NATO Ankara Summit Creates a Call-to-Action for Defense Industrial Base

Alliance Seeks Meaningful Progress on Last Year’s Defense Spending Pledge

Heads of State and Government from 32 nations will gather at this month’s NATO Summit in Ankara, Türkiye, looking to accelerate progress toward the goals agreed at The Hague Summit last year. The declaration pledged to strengthen collective defense by committing member nations to spend 5% of annual GDP on defense by 2035, deepen transatlantic defense industrial cooperation and reaffirmed support for Ukraine. Now, several factors are also heightening the stakes of the Ankara Summit: Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, recent conflicts in the Middle East and “NATO 3.0,” or the increased pressure on and intention of allies to take on greater defense investment and burden-sharing responsibilities. In response, there is growing momentum as NATO nations increasingly invest in defense capabilities, which presents an unprecedented call-to-action for the defense industrial base to respond in kind. 

“At this critical intersection, NATO nations see a more aggressive Russia, a more unpredictable America and a more challenging China, and those dynamics are driving allies to make decisions and take action,” said Tom Goffus, Executive Partner for Global Security at Elara Nova and the former Assistant Secretary General for Operations at NATO. “There will be three big focus areas at the NATO Summit in Ankara: implementing last year’s defense spending pledge, expanding defense industrial production and executing the NATO 3.0 concept.” 

In Washington DC at the Atlantic Council on 25 June, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte summarized the key themes of the Ankara Summit as: “Transformation in defence investment; revolution in defence industry; and affirmation of our enduring support to Ukraine.”  

Within this construct, he asserted that the major overhaul of defense spending and defense industry will deliver a stronger Europe in a stronger NATO – his NATO 3.0 definition.   

The Defense Spending Challenge

The Hague Summit’s 5% defense spending pledge can be broken down into two parts: 3.5% of spending for core defense requirements like plans, tanks and ships, and 1.5% on defense-related requirements like critical infrastructure, the defense industrial base and resilience.  

NATO’s framework for defense spending is known as the NATO Defense Planning Process (NDPP), a five-step process that occurs every four years in which threats are identified, operational plans are developed and capability targets are determined. The NDPP was most recently updated in 2025, which means the next set of capability targets won’t come until 2029. 

But as the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have shown, capability needs are rapidly evolving as technologies advance. 

“There will be several new capability targets for 2029, that I believe will include space, autonomous systems and Arctic-specific capabilities,” Goffus said. “And at the Ankara Summit, we can expect positive announcements on spending plans for several NATO nations. Poland and the Baltic nations could be at 5% as early as this year, Germany and Sweden are looking to reach 3.5% years ahead of the 2035 timeline.”  

Defense spending by NATO nations is accelerating. According to the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, European allies and Canada have invested $90 billion more in defense spending in 2025 compared to 2024, a roughly 20% single year increase.  

Defense Industrial Production and Integration by Design 

Along side growing calls for greater investments under the NATO 3.0 concept and these substantive increases in defense spending, the defense industrial base must also expand to be able to accommodate this increased demand with greater production. One acute example is air and missile defense, a mission area where Secretary General Rutte called for a 400% increase in investment by NATO nations. 

“Our defense industrial base is not currently structured to produce what NATO needs at the volume and pace required for the threat,” Goffus said. “So NATO has announced that the Defense Industry Forum connected to the Ankara Summit will be the largest industrial event in NATO’s history. But increasing transatlantic defense production capacity takes time, that’s why NATO is also expected to officially launch its ‘Front Door’ for industry at the summit which will be a single portal where contractors can upload their innovative solutions.”  

This is one of many initiatives designed to answer the Secretary General’s call “To scale up production, spark innovation, and outsmart our competitors.” 

There’s also an inherent challenge of coordinating investments made by NATO nations in a cohesive way, so members are not duplicating capabilities or investing in ones that don’t directly benefit the alliance. 

“NATO needs to spend that money wisely in a way that’s integrated by design,” said Gen (Ret) James “Scorch” Hecker, a Senior Principal Advisor at Elara Nova and the former Commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe, U.S. Air Forces Africa and Allied Air Command at NATO. “To use the air and missile defense example, when each NATO nation would traditionally buy an individual air defense system, they often weren’t integrated with one another. This created a huge disparity between NATO’s ‘Critical Asset List’ of things that need to be defended, compared to its ‘Defended Asset List’ of what was actually defended.” 

Complicating matters further is the growing complexity and urgency of the air and missile threat. But even still, NATO can address this complexity if the alliance coordinates their investments appropriately.   

