By Robbin Laird
Before a nation asks what threats it faces or what allies expect, it should ask a prior and more fundamental question — what are our genuine strategic advantages, and what force design maximizes them?
That framing is right. It is also not new. The same foundational question animated the best European defense thinking of the period examined in The Return of Direct Defense in Europe, the 2020 book Murielle Delaporte and I wrote as Europe was still absorbing the strategic shock of 2014 and the cascading crises that followed.
Reading both works together reveals a consistent analytical logic: the nations that navigated the return of direct defense most effectively were those that understood their genuine advantages with precision and designed their forces accordingly rather than simply buying what larger partners were buying or reflexively rebuilding what had been dismantled after the Cold War.
The common failure mode across both periods is identical: force design driven by external pressures and bureaucratic momentum rather than by a rigorous accounting of what the nation actually brings to the fight. In the post-Cold War decade, European militaries dismantled their direct defense capabilities because the threat had apparently disappeared and alliance membership seemed to substitute for sovereign credibility. They shaped themselves instead for expeditionary operations in distant theaters, counter-insurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq, stabilization in the Balkans, hollowing out the mass, readiness, and territorial depth that direct defense requires. When Russia re-entered the equation in 2014, the hollowing out was exposed. The question that confronted every European government from Warsaw to Oslo to London was the same one the Williams seminar posed in a different context: what do we actually have, why does it constitute a genuine advantage, and what force design follows from it?
The answers varied sharply and the variation itself is instructive. Countries that had never fully dismantled their direct defense posture, or that had specific geographic, cultural, and alliance-architectural advantages they understood and were prepared to exploit, adapted faster and more effectively than those that had to rebuild from institutional memory alone.
Geography as Operational Logic, Not Background
The Williams framework identifies the first and most fundamental advantage audit question as geographic, not the geography of the schoolroom map, but operational geography that determines how a force actually fights. The same distinction runs through the entire analysis in The Return of Direct Defense in Europe. One of the book’s central arguments is that the collapse of the Soviet Union did not produce a strategic geography; it produced a radically different one, and that difference was systematically misread by Western governments for two decades.
The old Central Front logic, a clear primary axis of Soviet advance through Germany, flanks serving the center, dissolved with the Warsaw Pact. What replaced it was a new and more complex geography: newly independent Baltic states directly exposed on Russia’s northwestern border, a Poland now fronting the NATO alliance without a deep buffer, a Nordic region linking the Atlantic approaches to the Baltic Sea, and a Russia that retained its Eurasian continental mass while losing the imperial glacis that had separated it from Western power. The nations that grasped this new geography earliest and designed their forces around it rather than around Cold War legacy structures were the ones best positioned when the 2014 shock arrived.
Norway is the most instructive case. The Nordic chapter of our 2020 book details how Norway systematically rebuilt its direct defense posture from the early 2010s onward, driven by an honest geographic assessment. Norway sits astride the approaches to the North Atlantic and shares a border with Russia in the High North. Its maritime geography, the Norwegian Sea, the GIUK gap, the Svalbard archipelago gives it a specific and irreplaceable role in any Atlantic conflict. Rather than designing a scaled-down version of a generic NATO land force, Norway invested in capabilities that exploited its specific geographic position: maritime patrol aviation, submarine forces oriented toward high-north operations, special operations capacity suited to its terrain, and integration with American naval and air assets in ways that leveraged Norway’s positional value directly. The result was not a mirror of what larger partners already had; it was a force genuinely shaped around what Norway uniquely contributes.
Finland offers the parallel lesson on land. Finland’s approach to direct defense was never abandoned in the way that most Western European states dismantled their territorial defense postures after 1991. The geographic logic was too obvious and too close to ignore: a long land border with Russia, limited strategic depth in the south, a national memory of the Winter War that inoculated Finnish defense planning against the comfortable assumption that the threat had permanently disappeared. The force design that followed from this geographic and historical honesty, large reserve army, integrated territorial defense, serious investment in fire suppression and counter-battery capability, was not fashionable by NATO standards of the 2000s. It was, however, exactly right for the threat Finland actually faced. When Finland and Sweden ultimately joined NATO in 2023-24, they brought force structures genuinely suited to the northern flank challenge, not forces that needed to be rebuilt from scratch to perform that mission.
Alliance Architecture as Strategic Advantage
The Williams framework’s fourth audit question — what does the alliance architecture actually provide, and what must the nation supply for itself? — maps directly onto one of the central arguments in our 2020 book. The return of direct defense in Europe was not simply a military question; it was a question about the real operational value of the alliance structures through which European nations were organized. NATO and the European Union provided frameworks, but frameworks do not fight. What mattered was whether specific nations, in specific geographic and political contexts, had built genuine operational integration with the partners whose assistance they would actually need in a crisis.
