, managing crises, and protecting critical systems. The COVID-19 pandemic later revealed the extent of European dependence on Chinese-dominated supply chains for essential goods, particularly pharmaceuticals and medical equipment. These successive crises underscored the need for what we and other strategic thinkers have termed “smart sovereignty”: the capability to guarantee critical supplies and shape diversified, trusted production networks rather than simply purchasing at the lowest cost on global markets.
This represents a profound conceptual shift. Sovereignty in the 21st century is not merely about territorial control or diplomatic recognition—it includes the ability to maintain societal functions and military operations without catastrophic dependencies on potential adversaries. This insight has direct implications for how democracies structure their economies, screen foreign investments, and organize crisis management.
Supply Chains as Strategic Weapons
Our research, including extensive interviews with Nordic and European defense experts, drove home a central point: supply chain security and resilience planning—once treated as purely economic or civil protection concerns—must now be understood as core defense functions. The assumptions underlying just-in-time logistics and globally optimized supply chains collapse under crisis conditions and would fragment even more severely during serious geopolitical conflict.
The evidence is stark. When crisis strikes, nations prioritize their own populations. Supply chains fracture at unpredictable points, from obscure component suppliers to shipping chokepoints. The complexity of modern manufacturing means that a single specialized facility in one country can become a strategic bottleneck affecting military production and essential civilian goods across an entire continent.
The strategic response must operate on multiple levels. First, predictable essentials must be stockpiled, following models developed by Finland and historically practiced by Sweden and Denmark. Second, alternative production capacity—including advanced manufacturing techniques like 3D printing and rapid conversion of existing production lines—must be developed and regularly tested. The crucial caveat: high-end systems such as precision-guided weapons and advanced medical devices cannot be improvised under crisis conditions. They require sustained investment in production capacity and supply chain security during peacetime.
Third, serious cross-national planning must map likely supply chain vulnerabilities and identify alternative sourcing and production paths before crises hit. This cannot be purely national work; smaller European states in particular must collaborate in regional clusters and through EU frameworks to build credible supply chain security and crisis management mechanisms capable of functioning under stress.
Nordic Models: Resilience and Smart Sovereignty
Finland emerged in our research as a compelling model for “smart sovereignty” in an age of hybrid threats. Finnish national security planning emphasizes comprehensive defense: stockpiles, conscription, territorial defense, and deep civil-military integration. Finnish officials described a holistic security-of-supply system covering not only ammunition and fuel but also electricity, telecommunications, data integrity, and physical shelters for both civilians and critical infrastructure.
The underlying logic is both simple and profound: in a compressed crisis, states must fight and function with what they already possess. Reliance on overseas replenishment becomes unrealistic when adversaries actively create anti-access and area-denial conditions across physical, cyber, and financial domains. Data security—ensuring both availability and integrity of essential information systems—now constitutes a distinct layer of infrastructure defense, with dedicated agencies tasked to protect national datasets from corruption or manipulation.
This concept of resilience is not merely supplementary to traditional deterrence—it is a central component. Authoritarian adversaries specifically target weak points in infrastructure and civil society precisely because these are the levers most likely to generate political effects without triggering NATO’s Article 5 collective defense commitments. A society that can absorb shocks, maintain essential functions, and continue operations despite disruption is significantly harder to coerce than one that depends on fragile, easily interdicted systems.
The institutional response across Europe has included important innovations. The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki represents one attempt to pool knowledge and help EU and NATO members develop capabilities for responding to influence operations, infrastructure attacks, and cross-domain pressures that blend economic, informational, and political instruments below the threshold of conventional warfare.
Our research suggested that effective infrastructure defense will not emerge from purely national efforts or exclusively supranational approaches. Instead, it will grow from coalitions of states with shared threat perceptions—the “clusters” we identified—operating under EU and NATO frameworks but not waiting for full alliance-wide consensus before taking action. This logic applies across domains: protection of undersea cables, screening of foreign investments in critical sectors, coordinated responses to disinformation campaigns, and joint development of resilience capabilities.
The Maritime Infrastructure Front
The concept of a “fourth battle of the Atlantic” illustrates how infrastructure defense, geography, and high-end warfighting intersect in practice. Russia’s military modernization around the Kola Peninsula, its advanced submarine and long-range missile forces, and its focus on denying NATO access across the North Atlantic directly threaten European ports, logistics hubs, and undersea communication and energy infrastructure.
