Prepare for the coming war | The Great Continent

The return of Donald Trump to the White House confirmed what a decade of bipartisan signals had already predicted: the United States is disengaging from the conventional defense of Europe. Since his re-election, the president has systematically made American support for NATO conditional on the European defense effort.. Defense Secretary Hegseth took advantage of his first visit to NATO headquarters to announce that Washington’s security priority was shifting to Asia and that the United States would “no longer be primarily focused on security of Europe ». The 2025 National Security Strategy formalized this shift, presenting the United States as “organizers and sustainers” of a burden-sharing network rather than as an active military participant. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby confirmed this during the February 2026 ministerial meeting, calling for a “NATO 3.0” closer to “NATO 1.0” than to the alliance that Europeans have known for thirty-five years, demanding that the allies “assume primary responsibility for the conventional defense of Europe”. The message is unambiguous: for Washington, the defense of the Western Hemisphere comes first, competition with China in the Pacific second; Europe is a European priority.

We shouldn’t have been surprised. The American military presence in Europe has been declining steadily for three decades.. The Bush administration initiated withdrawals that the Obama administration extended, withdrawing more than 10,000 troops from the continent as well as combat units, in part to finance a pivot to Asia.. If the annexation of Crimea in 2014 has certainly caused a partial reversalÂthe structural orientation of American policy has not changed: the desire to reduce European commitments and refocus on the Pacific is old and covers the political spectrum in the United States.. Those hoping that a Democratic victory in 2028 will restore the transatlantic relationship will likely be disappointed: domestic politics and the shift in the international order point to continued “burden shifting” under any plausible successor.. Supporters of American withdrawal welcome this change as lateHAS ; defenders of the transatlantic order treat it as a accomplished fact to which Europe must adapt. The political question is settled; the strategic question is not.

Two questions now seem to have to be discussed as a priority: Europe needs a concept of nuclear deterrence which does not depend on American extended deterrence, and a theory of victory for conventional war. This is what we will be talking about here.

It is striking that the European debate has focused on institutional architecture rather than military strategy. The discussion focused on the European pillar of NATO, the possibility of a European army, the expansion of the Joint Expeditionary Force and similar arrangements.. A rigorous assessment of the military strategies actually available to Europeans operating with limited or no American support is almost entirely lacking. A notable recent exception is work by Ruben Stewart, who examines how European NATO would fight in the most dangerous scenario: the abrupt absence of American support, in a fight “tonight” with existing forces. Its central contribution is to show that what the American withdrawal eliminates is not mass, but integration: the United States functions as the operating system of the Alliance, and their departure would impose a more cautious, more positional and more attritional way of waging war, by necessity rather only by choice. Our purpose is different and complementary. Where Stewart diagnoses the degraded war-making that a sudden American absence would impose on Europe as it is, we wonder what war-making ways Europe might deliberately construct within the range of plausible American postures, and what each would require of its strategy, its command and its capabilities. In the working hypothesis presented here, we propose to vary the residual level of American support and the resulting command structure in order to generate three operational concepts, each with its own theory of victory, its institutional architecture and its capability requirements, to explore the possibility that an effective European defense does not necessarily involve a single unified system.

The starting point is uncomfortable, but must be faced head on. For the Europeans, fighting “like the Americans without the Americans” is a strategic impasse. NATO’s current combat concept — which runs through the central notion of multi-domain operations — is based on a theory of victory where Russian forces are dislocated through superior technological integration and “decisional dominanceâ€. It is a theory of victory built around American strategic capabilities and whose causal logic of success is dubious at best.. The strategic foundations of the Alliance (the 2022 Strategic Concept, the Concept of Deterrence and Defense of the Euro-Atlantic Zone), and the public speeches of successive SACEUR translate this into three operational requirements: “detect, deter and defend against any threat of aggression; maintain or restore the territorial integrity of member states; and bring an early end to armed conflict or aggression.”. General Christopher Cavoli, SACEUR from 2022 to 2025, summarized the operational logic in one formula: “either you win from the outset, quickly and strongly, or you are engaged in a long fight. So…win from the start, but be ready to win over time.”HAS ; a future conventional confrontation with Russia, he argued, “will be decided on land.”. But this theory of victory cannot survive American disengagement intact. Estimates place the cost of replacing American technological enablers at several billion dollars and the European industrial catch-up time at ten or fifteen years.. In this regard, optimistic assessments assume a degree of European cohesion in the integration of forces and industrial coordination that is unrealistic.Â: the challenge of developing a European way of waging war remains.

Firstly, we will present here a framework for thinking about European strategic possibilities based on two variables: the level of residual American support and the resulting command structure. The three sections that follow each develop a scenario, examining the theory of victory, the institutional architecture and the capability requirements that each entails. A conclusion highlights the comparative implications and the political choices they impose. Throughout the argument, we assume that Russia remains an aggressive power ready to use force against Europe; we do not develop a theory of Russian motivations, but treat the threat as the structural condition within which strategy must be designed.

