NATO–EU Strategic Priority: Integrated Air & Missile Defence (IAMD)

Integrated Air and Missile Defence has moved from being a specialist concern of planners to one of the central tests of whether NATO and the European Union are able to protect their territory, populations and critical infrastructure. The large-scale use of missiles, drones and guided munitions in Ukraine has shown how quickly an adversary can attempt to paralyse a country’s energy system, transport network and command structures through sustained strikes from the air. At the same time, the rapid spread of increasingly sophisticated systems – from long-range cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons to cheap loitering munitions and commercial drones – is eroding the comfort once provided by distance and geography. For European and allied democracies, this raises a set of very concrete questions: who controls the airspace over the Alliance in a crisis; how resilient are current air- and missile-defence systems under sustained pressure; which parts of the industrial base and supply chain limit the scale and speed at which protection can be increased; and what this means for the credibility of deterrence by denial on NATO’s eastern flank and beyond. The debate on European Sky Shield, the future of ballistic-missile defence, and the ability to counter drone swarms and cruise missiles is, in substance, a debate on whether liberal democracies can remain militarily and industrially secure in an environment defined by long-range precision strike. The renewed focus on Integrated Air and Missile Defence (IAMD) in NATO, the EU and allied nations is rooted in a rapidly changing threat landscape and the imperatives of deterrence in Europe’s security architecture.