No Strategy Without Society: Rethinking NATO’s Coordination Mechanisms

This week, NATO leaders in The Hague plan to take a significant step in their deterrence and defense readiness by increasing their national security spending to 5 percent of GDP.  Of that, 3.5 percent will be spent on the traditional defense program; the remaining 1.5 percent is to be spent on broader national security capabilities. But throwing money at problems rarely in itself generates real results. The question NATO’s leaders now face is how to deliver real capabilities with those additional resources.

The first question: What is needed? The war in Ukraine is a reminder that the wars of the future will mirror the wars of the past. To be sure, Ukrainian forces have been able to resist, in large part through impressive technological and tactical innovations. Still, the Russian war machine grinds on, reducing Ukrainian defenses; the dictates of total war are unchanged. The mobilization of industry and people directed from the Kremlin translates into mass on the battlefield. Per the laws of physics and war, that mass of Russian troops and materiel is the ocean, reducing opposing forces to sand. NATO today therefore faces an existential need to reimagine the real requirements of collective security, the very reason for NATO’s existence, and to harness industry and people to achieve it. 

Alliance planners and leaders have long defined this as both a problem and a solution of defense spending, loosely correlated with the number of aircraft carriers, fighter squadrons, or nuclear warheads NATO’s resources can procure. But tanks and troops alone do not secure this alliance. True collective security depends on the resilience of the societies they are meant to protect and marshalling those resources over sustained periods of time to turn against the tide of divisions like Russia’s. In short, a future war with Russia—the scenario that NATO member states must unfortunately plan for—is unlikely to be over quickly; rather, a yearslong slog would require whole-of-society mobilization. Such mobilizations require sophisticated strategic-level coordination mechanisms. In other words, NATO needs a National Security Resources Board (NSRB).

What was the National Security Resources Board?

This is not the first generation to contend with this problem, and the solutions are within living memory. Originally created after World War II as part of the U.S. National Security Act of 1947, the NSRB was envisioned as a critical institution for postwar mobilization and continuity planning. Its mission was prescient: to coordinate the civilian and military components of strategic resources in the event of a national emergency. The NSRB developed policies for mobilizing manpower, managing industrial production, and stockpiling strategic materials—efforts that directly informed early Cold War readiness.

One notable example includes the board’s role in producing the “Resources for Freedom” reports, which offered comprehensive assessments of U.S. material and production capacities. These studies informed long-term defense planning and helped shape the foundations of the National Defense Stockpile. Such work laid the foundation for coordinated national mobilization strategies, linking economic policy directly to strategic preparedness. It fostered collaboration between government agencies and private industry to ensure rapid transition from peacetime to wartime footing. In its early years, the NSRB was central to Cold War planning, producing reports on critical materials, energy policy, and industrial preparedness. The NSRB was subsumed into other bureaucracies by the mid-1950s as part of the cost-cutting efforts of successive administrations that saw the threat of war with the Soviet Union recede into the distance, to the lasting detriment of the power of the United States and NATO to mobilize for war today.

The answers for the future are in the tools of the past, and NATO as an alliance should consider adopting and adapting those tools. Indeed, doing so aligns with NATO’s three core tasks: (1) deterrence and defense, (2) crisis prevention and management, and (3) cooperative security. Each of these depends not only on military capabilities but also on the ability of the alliance to sustain and adapt collective power in times of need. A new NSRB adapted for NATO also supports NATO’s renewed emphasis on societal resilience, reflected in Article III of the North Atlantic Treaty, which commits each member to maintain and develop its individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack. A modern NSRB within NATO headquarters would ensure the alliance can meet its obligations with coherence and credibility across these pillars. It would also help ensure that allied national security and defense budgets, projected to rise to 5 percent of GDP at the NATO Summit in The Hague, will be efficiently and effectively spent.