Framing European strategic possibilities

NATO has become an essential fixed point of European security, so much so that the term “coalition” usually designates what lies outside it. American disengagement forces Europeans to reconsider not only the Alliance’s relationship with Washington, but the architecture of the Alliance itself. The European debate has too often presented the American withdrawal as a coercive lever to be countered or reversed. Conversely, American policy towards Europe has long consisted of vigorously resisting the development of autonomous European strategic capabilities. We take the gradual withdrawal of the United States as a structural premise, and we ask what military strategies become available to Europeans depending on varying degrees of American support.

The framework is based on the degree to which diminishing US support should shape European definitions of appropriate military strategies and the institutional structures needed to support them. Other variables (political cohesion, industrial preparation, public tolerance for losses) count, but they are downstream from the question of support and command, which sets the strategic framework within which everything else is decided. Three scenarios arise from this.

In the first scenario, NATO retains an American SACEUR and reduced but real American military support; the existing theory of victory operates under capability constraints, in a version where multi-domain operations would take place without the United States. In the second scenario, the Europeans retain access to the American industrial base but lose American forces and intelligence; the operational concept becomes the strategic denial by continental attritionexecuted by an entirely European command. In the third scenario, even industrial access has disappeared; The Alliance is regionalizing into partially overlapping defense clusters, each pursuing a tailor-made counter-concentration in its theater. These three scenarios are conceptual ideals, not predictions; they make it possible to theoretically delimit the space of European choices. The first scenario is the most comfortable, because it is easily presented as a simple “transfer of the burden”: it does not require any substantive reflection on an appropriate military strategy, since it allows the Europeans to continue to import American concepts, and it avoids publicly recognize the transatlantic divide. But it leaves Europeans with a way of waging war that remains dependent on essential American strategic enablers, therefore politically vulnerable, and dependent on American technology for critical capabilities, which reduces Europe’s capacity for innovation, and therefore its potential prosperity. Careful planning would require Europeans to start thinking about second and third scenarios.

It is uncomfortable, because we must admit that they must become producers and no longer passive consumers of military concepts and strategies. But it is both a prudent and logical option if the burden of European defense must shift resolutely towards the Europeans.

First scenario: multi-domain operations but with limited American support

This scenario takes the current transatlantic trajectory as its starting point: a transactional American posture towards its allies.an uncertain commitment to NATO, and a continued reduction of forces and enablers in Europe.

Degré d’engagement américain

We assume continued allied access to US capabilities, especially the F-35 ecosystem, with its supply chains, metrics and user community, and to forces and enablers selected Americans. The critical distinction with Scenario 3 is that Europeans remain inside the US military-industrial system. Retaining access to this or that capability (airborne ISR, electromagnetic intelligence, in-flight refueling, long-range precision strike) is contingent and politically negotiated. The form that multi-domain operations would take therefore varies depending on the capabilities that Washington chooses to make available.

Theory of Victory

The theory of victory formulated by SACEUR survives in form, if not always in substance. With an American SACEUR and institutional cohesion maintained, the Alliance retains its insistence on deterrence by denial, backed by punishment, and its operational logic of victory from the outset while being ready to win over time. Regional, domain, and strategic plans retain their structure, even if their scope contracts. But the Alliance must come to terms with a tension that it had until now evaded: it has planned a war of maneuver (winning quickly) while building a force structure designed for attrition (winning over time). Under limited American support, it is the second component that dominates.

Forward Presence remains the Alliance’s most resilient advantage. Of NATO’s eight multinational battle groups, deployed from Bulgaria to Estonia, only the one in Poland operates under American command; the others are led by the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Italy, France, Spain and Hungary.. Integrated into SACEUR regional plans via the multinational Corps and Northeast Division, these deployments are unlikely to withdraw in the event of American disengagement.

The operational concept attached to this theory of victory is that of multi-domain operations or MDO: “the orchestration of military activities, across all domains and environments, synchronized with non-military activities, to enable the Alliance to produce convergent effects at the speed of relevance ». The concept is based on convergence across maritime, land, air, space and cyber environments, and on the integration of the private sector for certain technological enablers.

In this scenario, implementing MDOs without American capabilities is the central challenge.

Institutional trajectory

The command structure under limited American support is more reassuring than the capability table. NATO command and control has in fact gradually become Europeanized over the last decade, in a process which further accelerated at the start of 2026. Located in Mons, at NATO headquarters, SACEUR is the only post high-ranking operational staff run by an American officer; the three joint force commands (Naples, Brunssum and Norfolk) are now all led by Europeans – including Norfolk, the only operational-level headquarters located on US soil – as are the air (Ramstein), maritime (Northwood) and land component commands (Izmir) and, at the corps and division levels, the large multinational formations of the North-East.

Even if the American ground presence is greatly reduced, the operational planning function continues at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (or SHAPE, Alliance Headquarters), in joint commands and in component commands without disruption of infrastructure or direction. The buildings, permanent operational planning groups, staff work on regional plans and institutional memory all reside in Europe. The command-by-intent relationships that AJP-01 prescribes (centralized intent, decentralized execution) operate through European-led headquarters at all levels under SACEUR. The conceptual framework of NATO’s way of waging war is already executable by European command structures. American personnel represent a substantial part of NATO headquarters, and their replacement will burden smaller militaries.. But institutional architecture is not, in itself, the determining constraint.

