Strengthening Resilience Across NATO
Across the Alliance, NATO members are pioneering smart, innovative approaches to resilience. The 2026 Summit is the moment to turn this rich pool of national experience into collective Allied capability through mutual learning – and to make resilience a true pillar of credible deterrence and defence.
NATO Allies have moved decisively on resilience. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, governments across Europe have launched ambitious initiatives: from Sweden’s Total Defence revival and Estonia’s Data Embassy to Poland’s low-threshold mobilization drive and to the joint Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian “Baltic Defence Line.” The Seven Baseline Requirements for national resilience decided in Warsaw in 2016 created a shared foundation; the 2025 Hague Summit’s 1.5% resilience investment target has now opened the political and financial space to act at scale.
Importantly, military readiness, civil preparedness, industrial capacity and societal mobilisation are not separate agendas, but functional components under the umbrella of resilience. Attacks on energy systems, communications infrastructure, transport networks, information environments and public trust demonstrate that resilience is no longer a purely civilian crisis-management concept. It is a core condition for credible deterrence and defense.
NATO members face critical challenges in the process of gearing up on resilience. While the precise way in which these challenges play out is unique to every country and context, European NATO Allies often hit the same roadblocks.
We identified five critical challenges in this report:
- Governance fragmentation
- The preparedness paradox
- The targeting problem
- Operational coordination
- The societal readiness challenge
In the report, we discuss 10 examples of how NATO allies have taken decisive, innovative and creative measures to circumvent these critical challenges. The result of NATO members’ increased efforts towards resilience is a marketplace of national resilience action for other allies to learn from; each bringing distinct expertise shaped by its history, geography, and threat perception. Some have built cutting-edge models in cyber resilience, others in energy security, civil-military coordination, or whole-of-society mobilisation. This diversity is NATO’s strategic asset: no single country needs to solve every challenge alone. Building resilience ultimately means strengthening the connective tissue between armed forces, civilian authorities, private operators and significant parts of the society – and through NATO, members can do this faster than any ally could alone.
This report is intended to gather this collective intelligence, hoping to contribute to scaling what works, sharing what’s been tested, and learning from the successes of allies.
Key Recommendations
If the alliance faces an era of ongoing contestation – primarily below the threshold of inter-state war – uncoordinated resilience investment in the early 2030s will prove very costly and ineffective. Resilience must be built before war and exercised in peace.
The 2026 NATO Summit Communiqué must move resilience from political commitment to delivery.
- Define 1.5%: Clear criteria and guidance for resilience investment
- Planning cycle: Measurable profiles and clear planning structures for resilience in NATO
- Regional clusters: Cross-border cooperation pools for shared expertise, enhanced momentum and targeted measures
- Exercise resilience: Regular joint resilience exercises as a NATO-wide standard
- Societal readiness: Stronger integration of the societal pillar of resilience
This study was produced in cooperation with the PwC Defense & Security Institute.
