In 2025, Allied Command Transformation (ACT) focused on a defining challenge for the Alliance: time. The security environment is evolving at a pace that increasingly outstrips traditional defence planning, development, and procurement cycles. For much of the past two decades, capabilities were delivered through tightly managed, linear processes designed to optimize completeness and refinement. Recent conflicts have demonstrated some limits of that model.
Against this backdrop, ACT’s work throughout the year centered on accelerating how NATO adapts and adopts, prioritizing delivery of operationally critical capabilities. But speed alone does not deliver decisive results. Capabilities fielded quickly but lacking interoperability, training, integration or resilience proved unsustainable and ineffective.
Speed must deliver capability that work in practice, integrate with Allied forces and NATO systems, and retain value as conditions in the field change. Only solutions that are usable, scalable, and iteratively improved can generate advantage even if they are not yet fully mature. The objective is not rapid delivery for its own sake, but rapid progress toward operational value.
ACT’s emphasis in 2025 reflected this reality. This meant accepting that early solutions may be incomplete, without sacrificing interoperability, operational relevance, or the ability to adapt. The goal was not to move fast at all costs, but to move faster toward capabilities that deliver real effect.
Accelerating the Adaptation Loop
To support this shift, ACT increasingly framed its problem solving through the ITAA cycle – Innovate–Test–Adopt-Adapt. Rather than treating innovation, experimentation, adoption, and adaptation as individual phases, ACT worked to compress and connect them, allowing learning and feedback to flow continuously. This approach recognizes that advantage comes not from a single breakthrough, but from sustained momentum.
By reducing friction across decision-making, experimentation, and adoption, ACT helped the Alliance respond more dynamically to emerging challenges through the launch of Beacon Projects. This new, innovative approach to identifying the most urgent requirements and delivering relevant solutions at pace, was used to test, integrate, and refine solutions rapidly, helping Allies assess what could be adopted now and improved over time.
Similarly, Innovation Challenges focused on identifying usable solutions to clearly defined operational problems, accelerating the path from idea to application.
Interoperability efforts followed the same logic. Rather than waiting for fully optimized integration, ACT prioritized approaches that enable forces to operate together effectively in the near term, with refinement informed by use and feedback. In a multi-domain environment, the ability to work together now often matters more than achieving ideal integration later.
The 4Ds: From Insight to Delivery faster
ACT’s acceleration of transformation could also be seen through a changed approach to its core tasks and missions that could be tracked through four core functions: decipher, design, develop, and deliver.
Deciphering involves identifying emerging threats, operational challenges, and gaps informed by real-world observation and analysis. Designing translates those insights into concepts, approaches, and options that can be tested and refined. Developing focuses on implementation plans, experimentation and validation, working with Allies, industry, and partners to assess what works under realistic conditions. Delivering provides decision-makers with evidence, options, and pathways to adoption, enabling faster movement from concept to capability.
In 2025, these functions increasingly operated in parallel rather than sequence. This allowed ACT to reduce timelines while maintaining focus on operational utility and interoperability. Of particular importance was a symbiotic link between the deciphering role of ACT’s Strategic Foresight capability and the ground-breaking work on the future Force Design and Force Lethality options.
Alongside these activities, ACT delivered several significant studies and concepts in 2025 that now provide a foundation for future capability decisions. Conceptual work on critical Warfare Development Imperatives – Cross-Domain Command, Cognitive Warfare, and Layered Resilience – was not an end in itself. These efforts are intended to inform concrete choices, enabling Allies to transition more quickly from understanding and analysis to actionable capability development. Their value lies in shortening the distance between insight and implementation, helping ensure that future capabilities are shaped by operational reality and delivered at the pace required.
The Multi-Domain Operations Implementation Plan continued to inform this work, not as a distant goal, but as a practical framework for accelerating coordination and decision-making across domains and ensuring NATO becomes an MDO-enabled Alliance by 2030.
Sustaining Momentum
Underlying all of ACT’s 2025 work was a recognition that adaptation itself is a military capability. The ability to learn, iterate, and adjust faster than potential adversaries is central to credible deterrence and defence. ACT’s role is to help the Alliance build and sustain that capability, not by prescribing outcomes, but by enabling faster, better-informed decisions.
Transformation is not a destination. It is a continuous process shaped by time, competition, and uncertainty. In 2025, ACT’s contribution was to show how NATO can speed up its transformation. By mainstreaming rapid adoption, reinforcing the link between speed and utility, and accelerating the transition from concept to capability, ACT helped lay the groundwork for an Alliance better equipped to meet today’s challenges and adapt to those that will emerge tomorrow.