Three structural limitations apply to all variations of this scenario, and they concern the enablers rather than the masses.

First, the AJP-01 itself recognizes the synchronization requirement of MDOs: “Multi-domain operations require synchronization of actions ranging from the speed of light to walking pace.”. European forces have not demonstrated cross-domain synchronization at this speed; the platforms exist, but the employment concepts are still maturing. Second, the European long-range precision strike capability is insufficient for the deep fires component of denial: the European Long-Range Strike Approach is a program rather than a deployed capability, and stocks of Storm Shadow, SCALP and Taurus are limited.. Third, air operations remain dependent on American enablers, particularly strategic transport and aerial refueling. If Washington keeps them in reserve for the Pacific, the Alliance may not be able to produce the full converging effects of these operations. Ammunition stocks and industrial depth (air defense interceptors, 155 mm artillery, long-range lapping munitions) remain insufficient for the “win over time” component without sustained American resupply, even if the trajectory is encouraging: Germany produces now more artillery shells than the United States.

Capacity requirements

If the United States continues to provide intelligence and data sharing (high altitude ISR, electromagnetic intelligence, anti-missile early warning, integration via existing NATO channels), the Europeans are capable of executing something close to the AJP-01 concept even in the event of withdrawal of American ground forces. Residual US enablers (long-range precision strike, SEAD/DEAD, in-flight refueling) fill gaps that European capability cannot yet fill. If the American preference for air power and precision technologies at the expense of ground engagement continues in an Article 5 scenario, the United States would most likely contribute air power while withdrawing from persistent low-intensity activities. The “win from the start” component then depends heavily on American tactical aviation; the “win over time” component depends almost entirely on mass, ammunition stocks and European reinforcements. This is the most demanding configuration: the United States provides the high-end combat while abandoning the persistent presence of low intensity that the AJP-01 competition continuum presupposes.

The development of European forces must, above all, fill the empty boxes in the NATO force model: provide more troops and command posts than today, and guarantee an adequate level of preparation. In figures, the Europeans will have to align the 100,000 men of the first level of defense and the majority, if not all, of the 200,000 of the second. NATO nations currently field 144 maneuver brigades; Europe is still struggling to fill the gaps, and the American share of the first tier and projected reinforcements for the second is substantial.

Recruitment and retention will therefore have to increase, alongside preparation for regeneration in a protracted conflict.

This dynamic has begun to take shape by charting a trajectory: Denmark introduced the conscription of women in the summer of 2025.HAS ; Croatia made military service compulsory in October 2025; Germany has raised its recruitment targets to January 2026, with a mandatory conscription clause if the figures are not reached. Poland has set a target of 400,000 people trained for 2026, France has launched a voluntary military program effective from 2026, and Canada has seen its applications almost triple in 2025.. In terms of capabilities, the priority is to provide or modernize what a force that wishes to carry out multi-domain operations requires. Europeans should seek industrial partnerships to co-develop enablers, including with Boeing for tanker aircraft – Airbus alone cannot meet European demand – and for the production of Patriot interceptors, mentioned as a candidate for transatlantic co-development..

Second scenario: strategic denial through continental attrition

In this scenario, the United States has operationally withdrawn from the defense of Europe, but European states retain commercial access to the American defense industrial base.

Degré d’engagement américain

American troops, intelligence platforms and command structures no longer guarantee continental security; American weapons, sensors and munitions remain acquireable through ordinary defense trade. The strategic problem thus created is more subtle than the usual debate about capacity replacement suggests. The goal is not to fight “like the United States without the United States.” Capacity gaps can be bought off the shelf; operational gaps, particularly the data and command-control infrastructures that make multi-domain operations work, not. 

A European way of waging war should be able to control the operational chain from end to end, even when the equipment leaves American factories. This scenario assumes that political cohesion between the great European powers holds: France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, Italy and the Nordic and Baltic states commit to fighting as a single politico-military entity under a unified command. The plural alternative, in which sub-regional coalitions are formed around states that are effectively mobilizing, is the subject of the third scenario studied here.

Theory of Victory

Defeating Russia according to this concept means that Moscow cannot continue aggression: any Russian gain becomes too costly, too exposed and too unstable to serve as a accomplished fact. 

The goal is operational exhaustion: the gradual erosion of Russia’s ability to regenerate its combat power at the operational level — deterioration of trained manpower, disruption of logistics cycles, increasing friction in command systems responsible for supporting offensive operations under continuous pressure. It is a strategy of exhaustion where attrition converts into constraints on the adversary’s ability to act. It targets the Russian military apparatus at the operational level, not the regime nor the population. It neither requires nor expects a regime change in Moscow, and does not depend on a popular revolt, which historical experience shows to be unreliable and politically corrosive to provoke. It does not favor the punishment of the Russian population, which, empirically, tends more to harden the cohesion of the adversary than to dissolve it.