“We need to make sure that all 32 nations providing air and missile defense systems can address three different threats: ballistic missiles from space, air threats like fighters and cruise missiles and one-way attack vehicles like drones,” Hecker said. “While not every nation can afford a PAC-3 battery, several nations can buy the less exquisite anti-aircraft artillery necessary to respond to one-way attack vehicles. Yet all of these capabilities must still be integrated with a resilient space-based ISR and command and control architecture.” 

Calls for a Space Investment Framework 

Coherent space capability invesmtent and development is another emerging imperative for NATO, which first declared space an operational domain in 2019. This coincides with growth to a projected $1.8 trillion space economy by 2035. This presents an opportunity for NATO nations to meet their defense spending pledge by investing in space capabilities necessary for the alliance.  

“NATO nations are coming to the Ankara Summit with specific plans that show how they’re going to get to 5% by 2035,” said Brad Head, Executive Partner for Global Growth at Elara Nova and the former Chief of Defense Planning at the U.S. Mission to NATO. “But NATO as a collective defense alliance doesn’t actually own and operate most of its capabilities, which are instead provided to the alliance by the individual NATO nations. So what NATO can and should do is provide that overarching framework that would allow countries to invest their resources in a coherent way, so that the capabilities provided to the alliance are interoperable and additive.” 

While NATO released its own commercial space strategy in 2025, the alliance has yet to articulate capability targets for space in the NATO Defense Planning Process. But that’s also where NATO can look to recent actions from the United States Space Force to create a vision and a demand signal that the commercial space economy can respond to. 

“The NATO Commercial Space Strategy is largely in line with the Space Force’s Commercial Space Strategy, whose approach is to exploit what you have, buy what you can and build only what you must,” Head said. “General Saltzman also recently unveiled the Space Force’s Objective Force 2040 baseline to clearly articulate its capability needs by mission area and geography, with a classified annex, to coherently drive the service’s investments. NATO could provide a similar framework to coordinate Allied investment dollars in a coherent way and develop real value-add space capabilities. There are real operational challenges in space today, and commercial providers are preparing to respond.” 

The Digital Foundation Imperative 

Underpinning all of the capability investments of NATO nations, from air and missile defense to space capabilities, is a digital architecture to synchronize and coordinate the exchange of data and information that has become foundational to any modern fight.  

One primary example that puts this challenge into context is Secretary General Rutte’s projection that NATO will have over 700 F-35 fighter jets available to the alliance by 2032. A single F-35 can generate around a terabyte of data during every flight, which is equivalent to 500 hours of high definition video. 

Consequently, this creates an imperative for NATO to ensure that the hundreds of F-35s provided by its member nations can operate together and exchange data in an integrated fashion. 

“There’s a modernization challenge NATO has where advanced platforms are trying to operate on legacy networks,” said Brig Gen (Ret) Chad Raduege, President of the Cyber, Data and Communications sector at Elara Nova and former Chief Information Officer at Headquarters, U.S. European Command. “NATO needs to create a framework for a digital architecture that will connect all of these platforms. At the same time, NATO’s communications infrastructure is not designed to operate in a contested digital environment that defines modern warfare. So NATO’s biggest operational vulnerability, and threat to the alliance, is that every investment NATO makes is dependent on its digital foundation.” 

Likewise, NATO will require a command and control architecture that will be resilient in the face of the threat. This reality is evident in light of Russia’s cyberattack on a commercial satellite system Ukraine relied upon for command and control at the onset of its 2022 invasion. 

“As it stands today, NATO’s alliance-wide command and control architecture remains fragile,” Raduege said. “Resilient command and control means multiple pathways, such as satellite, terrestrial, airborne or radio frequency means as part of the Primary Alternate Contingency Emergency (PACE) communications plan. This PACE plan requires a zero-trust architecture that always assumes the network is compromised and has pre-delegated authorities for commanders to act upon when connectivity is degraded.”  

As the operating environment evolves across domains, the NATO Summit in Ankara will be a surefire indication of how the alliance intends to respond. It will then be up to the defense industrial base to position themselves accordingly, and that’s where Elara Nova is similarly prepared to support. 

“Right now, there’s a real opportunity because Europe has a desire to grow its defense industrial production,” Goffus said. “So despite the political shin-kicking that’s going on, there’s a lot of American companies that can work with European companies and support NATO nations in achieving their capability targets. One of the things Elara Nova can do is help companies determine which countries and companies to partner with so that NATO nations can spend their growing defense investments wisely.” 

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