NATO burden-sharing: past, present, future

ABSTRACT

How can NATO upgrade its understanding of (and metrics for) fair burden-sharing? Alliance burden-sharing is a lasting concern for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and will remain a focal point of the NATO 2022 Strategic Concept. Public discussions of NATO burden-sharing and the 2014 Defense Investment Pledge overemphasize defense expenditure and fail to account for alternative frameworks for understanding alliance burden-sharing and specifically, NATO’s optimal burden-share distribution. The U.S. Military Academy’s February 2022 NATO Strategic Concept Seminar featured a panel on burden-sharing frameworks and metrics. In this article, we present the main ideas and arguments, placed within the existing literature on alliance burden-sharing. We argue that, in the long-run, NATO can develop more fair, effective, and efficient burden-sharing arrangements by encouraging weapons and capability specialization, increasing inexpensive but influential operations such as advisory missions, and adapting flexible command and control structures when partnering with non-NATO actors on future battlefields. We argue that, in the short-run, NATO can refine the Defense Investment Pledge with a balanced focus on Cash, Capabilities, and Contributions while also extending the deadline for complete compliance with existing expenditure benchmarks until 2030.

KEYWORDS:

• NATO
• Alliance politics
• burden-sharing
• European security

Disclosure statement

The views expressed are the authors’ alone and do not reflect those of the United States Military Academy, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).