The concept is based on three premises. The first is the defender’s advantage on the modern battlefield. Ukraine’s defensive experience between 2023 and 2025 demonstrates that a prepared defender with dense ISR, layered precision fires and ammunition stocks imposes disproportionate costs on the attacker. The transformation is deeper than the addition of a capability: tactical and operational drones constitute an architectural innovation requiring corresponding adaptations of tactics, organization and doctrine, and a European concept that does not make these adjustments will not seize defensive advantage, even where platforms are present. The second premise is comparative industrial advantage: European GDP is about ten times higher than Russian GDP and, even in a war economy, Russia cannot match European production if the Europeans mobilize their industrial base.. The third premise is the sustainability of the multinational effort as an operational variable. A European war must be both militarily effective and politically sustainable within the framework of a coalition of around twenty democratic states, lasting two to five years. This excludes high-casualty offensive campaigns and, combined with the management of nuclear escalation, makes ground operations on Russian territory politically prohibited. The military challenge is therefore of the order of reconquest rather than conquest: contain Russian advances on European territory, dislodge Russian forces from any land seizedand exhaust Russian military power until Moscow chooses to withdraw. Deep effects on Russian territory are possible and necessary, but must be delivered by fire, not by land maneuver.

The operational concept that arises from these premises is the strategic denial by continental attrition. It consists of four mutually reinforcing lines of effort, the combined effect of which imposes a cumulative dilemma on Moscow.

The first and most important is the continental déni. The eastern border – running from the Russian-Norwegian border, through the Baltic states and the Ukrainian border, to the Black Sea – would be reconfigured into a single defensive reconnaissance-strike complex. Operational logic recalls the concept “Hellscape» envisaged for the defense of Taiwan: a layered architecture where the density and intensity of fires increase as the adversary advances, and where no layer is decisive in isolation, but where it is their cumulative effect that is.. Dense grids of ISR sensors would detect Russian movement at operational depth; saturation fires – artillery, lurking munitions and FPV drones – would engage Russian forces as soon as they threaten the line of contact. A layered ground-to-air defense, networked between national systems, would deny Russia air and missile access to the defended area. Advanced fortifications, obstacle belts and pre-established fire plans would channel any advance towards zones of destruction whose geometry the defender chose. Resilience in the face of electronic warfare and Russian decapitation strikes would rely on the delegation of command authority to the battalion and company levels, following the principles of command by intent. The Ukrainian experience provides the empirical model: a thirty-kilometer belt of attrition along the line of contact, supported by what Ukrainian commanders now call a “drone wall”. This same feedback disciplines the concept against an overly optimistic reading of cheap dronesÂ: continental denial relies on layered fires (artillery, lurking munitions, FPV, mines, electronic warfare), not on the mass of drones alone. The belt of denial must also include logistics as a contested area. Russian doctrine places great importance on deep strikes against logistical nodes, railway networks and rear command postsHAS ; a credible European approach must treat its own logistical infrastructure as part of the battlespace, otherwise the system of denial will deteriorate through the exhaustion of its own support structures.

The second line of effort is the strikes in reciprocal depth. Russian strategic depth must be continually threatened: war economy nodes, oil and logistics infrastructure, railway networks, command-control facilities, naval bases and assets linked to elites, by means of long-range missiles, drones mass suicides, cyber operations and sabotage The goal is denial, not punishment: to degrade the inputs Russia needs to sustain its offensive while raising the political cost of pursuit.. The Ukrainian experience, again, illustrates this: Kyiv’s deep strike posture combines asymmetric campaigns carried out with low-cost suicide drones against fixed infrastructure and a more restricted set of conventional precision strikes against hardened targets, in a layered campaign that is economically sustainable.. Stockpile size is the critical variable: Europe must sustain deep strike operations for years, not weeks, treating long-range munitions stockpiles and suicide drone production capacity as strategic assets comparable to armored divisions.

The third line of effort is themaritime and economic strangulation. Europe’s structural naval and economic superiority must be converted into an instrument of war: denial of the sea in the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean and in the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) lock; neutralization of the ghost fleet; defense of underwater infrastructures; and integration of financial and commercial warfare and sanctions into military operations. Europe does not need to defeat the Russian navy in a naval battle; it needs to deny Russia its maritime freedom and economic oxygen while securing its own maritime lines of communication. European special forces could also carry out sabotage actions against Russian economic interests around the world. It is the element least dependent on the United States in the current European posture, and a natural area of ​​comparative advantage.

The fourth line of effort is the total defense. European societies must be able to absorb a first blow, sustain a long war and deny Russia the political dividends of an escalation below nuclear employment. This involves conscription or selective service in major continental powers, civil defense, strategic stockpiles, hardening of critical infrastructure, large-scale counter-sabotage and pre-planned economic mobilization. The Finnish, Swedish and Swiss models provide the institutional matrices..

The four lines impose four parallel pressures and generate a cumulative dilemma: Russia can neither take territory, nor exploit its rear as a sanctuary, nor use maritime or economic channels, nor break up European societies. The architecture is robust to partial failure: the loss of a line degrades it without causing it to collapse. It also requires explicit prioritization, as resource constraints and political frictions will prevent all four lines from being developed simultaneously to their optimal levels. Continental denial and the production of munitions form the irreducible core; the other lines increase in power in parallel. Without such prioritization, dispersed resources risk producing none of sufficient depth.

