This E-Paper by Dan Marksand and Ed Arnold of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) was published by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union | Global Dialogue in March 2026.
At the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague, allies agreed to spend a total of 5% of GDP on defence by 2035, with 3.5% allocated to core military expenditures and 1.5% to security-related spending, including civil preparedness and resilience. Increased Russian hybrid aggression towards Europe, climate change, and threats to hydrocarbon supply chains have exposed economic, societal and infrastructure vulnerabilities, which are driving an increased focus on resilience.
While NATO has established governance and processes to oversee the 3.5%, the criteria for what contributes to the 1.5% remain unclear. Without a transparent governance and accounting framework, there is a risk of inefficiency, duplication, and domestic spending being politicized and relabeled. With proper guidance, increased funding could be directed toward infrastructure, resilience, and nature restoration initiatives that support NATO’s core objectives while also addressing rising emissions and biodiversity decline.
This report argues that Allies have distinct infrastructure, industrial, and environmental functions in a high-intensity conflict: rear-area hubs must sustain energy and industrial output; transit states must enable secure movement and reinforcement; littoral states must protect offshore infrastructure and shipping; and frontline states must maintain essential services and operational resilience under attack.
Across the peace-crisis-conflict continuum, resilience also depends on robust supply chains, dual-use technologies, and the ability to surge defence-industrial production. Within this framework, sustainable investments can be assessed objectively in terms of measurable contributions to resilience and national wartime roles.
Key recommendations
- Define and standardise eligibility for the 1.5% target by 2026, using clear criteria tied to NATO’s Baseline Requirements, national wartime roles and measurable additionality, to prevent relabelling of routine spending and ensure accountability.
- Require all Allies to submit National Resilience Plans, aligned with NATO regional defence plans, setting out how proposed investments support their differentiated roles in collective defence and resilience against hybrid attack.
- Prioritise dual-use infrastructure that accelerates military mobility and industrial surge, particularly rail capacity, port connectivity and electricity grid reinforcement, where benefits to deterrence, emissions reduction and economic resilience coincide.
- Invest systematically in decentralised and resilient energy systems, including renewable generation, storage, demand flexibility and behind-the-meter solutions, to reduce vulnerability to attack on concentrated gas and grid assets while supporting defence estates and critical services.
- Use the 1.5% to crowd in supply-chain security and industrial capacity, anchoring investment in critical minerals, processing and the ‘electric tech stack’ through public finance, offtake guarantees and defence-civil R&D collaboration.
- Integrate defence requirements into energy and infrastructure planning decisions, ensuring priority grid access, coordinated permitting and anticipatory over- sizing for defence industries and strategic transport corridors.
- Recognise strategic nature restoration as a long-term resilience investment, funding wetlands, floodplains and forest restoration in frontline regions where ecosystems can delay manoeuvre, protect food systems and help mitigate climate-driven instability.
Photo by Vizag Explore on Unsplash
This text is based on extracts from an e-paper by Dan Marks and Ed Arnold of the Royal United Services Institute. To read the full contribution, follow this link.