Resourcing the Ramp-Up: NATO and the Challenge of a Coherent Industrial Response to Russia's War in Ukraine

Stuart Dee, James Black, Lucia Retter

Source Link

In July, NATO leaders gathered in Washington to unveil a raft of new initiatives at the alliance's 75th Anniversary Summit. These included NATO taking over the coordination of aid to Ukraine—now described as on an “irreversible” path to membership—and an Industrial Capacity Expansion Pledge to boost production of arms and equipment, both to support Kyiv and to replenish depleted Western stockpiles after decades of low investment.

But near the top of the new NATO Secretary-General's in-tray will be an urgent question: why are efforts to mobilise the alliance's industrial base and ramp up production still yielding underwhelming results, over two years since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine? As allied leaders head home from the latest summit, a new RAND report shows that decades of fragmented and lacklustre investment in the industrial base and its underlying workforce skills, production lines, and supply chains will not yield to quick fixes.

Playing Catch-Up

Such has been the scale of bilateral and multilateral support to Ukraine that it has become increasingly difficult to track. The Kiel Institute currently assesses U.S. bilateral aid to be in the region of €75 billion, of which two thirds is military aid and the rest financial or humanitarian. Donations from EU institutions exceed €33 billion.