Allied responses—new maritime patrol aircraft, F-35-enabled networked air operations, hardened and dispersed air bases, revitalized anti-submarine warfare capabilities—represent not merely force modernization but measures to protect the infrastructural lifelines connecting North America and Europe. Modern maritime contestation now includes hybrid elements: potential attacks on submarine cables, GPS jamming, cyber operations against shipping and port management systems, and the use of civilian vessels for military purposes.
In this environment, infrastructure protection—harbor facilities, fuel depots, data cables, and automatic identification systems—becomes integral to deterrence. Losing control of these nodes rapidly undermines the ability to surge forces or sustain operations. The Atlantic is simultaneously a military theater and a complex infrastructure system that must be defended as an integrated whole.
From Crisis Management to Operational Capability
The COVID-19 pandemic provided a brutal stress test for European infrastructure and crisis governance. Both the EU and national governments had assumed global markets would provide essential goods under all conditions. Instead, supply chains broke down completely and voluntary “solidarity” between member states proved insufficient when all faced simultaneous crises. Proposals for EU-level strategic stockpiles and regional hubs of critical equipment were important, but we argued they must be anchored in serious national planning and cross-border coordination rather than treated as substitutes for it.
This connects to a broader legitimacy question for the European Union. If Brussels cannot demonstrate real value in managing transnational crises—whether pandemics, migration, or infrastructure shocks—its credibility as a security actor will erode. Infrastructure defense and supply chain security thus become litmus tests of whether the EU can move beyond regulatory authority to operational relevance, particularly when authoritarian powers actively exploit economic dependencies and political divisions across the Union.
The European Defence Fund and related initiatives represent attempts to reduce fragmentation in European defense industries and stimulate collaborative development of key capabilities, including those relevant to infrastructure protection, cyber defense, and secure communications. For such programs to contribute meaningfully to direct defense, they must target genuine capability gaps identified in both EU and NATO planning processes rather than simply subsidizing national industrial champions.
Investment screening mechanisms have emerged as another critical tool. However, Europe’s economic difficulties and internal political divisions create constant pressure to welcome external capital regardless of strategic implications. Credible infrastructure defense requires not only legal frameworks for screening foreign investments but also sustained political will to prioritize long-term security over short-term financial attraction.
The Politics of Infrastructure Security
A central political theme in our analysis was that Europe’s response to authoritarian pressure will be shaped less by centralized grand designs than by the interaction of diverse national and regional trajectories. We identified multiple dynamics: Brussels-driven efforts toward convergence and common standards; national reassertion driven by migration, economic stress, and cultural politics; and a clusterization trend in which groups of like-minded states form practical coalitions on specific security issues.
Infrastructure defense sits at the nexus of these tensions. Decisions about ports, telecommunications networks, energy grids, and data centers embody fundamental questions about the relationship between national sovereignty, EU-level regulation, and regional solidarity. The Nordic countries offer one model: shared work on security of supply, cross-border air and maritime exercises, common technical standards, and political alignment in confronting Russian pressure. Similar patterns could emerge elsewhere in Europe, creating overlapping networks of trusted partners capable of rapid action to protect infrastructure and supply chains even when broader alliance consensus proves elusive.
Conclusion: Defense Transformed
Our central conclusion in 2020 was that direct defense has returned to Europe, but in a form far more complex than Cold War precedents. The authoritarian challenge extends well beyond armored offensives or missile salvos to include sustained efforts to penetrate and shape European infrastructure, information environments, and supply chains. NATO’s military adaptation, the EU’s emerging role in crisis management and industrial policy, and the growing emphasis on national and regional resilience all converge on a single strategic imperative: defend the systems that allow European societies and armed forces to function.
This transformation requires Europeans to fundamentally rethink sovereignty, alliance roles, and the balance between economic openness and security. Infrastructure defense—understood broadly to encompass energy, data, transport, medical and industrial supply chains, and societal resilience—is not a technical or secondary concern. It has become a central battlefield in the long contest between liberal democracies and 21st-century authoritarian powers.
The challenge is formidable, but it is also clarifying. When infrastructure becomes battlespace, defense becomes everyone’s responsibility. Military forces, intelligence agencies, regulatory bodies, private companies, and civil society organizations all have roles to play. Success will require unprecedented coordination across traditional boundaries while maintaining the adaptability to respond to threats that evolve faster than bureaucratic consensus.
The authoritarian powers have already adapted their strategies to exploit the infrastructure dependencies of open societies. The question is whether democracies can respond with sufficient speed, coherence, and political will to defend the systems on which their security and prosperity ultimately depend. The answer will shape the strategic landscape for decades to come.