NATO Warfighting Capstone Concept

The changing and evolving security environment puts the Alliance’s continued success at risk. While NATO remains a defensive alliance, the operating environment demands new ways of thinking, organising and acting. Russia and terrorist groups and organisations will continue to threaten the Alliance whilst the role and impact of China in particular will grow. Broader security challenges, including those related to demography, climate, resources and public health crises such as COVID-19 will persist.

The operating environment is widening beyond traditional military bounds, with competition among different actors becoming more persistent across all instruments of power. This environment also features more diverse actors, with new weapons and technologies employed in new ways. Successfully upholding NATO’s objectives in this operating environment requires a proactive mindset, effective connectivity and speed at scale. Success demands balancing the efforts of the Alliance military instrument of power (MIoP) across shaping, contesting and fighting contexts.

Some actors, such as the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU), partner nations, industry and open societies will continue to present opportunities to positively influence the operating environment, which is essential for NATO’s response to future security challenges. The NATO Warfighting Capstone Concept (NWCC) offers an aspirational North Star vision for warfare development initiatives and the opportunity for engagement with all those who share the values of the Alliance. The North Star vision is informed by the activities of potential adversaries, but is proactively driven by the MIoP’s own ambition for success in transitioning towards the 2040 operating environment. The ambition is necessarily high; however, the NWCC offers a realistic and agile path to realize it. The path ‘pulls’ forward the most important warfare development work. It provides a framework to focus and synchronize efforts to build military advantage, and proactively shape the operating environment to Allies’ strengths. It expands decision space for political authorities by focusing on the generation of military options including to create strategic, operational and tactical dilemmas for adversaries.

The NWCC is part of the coherent package of NATO Military Authorities best military thinking. Along with the 2020 Concept for Deterrence and Defence of the Euro-Atlantic Area, the NWCC implements the 2019 NATO Military Strategy, a renewed approach setting out Alliance military-strategic objectives and the ways and means to implement them. Therefore, the NWCC provides a description of the 2040 operating environment and future warfighting to identify implications for the future MIoP. It offers a functional design to which the MIoP shall aspire for success. It provides five warfare development imperatives to focus and synchronize efforts to develop the MIoP. Finally, it puts forward an ambitious set of proposals, alongside an immediately usable realistic path to deliver improvements to the MIoP.

The warfare development imperatives provide an organising principle that promotes coherence across the breadth of warfare development efforts. They offer a new, forward- looking multi-domain (land, maritime, air, cyber, and space) and cross-instruments of power approach to military thinking, organising and acting. They are immediately usable and implementable through the lines of delivery developed with the support of Allies, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, operational commanders and NATO HQ staffs, and engagement with Allies’ academic communities.