Top NATO commander urges sea change in training, deterrence, spending

French Adm. Pierre Vandier has led the Allied Command Transformation, one of NATO’s two strategic commands, responsible for identifying future capability and interoperability requirements, since September 2024. Now based in Norfolk, Virginia, he was previously the French Chief of the Naval Staff and the Vice Chief of Defense.

In an interview with Defense News, Vandier discussed his vision for modernizing the alliance’s approach to training, the need for greater risk taking and innovation in Europe, his top priorities for future systems, and his take on Russia’s new intermediate-range ballistic missile.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Since assuming this role, you have called for NATO to be more audacious with its training. What kind of changes will you implement in the training of allied forces and what new concepts are you hoping to see them tackle?

In training you have different levels – the first is getting people to know how to handle an aircraft, a ship, a battalion. The second level is to train the plans, where troops know the plans and how to carry them out. As such, on the first day [of training] you [already] know what the plan is. The problem with this is that plans are subject to change, in fact we often say that the plan is what is killed on the first day of war, so it is much more a question of being able to adapt.

Training is the chamber where innovation is brought in. Some ideas we are working on, include giving the red team more room to maneuver, letting them attack when they want, doing their own course of action, and letting them be innovative. When the reds are more straining on the blue team, the blues learn more, as the simulated enemy will do more things that are unexpected, such as attacking when they are resting, for instance.

I would sum up audacious training as making the OPFOR [adversary for training] great again in terms of what you are up for and against in an exercise. When you have more innovation tools and do not know in advance when you are going to be killed, it gives the blue team better lessons learnt. We are working on dedicated exercises and vignettes where new equipment will be brought in and given to the reds. Here I am thinking of unmanned and AI tools to put more pressure on the blues… Train for what is non-prepared and unexpected in order to boost the learning loop.

What we want to see more of is: no magic moves, no magic replenishment, no magic re-survival. I’ve done this when I was Chief of the Naval Staff in saying “no re-generation, no reload.” For instance, on the first day of the game, you lose a ship, then the ship goes ashore. It is frustrating for the people that are killed on the first day, but you are giving them an opportunity to learn more. Everybody learns more when you simulate real-life and when your logistics are real.

You’ve spoken about the need for Europe to take inspiration from how the United States invests in technological innovation, supply chains and risk taking. How do you institutionalize risk taking in NATO nations?

The way we have been designing our weapon systems [in Europe] is much more reliant on sophistication. For example, you say ‘I am building the next generation of tanks,’ you bring all the military engineers in to determine what the future of the tank could be. They work for years on this and in the end, they come up with a generous book of specifications and announce a contract, industry runs this for another decade, and ultimately you have a tank that you are not certain fulfills your goals as things have changed.

New technology had time to arrive – you’ve spent a lot of money, just to have a platform that is obsolete by design, and all because the time spent building it was too long.

Innovation will not change major, big platforms – making an aircraft, tank or ship will always be a matter of decades. However, all the things which are around such as optronics, AI, communication systems, and software, need to be run on a process that is much faster. The speed of technology is a matter of two to three years, which is maybe 10 times quicker than the huge, controlled procurement system in Europe.

We need an approach convergence between what I would say is “fail-safe,” which is the big stuff, where you know where the money goes and is very specific, and then a part that can be 10% to 15% “safe to fail.” That’s where you test, and if it doesn’t work, you just put it out and test again and find a quick fix.

This innovation loop is important because the more you test, the more you may find good solutions. Of course, you need to be clever, but you also need to accept that often the first thing you design is not going to be the good one.

That’s the most important thing, we need to be in a learning loop – the enemy is learning a lot, and we need to be learning more than it is. Innovation is not a smart bullet, but a reinvestment process where you put the good minds of good people and test things.

What factors do you think are responsible for European states not taking on more risks?

A lot of rules have been made in Europe regarding defense investments, which were under deep scrutiny for legal and financial control. First, it was seen as bad to spend on defense, and so the ratings of banks is not so good when defense is in their portfolio. Another element is the size of regulations, which are very complex, lengthy, and slow. You run into a lot of legal issues and contestation… It is a fragmented market.

The stakeholders make more money outside of the European Union than in it, so they fight to sell their stuff outside of the continent.

Last but not least, the way we spend money in Europe is very reluctant to lose something… In other words, we do not accept to test and lose. I was attending an event recently in the U.S., where they used the following scenario: imagine you have $100 million and you select a portfolio of ten start-ups, where ten million are attributed to each. You check in after two years, and realize some projects are dead and perhaps keep two out of the initial ten. You lose 80%, but out of the two remaining ones, you may make hundreds of millions. The probability of winning will make you richer.