The concept is designed to thwart each of the strategic bets on which Russian aggression would rest. If Russia relies on speedhopefully a accomplished fact territorial before Europe mobilizes politically, the bet is foiled by an advanced denial imposing catastrophic costs from the first kilometer. If it relies on nuclear coercion, calculating that the risk of escalation would detach the non-nuclear front-line states from the coalition, the bet is foiled by advanced deterrence and societal resilience. If it banks on Western fragmentation, anticipating that political divisions would paralyze the response, the bet is foiled by unified command structures and a pre-commitment established before the crisis. If it bets on industrial endurance, expecting to exhaust European stocks in a prolonged war, the bet is foiled by counter-attrition and the deliberate development of industrial depth. The key difference with multi-domain operations lies in the relationship to time. These exploit time through speed: operating within the adversary’s decision-making cycle and producing dislocation faster than he can adapt.. The strategic denial by continental attrition uses time as endurance: lasting longer than the opponent can sustain. It is structurally adapted to the political and operational realities of continental defense without American support.

Two vulnerabilities of exhaustion strategies deserve recognition.

The first is internal political decay: a protracted war puts sustained pressure on coalition cohesion and the domestic patience necessary to continue financing, arming, and tolerating the effort. The second is the emotional dimension of attrition itself, which can harden the adversary’s resolve through anger and the desire for revenge rather than dissolve it. The institutional architecture described below responds to the first; the second is more difficult, and involves careful calibration of the deep strike: not maximum punishment, but operational denial designed to degrade Russian capability without delivering the symbolic atrocity that would consolidate Russian domestic support for the war.

Institutional trajectory

The institutional architecture required by this concept is based on two operational pillars: a unified European strategic command, and a sovereign ISR enterprise capable of supplying it. Around these two pillars are grafted four additional demands – reform of the industrial base, rebalancing of the force structure, nuclear arrangements and political pre-commitment – ​​each presupposing political decisions that European governments have so far been reluctant to take.

L’command requirement is that of a European officer at the strategic command level (a European SACEUR) at the head of the Allied Operations Command, with the land, air and sea component commands Europeanized at the four-star level. The institutional form matters less than the functional requirements: unified operational planning across the entire eastern border, a single theater logistics backbone, and a common authoritative operational image. The operational chain must be entirely European, and built before the crisis rather than improvised during it. As most of NATO’s operational command structure is already European, as the first scenario showed, the jump is more modest than it seems.

L’architecture ISR is the second pillar. A sovereign architecture should cover four layers: a space layer bringing together Galileo, Copernicus, CSO, SARah, CERES and IRIS² under a European Space Command with authority for tasking opérationnel HAS ; an airborne layer expanding the E-7 and GlobalEye fleets and developing a successor to NATO’s AWACS; a land layer networking national radars, passive sensors and tactical drones in a continuous mesh along the eastern border; and a maritime layer combining patrol aircraft, underwater surveillance in the GIUK lock and the Baltic, and unmanned surface vehicles and submarines. The four should be merged into a European Joint Intelligence Center directly feeding theater commands.

Three other requirements arise from this. The first is the transformation of the European defense industrial base. The Security Action for Europe (SAFE) instrument, launched in 2025, and its successors must serve not for marginal increases in joint procurement, but for structural reform of demand: common standards, deliberate redundancy of production lines, and multi-year purchasing contracts large enough to free up investment in capital capacity private. The second is the rééequilibration of the structure of forces towards the defensive mass and the relaunch of conscription or selective service in the great continental powers: the territorial mass required by continental denial cannot be generated by professional volunteer forces alone; a high availability pan-European permanent force of around 100,000 men, under the European command structure, would provide the operational backbone. The third concerns nuclear arrangements. The concept presupposes that Russian nuclear coercion can be neutralized, which, in the absence of American expanded deterrence, means that Franco-British nuclear forces must guarantee continental defense as a whole. The first discussions on French “advanced deterrence” are going in the right direction and should be strengthened.

A final requirement is the binding political pre-commitment of the great European powers to fight as a single entity, with prior delegation of force generation and command authorities. This pre-commitment exists in principle within NATO, but it must be politically reaffirmed given the fundamental transformation of the nature of the Alliance implied by the American withdrawal.

Capacity requirements

The capability architecture that supports the strategic denial by continental attrition favors the mass production of equipment, even if it is not necessarily at the cutting edge of technology, and accepts a deliberate reduction in expeditionary capacity in exchange for a much higher continental defensive density. Almost all states outside Europe preparing for high-intensity war – China, the United States, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan – have relied heavily on long-range strike and attritional mass, while the major European powers have followed suit. that Fabian Hoffmann calls a Sonderweg Europeana divergence from equipment choices made elsewhere.