The two great intelligence partnerships of the 1980s, the Gordievsky affair, which linked British and American intelligence at the highest levels, and the Farewell affair, which created an operational channel between French internal security and the Reagan White House, illustrate this principle with unusual sharpness. What made both partnerships effective was not that Britain and France were simply members of NATO. It was that specific individuals in specific governments had built working relationships of sufficient depth and trust to handle material of the most sensitive kind, outside normal bureaucratic channels, in ways that produced strategic results. The Gordievsky operation modified the ABLE ARCHER nuclear exercise in real time, reducing the risk of catastrophic Soviet miscalculation. The Farewell dossier contributed to shaping Reagan’s Star Wars announcement at precisely the moment Soviet technical intelligence was being rolled up. Neither outcome was the product of alliance machinery in the abstract. Both were the product of specific bilateral integration, built deliberately and maintained carefully.
The lesson for contemporary force design is direct. An alliance contribution, properly understood, is not simply about interoperability standards and combined exercises. It is about the capacity to function as a genuine force multiplier for specific partners , providing capabilities, intelligence, basing, or operational access that those partners cannot replicate from within their own resources, and building the institutional depth needed for that contribution to function under crisis conditions. The nations that invested in this kind of deep bilateral integration before 2014 were significantly better positioned to respond when the strategic environment changed. Those that had relied on the alliance framework in the abstract, assuming that NATO membership was itself a guarantee of operational coherence, found that the framework was thinner in practice than it had appeared on paper.
Poland is the clearest contemporary example of a nation that understood this distinction and acted on it. Our 2020 book’s chapter on Polish defense transformation traces how Warsaw, from 2014 onward, combined a genuine investment in territorial defense mass, rebuilding conventional ground forces at a scale no other European NATO member was contemplating — with a deliberate deepening of the bilateral relationship with the United States. The Polish calculation was not that NATO would fail; it was that the contribution Poland could make to alliance deterrence was inseparable from the sovereign credibility of Polish forces. A Poland that relied entirely on allied reinforcement was a Poland that could be coerced in the interval before that reinforcement arrived. A Poland that combined genuine territorial defense capability with deep bilateral US-Polish integration was a Poland that denied Russia the exploitation window that hybrid operations depend on.
Human Capital and Institutional Culture as Advantage
The Williams framework identifies human capital as one of the most consistently underanalyzed dimensions of national military power, the quality, adaptability, and efficiency of personnel relative to the resources invested in them. The observation is equally applicable to the European case. What the Nordic and Baltic states demonstrated after 2014 was not simply that they had maintained more territorial defense infrastructure than their Western European counterparts. They had maintained something harder to rebuild: the institutional cultures, the command competencies, and the reserve integration mechanisms that allow smaller forces to fight effectively against larger ones.
The distinction matters because institutional culture cannot be procured. Platforms can be bought, training cycles can be accelerated, doctrines can be revised. The tacit knowledge embedded in a professional military culture that has never stopped taking direct defense seriously, the judgment about when to hold ground, when to yield depth, how to operate under communications degradation, how to integrate with reserve and civil defense structures, is not recoverable on any procurement timeline. Finland’s military had it because Finland never stopped practicing it. Germany’s military did not, because Germany had spent two decades reorienting toward out-of-area operations and was by 2014 operating a force whose organizational culture was built around stabilization operations, not territorial combat.
The Williams framework’s observation about the Royal Australian Air Force, delivering more practical firepower per person and per dollar than larger counterparts, points to the same underlying dynamic. A smaller force, operating without the institutional mass that absorbs suboptimal performance in larger militaries, tends to develop individual excellence and adaptive thinking as substitutes for numbers. That efficiency is the product of deliberate cultivation: realistic training, demanding exercises, and cultures that reward initiative over compliance. Where that culture exists and is maintained, it constitutes a strategic advantage no platform purchase can replicate. Where it is allowed to atrophy as happened across much of Western European military culture during the post-Cold War decade, it can take a generation to rebuild.
The Industrial Dimension: Sovereign Depth Under Pressure
The industrial audit question in the Williams framework asks not simply what the defense industrial base produces in peacetime, but what sovereign knowledge and manufacturing depth would allow a nation to sustain, repair, adapt, and scale capability under wartime conditions. This question was almost entirely absent from European defense thinking during the post-Cold War decade. The assumption of globalized supply chains and allied industrial interdependence made it seem redundant. The return of direct defense exposed that assumption as strategically dangerous.
The 2020 book addresses this through the lens of what was called the “infrastructure challenge”, encompassing not only munitions stocks and maintenance depth but the broader question of what economic and industrial dependencies adversaries could exploit. The Russian strategy against Europe was never simply a military one; it was a combined economic, informational, and military pressure campaign that sought leverage points in European infrastructure, energy dependencies, and supply chain vulnerabilities. The European nations that had maintained genuine industrial sovereignty not as a protectionist reflex, but as a deliberate defense investment were less exposed to that leverage.
The COVID-19 crisis, which arrived as the book was being completed, underscored the point with unusual vividness. The over-dependence of Western economies on Chinese supply chains which the pandemic made visible in medical manufacturing and supplies was precisely the same logic applied in a different domain. Nations that had assumed that global supply chains would remain accessible under stress discovered that this assumption had structural limits. The same lesson applies to defense industrial capacity: sovereignty is not free and not automatic, but its absence is discovered at the worst possible moment.