NATO’s Strategic Need for an NSRB

A close reading of the Washington Treaty—in particular, Article II—suggests that NATO’s founders knew that security is a whole-of-society enterprise. This insight must be brought to the fore of NATO’s conversations to avoid repeating the wars of the 1940s in the 2020s. Beijing wields state-controlled industrial and technological capacity as instruments of national power. Moscow blends energy coercion, disinformation, and irregular warfare to achieve strategic effects.

The challenge is not that NATO lacks courage or resolve, it is that the alliance simply lacks the mechanisms to integrate civilian and military power across member states. Absent such a mechanism, the alliance relies on fragmented national-level responses that lack strategic integration. Disparate national approaches to energy resilience and defense industrial mobilization in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine underscored the absence of a shared transatlantic framework for aligning civil preparedness with strategic deterrence. Without a NATO-level mechanism to knit these efforts together, the alliance remains vulnerable to systemic shocks that exploit disunity rather than military weakness. Recent efforts, such as the European Union’s initiatives on strategic autonomy or national-level industrial investments like the U.S. Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act, point to highlight the demand for resilience. But these initiatives are often stovepiped, lacking coordination across the broader NATO community. Some may argue that existing NATO institutions, such as the Defence Planning Committee or Civil Emergency Planning Committee, are already tasked with this role. But these bodies are focused on narrow mandates and never achieve the integration required between governance, industry, and people.

What a NATO-Based NSRB Looks Like

A NATO-based NSRB (NNSRB), properly executed, would not be another layer of bureaucracy, but structured as a high-level strategic body reporting directly to the North Atlantic Council, with regular coordination briefings to the secretary general. This would ensure political accountability and strategic alignment while maintaining operational flexibility. The NNSRB would provide a mechanism for representatives from each member nation’s defense, economic, and civil preparedness institutions, supported by a permanent staff embedded within NATO headquarters, to begin aligning national resources with strategic, operational and tactical requirements.

What an NNSRB Could Do

An NNSRB modeled after its historical predecessor, embedded in NATO headquarters with a cross-functional and long-term mandate, would complement existing entities while enabling strategic coherence across the civil-military spectrum. This model of coordination directly reinforces NATO’s deterrence and defense mission by ensuring that allied forces are backed by resilient, interoperable supply chains and industrial capacity. It enhances crisis prevention and management by supporting rapid mobilization and coordination in response to transnational emergencies—military, economic, or environmental. And by fostering cross-border defense-industrial collaboration and information sharing, a NATO NSRB bolsters cooperative security, deepening practical integration among allies and partners. By advancing Article III obligations through proactive civil preparedness and resilience-building, the NSRB would serve as a force multiplier for NATO’s broader strategic agenda.

Tasked with producing regular assessments of allied industrial and societal readiness, conducting simulations of mobilization scenarios, and coordinating resilience planning efforts across national boundaries, the NNSRB would build the shortest path to a meaningful deterrent capability needed for the alliance in the face of new threats. Structurally, the board could include thematic working groups—such as energy resilience, medical logistics, workforce development, and technological innovation—that feed into broader strategic planning efforts. It could also (1) identify systemic vulnerabilities in the transatlantic industrial base, (2) coordinate surge production plans for critical goods, (3) support continuity of government and continuity of economy planning, and (4) ensure that alliance defense priorities are nested within a broader framework of societal resilience. Critically, such a board would be positioned to link security priorities with education, workforce development, and technological innovation—building long-term allied strength rather than reacting to short-term shocks.

Concluding Thoughts

The war in Ukraine has brought to light the urgency of whole-of-society resilience. In areas including munitions production, energy diversification, infrastructure protection, and workforce mobilization, the conflict shows us time and time again that modern deterrence and defense require more than military readiness. They require national and allied systems capable of sustaining the fight over time, with the full participation of industry and electorates behind national will and multinational security. Establishing an NNSRB is a powerful step toward accomplishing NATO’s core tasks realistically—not just in rhetoric, but in capability, in the manner by which the peace was won in the Atlantic Charter.

Kathleen J. McInnis is a senior fellow in the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.