The asymmetry of production is striking. The Russian air force retains around 1,400 operational combat aircraft, and Russian missile production has been largely replenished: Ukrainian intelligence estimates that Russia produces 840 to 1,020 short- and medium-range ballistic missiles per year, in addition to cruise missiles and more than a thousand suicide drones long range per month. European production of interceptors cannot measure up to this, and the cost ratio is structurally unfavorable: interceptors cost two to four million dollars each – much more than the missiles they engage – and at least two are required per target for a 90% probability of interception.. The required architecture is therefore a fully layered ground-to-air system — long, medium, short range and anti-drone warfare — in which high-end interceptors are reserved for high-value threats, with lower-cost threats being handled by electronic warfare, short-range anti-drone warfare, decoys, dispersal, hardening of infrastructure and offensive action against launch systems. The interceptor store itself is a strategic asset.

Because air and missile defense cannot, on their own, produce deterrence, they must be coupled with a credible counterstrike capability threatening Russian critical infrastructure and economic assets. The current European inventory of cruise missiles with a range greater than 150 km is approximately 3,100 to 3,300 systems, an arsenal that would be exhausted within days or weeks of high-intensity operations.. European programs are real, but slow. The European Long-Range Strike Approach (ELSA), signed in the form of a letter of intent by France, Germany, Italy, Poland, the United Kingdom and Sweden in February 2026, targets a surface-to-surface cruise missile of 1,000 to 2,000 km, with a first MBDA test firing in 2027-2028 and commissioning in the early 2030s. Other programs – German Taurus Neo, Franco-British-Italian STRATUS, German-Norwegian 3SM Tyrfing – run from 2028 to the mid-2030s. These high-end programs must be coupled with mass-produced low-end systems, the image of the British Project Brakestop (600 km, unit cost less than $500,000) or MBDA’s One-Way Effector. Effective deep strike is a campaign logic built on layered, economically sustainable systems, not a capability defined by exquisite munitions.

Attritional mass at the tactical level is the area where European forces are furthest from contemporary battlefield realities. Ukraine produced 4.5 million drones in 2025, compared to 500,000 in 2023HAS ; drawing on the Ukrainian experience (four million drones for a 1,200 km front), the European Defense Commissioner extrapolated that Lithuania would need around three million drones per year to defend its 900 km border with Russia and Belarus in a high-level war. intensity. The French military planning law of 2026 provides for a 400% increase in drone stocks by 2030, with 8.5 billion euros, but its 2024-2026 acquisitions only included around 2,000 short-range homing munitions under the COLIBRI program.. Closing this gap requires the integration of FPV drones at the section level and ruffing munitions at the company and battalion levels across the eastern border. The belt of denial would also depend on the massive deployment of landmines, a possibility that the withdrawals from the Ottawa Convention by Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and Poland in 2025 have made legally possible, but whose industrial and legal implications have not yet been planned for. coalition level.

Ultimately, the munitions production chain underpins all of this. The European artillery base has transformed faster than the missile base: the factory Omission Rheinmetall will reach 350,000 155mm shells per year by 2027, and the combined production of the European Union, the United Kingdom and Ukraine is projected at 2.8-3 million 155mm shells per year by 2026, roughly parity with Russian war production. The artillery model is the institutional matrix for the rest: large-scale multi-year purchasing contracts, deliberate redundancy of production between countries, and explicit treatment of munitions production as a strategic enabler. The Belt of Denial is further supported by the Polish Eastern Shield (10 billion zlotys, 700 km of border fortifications, completion in 2028) and the Baltic Defense Line, which together will form a continuous fortified line on NATO’s eastern flank.

Europe can obtain these capabilities, but unequally and on different timetables.

A fast track (FPV drones, 155mm munitions, mines, anti-drone warfare, fortification and logistical resilience) can deliver a reinforced denial posture by 2028. An intermediate track (layered air defense, Taurus Neo, STRATUS, One-Way Effector) is deployed on 2029-2031. A slow lane (ELSA surface-to-surface cruise missile, 3SM Tyrfing, sovereign ISR fusion and integrated theater command) extends into the mid-2030s. The concept is realistic as a staged process whose credibility depends on the sequencing: first building the mass of denial, then the autonomous operational system. If these elements are treated systematically, the scenario becomes credible as a mature strategy within a decade. Otherwise, Europe risks remaining in a transitional state where it has increased its spending and its capabilities without having the coherence necessary to convert them into a reliable theory of victory.

Third scenario: tailor-made counter-concentration through regional attrition

In the third scenario, the United States has withdrawn not only its military capabilities from the defense of Europe, but also European access to its industrial complex.

Degré d’engagement américain

Bilateral agreements on stationing and cooperation with selected European states are possible, but there is no permanent U.S. commitment to credible deterrence of Russia. Lack of access to the US military-industrial system does not mean that European militaries do not possess any US equipment, but that they do not have the latest technologies, updates and reliable supply chains, industrial capacity American being prioritized for other partners.

Under these conditions, we assume that Alliance cohesion becomes regionalized, in accordance with the current geographical structure of NATO and the diversity of threats depending on the region, producing a mosaic of partially overlapping defense cooperation.. It is sometimes argued that a European defense is not achievable without pooling.. This scenario is based on the opposite premise: pooling can be reduced at the cost of increased mass. The gaps left by the US withdrawal are being filled by European capabilities and idiosyncratic local solutions, with each European state converting its own circumstances – geography, industrial base, historical posture – into tailor-made regional arrangements with its immediate neighbors and powers nearest intermediaries.