The Temporal Dimension: Strategic Clocks and Institutional Calendars
The Williams framework’s fifth audit question — what is the actual strategic horizon, not the planning cycle that budgetary processes impose? — may be the hardest to act on and the most important to get right. The European experience after 2014 illustrates why with painful clarity.
The strategic shock of Crimea was recognized as a turning point almost immediately. The Wales Summit committed NATO members to the 2% GDP defense spending target in 2014. The Enhanced Forward Presence was stood up. The Very High Readiness Joint Task Force was created. These were genuine responses, not empty gestures. But the pace of institutional response consistently lagged the pace of strategic change, because institutional calendars and procurement timelines operate on schedules that strategic adversaries do not respect. A nation that correctly diagnoses a threat in 2014 but designs its response around a decade-long recapitalization program may find that the window of risk it identified has narrowed or closed by the time the force structure changes it planned arrive in the field.
The book’s chapter on Germany illustrates this temporal mismatch most sharply. German political culture, shaped by deep historical aversion to military power, had built institutional processes for defense decisions that were structurally resistant to rapid change. The 2014 turning point was recognized in Berlin; the Zeitenwende — the declared structural shift in German security policy — would not come until 2022, in response to full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Eight years elapsed between the strategic signal and the institutional response. That gap is not unique to Germany; it reflects a broader pattern in how liberal democracies process strategic change. But the gap is not inevitable, and the nations that managed it most effectively after 2014, Poland, the Nordic states, the Baltics, did so because they had built institutions with lower latency between strategic recognition and operational response.
The Williams seminar’s argument for a ten-month readiness plan running in parallel with decade-long recapitalization, rather than treating the former as derivative from the latter, reflects the same lesson in the Indo-Pacific context. Advantages not exploited at the moment of strategic stress are not advantages; they are potential, unrealized. The conversion of potential into operational effect requires both the right force design and the right timeline for achieving it. Getting the timeline right requires the intellectual honesty to separate the strategic clock from the institutional calendar and to act at the pace the former demands rather than the pace the latter prefers.
Distinctiveness as Alliance Contribution
The Williams framework’s most important practical conclusion is that a nation designed around its genuine advantages will look different from its allies and that this distinctiveness is the precondition for genuine allied complementarity rather than a problem to be managed. An alliance of nations each exploiting their own advantages brings something no alliance of scaled-down copies of the same force template can produce: asymmetric capacity that an adversary cannot easily map, target, or defeat.
This conclusion runs through the entire European analysis in our 2020 book, though it is expressed differently in each national case. France’s contribution to European defense is not interchangeable with Germany’s, Norway’s, Poland’s, or the United Kingdom’s and the strength of the European defense architecture depends on the distinctiveness being maintained and exploited, not homogenized away in the name of standardization. France’s nuclear deterrent, expeditionary culture, and independent intelligence services represent genuine advantages that French force design should maximize. Britain’s maritime tradition, special relationship with American intelligence, and power projection capacity represent a different set. Poland’s geographic position, demographic weight, and political will to maintain large conventional ground forces represent a third.
What the book documents is that the return of direct defense forced a productive rediscovery of this complementarity logic. The coalition-building that occurred from 2014 onward, the Nordic-Baltic-Polish defense corridor, the UK’s reinforcement of the northern flank, the deeper French engagement in central and eastern Europe, was more than a set of bilateral or multilateral arrangements. It was a working-out in practice of what a genuinely complementary alliance architecture looks like: nations contributing what they uniquely have, to a collective whole that is more capable than the sum of its scaled-down parts.
The Method Is the Lesson
The methodology the Williams seminar applied to Australia is portable because the questions it poses are universal. Any nation serious about its own defense can conduct this kind of audit. The European experience with the return of direct defense demonstrates both what happens when nations fail to ask these questions with honesty and what becomes possible when they do.
The nations that navigated the post-2014 environment most effectively were those that already had answers to the five foundational questions, even if they had never framed them in those terms: they knew their operational geography and were designing forces to exploit it. They had maintained or rebuilt the institutional cultures that convert human capital into military efficiency; they had invested in deep bilateral alliance integration rather than relying on abstract membership in multilateral frameworks. They had retained genuine industrial and sustainment depth; and they were operating with a strategic clock that matched the actual tempo of threat rather than the comfort of a decade-long procurement cycle.
The lesson is not that any particular force structure is universally correct. Norway’s answer differs from Poland’s, which differs from Finland’s, which differs from France’s. The lesson is that the method of analysis is the same in each case, starting from a rigorous and honest accounting of genuine advantages rather than from threat catalogues, alliance expectations, or acquisition market offerings. A nation that conducts this analysis with sufficient candor and acts on its conclusions with sufficient urgency will field a force that contributes distinctively rather than redundantly, that deters effectively rather than symbolically, and that fights well rather than simply showing up.
That is the enduring lesson of the return of direct defense in Europe. It is also, plainly, the lesson that the Williams Foundation seminar was trying to apply to Australia.