NATO's meeting in Ankara marked a shift from political demands for higher defense spending to outcome-based contracts, scaled-up production lines, and new infrastructure, according to a new analysis published on Foreign Policy by PwC's Rainer Bernnat, Paul Malte Behne, and Ann-Kathrin Knacke. But the authors argue that credible deterrence in the 21st century can no longer rest on weapon systems and budgets alone. It requires a collaborative operating model between government, industry, and society that holds up against kinetic, cyber, and hybrid threats alike.
The 2025 Hague Summit earmarked 1.5 percentage points of the Alliance's new 5 percent spending target for resilience specifically. Even so, the analysis notes that it remains unclear how that funding will be turned into concrete capabilities through a coordinated process across member states. Most of the current focus falls on the defense industry, but the authors argue that strengthening it effectively also demands resilient critical infrastructure, broader industrial capacity, and a prepared civil society treated as an integrated capability, not a civilian afterthought to military planning.
The piece identifies five recurring obstacles to building that kind of national resilience: governance responsibilities scattered across ministries and federal levels; a "preparedness paradox" in which prevention is costly and politically unrewarding until a crisis hits; the difficulty of prioritizing within a capability as broad as resilience without a shared framework for measuring it; the challenge of turning political decisions into coordinated operational measures across public and private actors; and the work of actually involving civil society, which the authors say requires breaking down silos between government, industry, and the military. A joint research project between the German Council on Foreign Relations and PwC is cited as an early effort to make those facets of state resilience measurable.
To illustrate what works, the analysis surveys individual NATO members: Estonia's Data Embassy in Luxembourg, built from its early exposure to Russian cyberattacks, preserves statehood even if its territory is physically compromised. Spain developed black-start capabilities to rebuild its power grid from the bottom up after the April 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout. Sweden's new Civil Defence and Resilience Agency and its "If Crisis or War Comes" brochure adapt the country's total-defense tradition for a wider audience, including a business-specific edition. Finland's Security Committee has run interagency preparedness for over a decade and became the model for the EU's Preparedness Union Strategy. The United Kingdom's cap-and-floor model shows how private investment in grid interconnectors can be incentivized without new public spending, and Germany is building out OPLAN Deutschland alongside a new Critical Infrastructure Act despite the friction of its federal system.
Taken together, the authors describe these national efforts as a "Marketplace of Resilience": no member state has to build resilience alone, since the Alliance can scale individual solutions through peer learning, shared standards, and each country's comparative advantages. Their conclusion is that Ankara pushed NATO further toward a delivery mindset on defense contracts, but the next step is extending that mindset to every area of government action, with new public-private partnerships and cross-border coordination that cannot be improvised once a crisis has already started.