Theory of Victory

Europeans must be able to deter Russia in each region to the point that military action ceases to be a favorable option there.

Since Moscow can quickly move its efforts between military districts, each region must be able to resist a stronger rise in Russian military power alone. The difference with the second scenario in this regard is that the larger European economy and aggregated defense spending generate deterrence regionally rather than through a unified approach. The scenario is based on the premise that the combined financial capacity of European states remains sufficient to achieve regional military effectiveness, even if the multiplicity of approaches is less efficient than a single approach. Each region must exploit its geography and local capabilities with limited support from other allies, over time. The required posture makes Russian advances either impossible or very costly, rather than relying on maneuver. Russia faces a cluster of inaccessible regions, each capable of immobilizing its forces in ways that deprive it of options.

We call this concept the tailor-made counter-concentration by regional attrition. The counter-concentration here is not that of the Cold War – massive forces and reinforcements in a single decisive theater – but a denial of regional access. Deterrence emerges as a layered, interconnected system: a network, or “ring,” of deterrence, where overlapping areas of responsibility reinforce each other. The underlying logic is reminiscent of that of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, which managed military balances through defined geographic zones with superimposed force ceilings. This “regionalized” approach even distributes military capabilities between theaters in a way that complicates adversary planning while maintaining credible deterrence. The concept’s vulnerability to Alliance fragmentation is real but manageable: regions overlap, major powers participate in multiple clusters, and the mutual interest in denying Russia any regional success welds the system together more firmly than is possible. suggests its institutional minimalism.

The scenario involves four partially overlapping regions. The first is a region northern (Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Baltic States and Denmark), where the United Kingdom plays a central role due to its interest in the North Atlantic, where Germany participates in the North Sea, and where the Netherlands contributes through its historical links. The theater is characterized by very little operational depth on land and considerable depth in the air and maritime environments. Two interconnected operational concepts result from this: a land concept close to Ukrainian practice and what is being prepared in the Baltic States, based on prepared defensive positions integrated into total defenseHAS ; and a European naval air battle exploiting the fact that European NATO nations control the shores of the area of ​​operations, which Russia must penetrate. This naval air concept would be the most advanced of European ways of waging war, shared between the major nations and those already present in the area.

The second is a region of Front centralwith Lithuania and Poland as main players, Ukraine as a crucial military partner, and Germany strongly committed as part of its stated strategic ambition. It is the most direct land confrontation zone between NATO and Russia: Poland is the key logistics and staging area, Lithuania is critical for the defense of the Baltic states and the Suwałki corridor, and Ukrainian resistance shapes Russian capacity to project power westward. Counter-concentration requires forward defense with reinforcement capabilities, a strong emphasis on land forces and integrated air and missile defense. The geography is shaped by the SuwaÅ‚ki lock, the Kaliningrad oblast and the possibility that Russia retains of using Belarus to move its axis of attack. The absence of American capabilities and deep strikes in numbers forces these nations to rely on mass. Artillery, combined with drones, has been a central component of Ukrainian attrition of Russian forces.HAS ; The nations of this region have substantial potential in artillery and munitions production, which can be mobilized in a war of attrition when coupled with modern ISR.

The third is a broader Mediterranean region, where European nations are primarily focused on sources of instability to the south. Countering Moscow involves facing limited Russian military capabilities, other threats, and Russian involvement in destabilizing actions in the south of the Mediterranean. The operational concept is therefore that of a stabilisation à distanceof which the fight against Russia is a subset.Â

The fourth is a region of the Black Seawhich is distinguished from the previous one by the direct territorial presence of Russia. It mainly includes Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey, with Ukraine being a vital partner. The Bosphorus and the access provisions of the Montreux Convention shape the environment. The operational concept would be a déni de mer confinéeven though Turkey has substantial naval forces and the capacity to strangle a Russian naval buildup through the Bosphorus.

Institutional trajectory

Regionalization presupposes differentiated attention to threats, including different manifestations of the Russian challenge in different theaters, rather than treating Russia as a uniform adversary. The arrangement is reminiscent of the “prehistoric” NATO of the early 1950s, before the establishment of the integrated command structure.

In its early days, the Alliance had a more regionalized character, complemented by a series of bilateral relationships between the United States and key non-NATO allies: Spain, Turkey, Greece, and even Sweden in the absence of formal coordination. Deterrence planning has historically extended beyond formal institutional boundaries when strategic imperatives require it.

Regionalization does not imply rigid geographic partitioning. It is best conceived as clusters of states organized around shared regional interests, structured by formal and informal groupings such as the Visegrád Group, the Nordic Defense Cooperation (NORDEFCO) and the Joint Expeditionary Force. These groupings overlap rather than exclude each other: states participate simultaneously in several regional constellations. In this scenario, there would be allied joint commands and subordinate domain and geographic commands within each region, manned by interested European nations, but there would be no overarching strategic military command along the lines of SHAPE. A residual structure close to the Military Committee could oversee European efforts between regions without exercising military command and control.

