In 1914, Russia sent soldiers to the front without boots because its entire supply of tannin, the chemical needed to make boot leather, was produced in Germany, and the supply line had been cut. A century later, NATO allies are making the same category of mistake. The battlefield has changed. The alliance’s thinking has not kept pace.
The Ankara summit opening on 7 July will be dominated by the numbers that NATO has spent the past year generating: spending pledges, contract announcements, force commitments and procurement targets. All of it matters. None of it addresses the dimension of the alliance’s vulnerability that adversaries have been exploiting most consistently, most successfully and most cheaply.
While NATO argues about whether members are spending three per cent or five per cent of GDP on defence, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have been waging a different kind of war, one fought with export controls, critical mineral embargoes, undersea cable sabotage, shadow fleet disruption and the systematic targeting of supply chains that NATO’s military capabilities depend on. The alliance has enormous military spending. It has almost no coherent economic security framework to match it.
This is not a peripheral problem. It is the central vulnerability of a military alliance whose weapons systems require semiconductors produced in Taiwan, whose propulsion systems for missiles depend on rare earth minerals processed almost entirely in China, whose communications networks run through undersea cables that Russia has been rehearsing how to cut, and whose defence industrial base has spent three decades optimising for cost efficiency at the direct expense of supply chain resilience.
The Iran war demonstrated what happens when a technically dominant military is forced to fight through stockpiles that take years to replenish and depend on production lines with single points of failure. China’s export controls on gallium and germanium in 2023, essential elements in advanced electronics and radar systems, demonstrated that an adversary does not need to fire a single missile to threaten NATO’s weapons production. These are not hypothetical vulnerabilities. They are documented, operating and largely unaddressed.
The 1.5 Per Cent That Could Change Everything
The Hague Summit in June 2025 produced something that received less attention than the headline five per cent spending commitment but may prove more consequential in practice.
Alongside the 3.5 per cent of GDP pledged for traditional defence requirements, every member except Spain also committed to spending 1.5 per cent of GDP on resilience, critical infrastructure protection and the defence industrial base.
That 1.5 per cent, spread across 32 NATO economies, represents an extraordinary sum of money directed at precisely the vulnerability that adversaries have been exploiting. Whether it achieves anything useful depends entirely on whether NATO decides what economic security actually means and builds the institutional capacity to pursue it.
At present, it does not. NATO’s Economics and Security Committee passes resolutions as an advisory body with no power to act and no mechanism to enforce the decisions it recommends. NATO’s supply-chain work is disconnected from military planning, meaning that the alliance plans military operations without simultaneously modelling the supply chains that sustain them.
The European Union, which has regulatory and financial tools that NATO lacks, is moving with the glacial speed that consensus-driven governance across 27 member states inevitably produces. Its anti-coercion instrument has never been used.
Its Critical Raw Materials Act has left defence firms scrambling in the face of Chinese export controls precisely because the act lacks the procurement muscle to drive results at the speed the security environment requires.
The gap between what needs to happen and what the institutional machinery can currently deliver is the problem that Ankara has an opportunity to begin closing. Three specific measures would represent genuine progress rather than another layer of policy language that sits above the existing inadequacy.
The first is supply-chain mapping mandated across the alliance. NATO already stress-tests military mobility through exercises that simulate how forces would move in wartime. It does not currently stress-test the supply chains on which those forces depend. A single Chinese export control on a critical electronic component can stall a pan-European production line.
A disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, of the kind that the Iran war produced for seven weeks, affects the fuel costs and logistics of every allied military operation simultaneously. NATO should mandate that members collectively map their defence supply chains to the component level, identify the single points of failure, and include supply-chain vulnerability in every major exercise and contingency plan alongside military mobility assumptions.
The second is a shared strategic reserve of critical minerals, modelled on the fuel and ammunition stockpiles that the alliance already maintains. China’s dominance of the processing and refining of rare earth minerals, gallium, germanium, cobalt and dozens of other materials essential to defence electronics is not a distant risk. It is a present condition.
The G7 summit in June this year produced a concrete template: Canada offered allies priority access to its critical minerals stockpile, and France, Germany, Italy and South Korea agreed to build joint reserves with Ottawa. NATO should formalise and extend this model, treating access to strategic materials as a collective security question of the same order as access to ammunition.
The Economic War Already Being Fought
The adversaries that NATO was built to deter have already understood this logic and are acting on it. Russia’s shadow fleet, more than 600 tankers operating outside Western maritime insurance and sanctions frameworks, has allowed Moscow to sustain its oil revenues throughout the Ukraine war in ways that no NATO member had adequately planned for.
China’s Belt and Road infrastructure investments across Africa, Asia and parts of Europe have created economic dependencies that complicate the political calculations of countries NATO needs as partners. North Korea and Iran have provided Russia with weapons at a pace and volume that Western defence industrial planning assumptions did not anticipate, partly because no one had modelled the economic cooperation architecture that made it possible.
The third measure that Ankara should pursue is the establishment of an economic intelligence function within NATO, separate from but coordinated with member states’ national intelligence services, focused specifically on mapping and monitoring the economic warfare toolkit that adversaries are deploying.
This does not require a new treaty or a major bureaucratic expansion. It requires treating economic coercion, supply chain manipulation and financial sanctions as security threats that need the same quality of analysis and planning that NATO applies to Russian tank formations and Chinese naval exercises.
Atlantic Council researchers who have studied civilian infrastructure as a strategic target have noted that the Ankara summit must focus not only on spending more but on spending better.
The NATO Secretary General Rutte has made the same point in his pre-summit remarks, framing the meeting explicitly as an opportunity to demonstrate that spending commitments translate into real capability. The 1.5 per cent resilience fund is the instrument through which that translation can happen for economic security. It is funded. It is committed. It lacks a coherent framework for deployment.
A military alliance that spends three trillion dollars a year collectively and cannot guarantee the supply of the gallium its radar systems require, cannot reliably cut the revenue streams of the adversaries it is deterring, and cannot model the supply-chain consequences of an economic attack with the same fidelity it models a conventional military attack, is an alliance with a significant and unexploited structural weakness.
The Ankara summit will produce billions in defence contracts and a communique language about unity. Whether it produces anything that addresses the dimension of modern warfare that no amount of tank procurement can solve is the test that the 1.5 per cent resilience commitment was designed to answer.
