Speaking at a defence conference in London this week, NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Air Chief Marshal Sir Johnny Stringer, underlined the need to shift towards mass-produced, low-cost equipment such as drones and interceptors, while becoming less dependent on high-end, expensive platforms that can take years to produce.
Among the other priorities, he said, were the ability to conduct deep precision strikes and electromagnetic warfare, while also strengthening air defences, including protection against weapons with ranges of thousands of kilometres. He was speaking at a conference hosted by the Royal United Services Institute, a UK-based defence and security think tank.
“The threat we face is at 360 degrees,” the Air Chief Marshal told an audience of military and industry representatives. “We need to be looking much further north now in terms of the ranges at which we’re needing to deal with Russian long-range aviation and with a potent surface and subsurface threat, most obviously from the [Russian navy’s] Northern Fleet.”
Some senior European officials have said Russia could rebuild its military sufficiently to threaten NATO territory within the next few years.
President Donald Trump’s administration has repeatedly accused European governments of underinvesting in their militaries and relying too heavily on US protection. Washington announced plans in May to withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany, and Trump has threatened to pull the US out of NATO. A pivotal NATO leaders’ summit is scheduled to take place in July in Ankara.
The prolonged war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East have reinforced the need for a sweeping overhaul of defence strategy, military officials said.
Current conflicts show that land warfare is “fundamentally changing”, the commander of the German Army, Lieutenant General Christian Freuding, said during a presentation on Tuesday. In addition to increasing military spending and accelerating procurement processes, “we must fundamentally adapt how we will fight”, he said.
On procurement, Freuding said the German Army is focusing on interim solutions that are available immediately to address its most critical capability gaps, rather than waiting for “what might be possible in five years’ time but won’t be delivered for another 10 years”.
Artificial intelligence is also having a transformative impact on processing battlefield data, military leaders said. “A corps planning cycle that once took 72 hours can now take one,” said the British Army’s Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Roly Walker. “A corps that once prosecuted 24 targets a day, because that was the speed at which they moved, can now increase that tenfold.”