For Europe, going on a defense-spending target of 3% of GDP means that all European Union nations combined should spend €100 billion more per year. That is a huge amount. So if you do things as you did before, you will produce the equipment of the past and not for the future, especially when it comes to AI, space, robots and unmanned systems.

I think a lot of European countries bank on U.S. or Western sufficiency to say, “Okay, I have paid my insurance” – but it’s not a matter of insurance, it’s a matter of existence. Europe needs to take defense issues seriously and not just as a sense of cost.

What are your top priorities for NATO when it comes to future capabilities and systems it must field?

Let me start by giving you some more context to what these priorities are. We have an ongoing war in Ukraine, where Russian efforts are not only there but are global against the West and include space, cyber, surface and subsurface, as we have seen in the Baltics recently, hybrid actions. Even if Russia loses a lot of people, they know how to adapt well. On average, they are losing 1,000 personnel per week in Ukraine.

This global competition is spreading outside of Europe. We are in a moment where the response time has been accelerated. What Allied Command Transformation (ACT) has to do is provide the warfighting environment for the nations of NATO. We need to bring some strategic foresight, comprehensive talks in order to tackle this environment and shape the forces by providing concepts in multi-domain operations. It’s much more than just making plans and being trained for those plans. Essentially, what we are trying to do is to have a better comprehension of what is going on to try to have a coup d’avance.

My main priorities are giving foresight to the stakeholders of NATO, which also include the political side. The second area is the re-synchronization efforts in relation to the Defense Planning Process, where at the next NATO summit the capability targets for the next year will be outlined and endorsed.

Another priority is bringing innovation into the field in a different way than it has been done before. In past years, investments in defense have drastically been reduced and so I see innovation as being much more a question of the civilian sector than it is of the military.

When you see figures of how much the U.S. spends on big tech research and development, it is maybe 50 times what Europe spends. The question for the military is to try to understand what kind of advantage they can bring from the tech sector into their operations. That means AI, space, robotics and all software and quick-running processes, where the digital backbone is essentially everything.

Russia recently carried out an attack in Ukraine with a new weapon dubbed the Oreshnik, an intermediate-range ballistic missile Russian officials said can reach any European target. What are your thoughts about this class of weapon and how does that concern the stability between Russia and NATO?

In the past four to five years, most of the stabilization tools we had built after the Cold War jumped out. One of the biggest ones was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), from which the U.S. and Russia withdrew.

We are back to the question we observed in the 1980s, where you may have long-range ballistic weaponry able to threaten Europe. As part of the Treaty, the parties were not allowed to build missiles of range between 500 to 1,000 kilometers. Hence, the only long-range ones at the time were nuclear ballistic missiles.

We are now again in a period where these kinds of missiles are free to act – you’ve seen what happened with the Houthis, with Iran against Israel. For NATO, it raises the question of balance between deter and defend. You’ve seen the limits of the Iron Dome in Israel, given the size of Europe, the idea to get rid of the threat by creating a European Iron Dome is just unfeasible. It is just like batteries for electricity – it simply will not happen.

The kind of initiative like the European Long-Strike Approach, or ELSA, [launched in 2024 between France, Germany, Italy and Poland to create a ground-launched cruise missile with a range of 1,000-2,000km] is the way to think about the future. Perhaps discussions will be more open one day for strategic stability.

What sort of equipment does the alliance need to have in its arsenal to be able to respond and address that kind of threat?

Deep fires. You need to reciprocate. Stability is the ability to reciprocate. If Russia has means to strike Europe at the depth of 2,000 km, you need to be able to answer. Deterrence is a way to put pressure on the enemy before it comes to you. He has to think of the consequences of his actions before he commits them. It’s exactly the opposite that we see today – today we witness a sort of fait accompli all the time.

If you have more uncertainty, more dilemma and the consequences of attacking or not attacking, then you have deterrence. Because you know that you might suffer harder than you expect attacking for a minor win, or minor gain. You will have some square kilometers in a country but then you might trigger something really bad for you.

You have called for Europe to wake up and for countries to invest more in their militaries. Many experts argue the invasion of Ukraine should have been the necessary wake-up call, yet some still appear on the fence about making the necessary investments and changes. What do you believe will be enough to achieve this?

Three Western prophecies just went down: the first one is the belief that liberal training will bring democracy, we have seen that doesn’t work. The second is the idea that interdependence will bring peace and the last is that disarmament will drive to peace.

I was recently giving a lecture to Franco-German industry leaders and chief executives. I said to them, you are just like the dinosaurs – you see the smoke of volcanoes and just say you are in changing times. Most Europeans are herbivores, they think there is sufficient grass to feed from. This is not the case. We need to be more awake and invest because it is not only about making some more shells to support Ukraine. It’s to be ready on the new warfighting domains where we may suffer a lot.