Capacity requirements

The capacity profile of the tailor-made counter-concentration by regional attrition shares with the second scenario the requirement for attritional mass, particularly in the northern and central regions. Added to this is a need for sea denial, stabilization and counter-hybrid threat capabilities in the Northern, Mediterranean and Black Sea regions, as well as significant artillery forces coupled with advanced drone-based ISR in the central region.. Rather than the long-range strategic strike of the previous scenario, the effort here focuses on second-rate strike capabilities in each region, combining drones, missiles and conventional combat aircraft with precision munitions, capable of attrition through interdiction, air support, suppression of defenses opposing air forces and electronic warfare.

Although attrition is sought regionally, an operational reserve may remain necessary to deter and counter a Russian breakthrough. In the central region, an operational reserve in Poland could provide the mass of maneuver that a US commitment would ensure in scenarios where the United States remains in Europe.. In this scenario, it should be a force in place replacing American ground forces, closer in nature to the British Army of the Rhine than a reaction force. Regionalization reduces reliance on long-distance reinforcements, partly compensating for the fact that reinforcement-as-maneuver is problematic when military mobility across Germany and Poland remains constrained.. Total defense, in this scenario, therefore focuses less on supporting the host nation than on the fusion of total defense and conventional defense, in the manner of the Estonian strategy. Where the previous scenario assumed that the frontline states could be defended by reinforcementthis requires forces in place, therefore the integration of territorial forces into overall defense plans, alongside the advanced weapons systems that Ukraine has demonstrated. Military aid within NATO has traditionally meant transatlantic assistance; the logic of regional sharing of the burden suggests that it could now circulate within Europe, with the great powers helping the front-line states so that they concentrate on the masses in place.

Even in a regionalized scenario, high-end assets are needed to replace U.S. capabilities like ISR and space communications. The major European nations, alongside the Union, can develop some of them, as in the second scenario. But regionalization also creates the opportunity to pursue alternative technologies for the same purposes, as long as they are part of a tailor-made regional effort: communications by tropospheric scatter, or long-range sensors beyond the horizon such as the French Nostradamus system..

Conclusion

The institutional cohesion of an alliance is usually understood by a combination of shared threat perception, common norms, institutions and leadership . But the existence of a common strategy that the allies believe in and that they can actually execute matters at least as much, and is perhaps the underestimated variable in current debates on European defense.

Eisenhower, as SACEUR and then as President of the United States, institutionalized NATO with command structures and bodies designed to solidify allied coherence around the regional plans of the first planning groups.. NATO’s command structure was, from the outset, designed to implement the theory of victory it was intended to execute. The principle remains valid: any serious debate on the institutionalization of European defense should begin with military strategy and the operational concepts it must support, and reason from there towards institutions and capacities.

As we have already clarified, these scenarios are conceptual ideal types and not predictions, and the boundaries between them are not rigid.

The European way of waging war developed in the second scenario could in principle operate alongside a reduced American presence, as in the first scenario, with the European states assuming a increased operational and industrial accountability while the United States provides selected strategic enablers. Conversely, European defense investments oriented toward the first scenario’s theory of victory – alignment with the theory of American victory – would not work under any form of American absence. There is also a partial relationship between the latter two scenarios: the group of states along the Central and Northern European front could possess the collective capacity to execute the strategic denial by continental attrition even if other regions could not, provided that their defense investments converge towards this shared objective.

The most consequential implication of the analysis is that European defense does not necessarily require all European armed forces to operate as a single unified structure.

The combined force of national efforts, possibly under more than one operational concept executed simultaneously, can provide credible defense and deterrence, provided that the substantial increase in European defense spending in coming years is oriented towards a coherent strategy and a constant operational framework. Such an arrangement requires neither full political nor military integration. It depends on interoperability, strategic coordination, resilient logistics and a shared understanding of deterrence. The European security architecture could thus evolve towards a more reticular and layered system, where different national forces bring complementary forces within an overall strategic logic. The political challenge is less about building a single European army than about ensuring that national defense initiatives reinforce each other within a unified strategic vision.

Three political implications arise from this.

First, the European debate must reorder its priorities and put strategy before structure. Whether the right institutional response is a European pillar of NATO, a European army, an expanded Joint Expeditionary Force or a combination of these depends only on the theory of victory that each is supposed to serve. As long as this theory is not articulated, debates on institutions will continue to intersect without meeting.

Second, European governments should immediately initiate the escalation of capabilities common to the second and third scenarios – continental mass denial, deep strike capability, layered air defense and sovereign ISR — because they are required for the Alliance to evolve in fine towards a unified European defense or towards regionalization. The expressway is technically feasible by 2028.

Third, the political pre-commitment required, in different forms, by the three scenarios, must be addressed now rather than during the next crisis. American disengagement has modified the structural conditions of European defense; only deliberate European decisions, taken in advance, will determine whether the strategic space opened up by this disengagement will be filled by a coherent strategy or by improvisation.