The 2026 NATO Summit in Ankara marked a significant step in strengthening the Alliance's conventional deterrence posture through ambitious investments in defence spending, industrial capacity, advanced military technologies, and multinational capability development. While these initiatives reinforce NATO's preparedness for high-intensity interstate conflict, this policy brief argues that they also expose a growing strategic imbalance. Russia's primary challenge to Euro-Atlantic security increasingly manifests not through conventional military confrontation, but through persistent hybrid activities, including cyber operations, sabotage, foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI), attacks on critical infrastructure, and other forms of sub-threshold coercion designed to remain below the threshold of Article 5.

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Accordingly, the brief contends that NATO risks preparing for the next conventional war while remaining insufficiently equipped to deter the form of competition it confronts on a daily basis. Although the Alliance has made important progress in resilience, civil preparedness, and hybrid threat awareness, these efforts remain less institutionalized and operationalized than conventional defence planning. The paper therefore recommends that NATO elevate resilience to the same strategic level as deterrence by establishing Alliance-wide resilience capability targets, developing a collective framework for responding to persistent hybrid aggression below the Article 5 threshold, and systematically integrating Ukraine's battlefield experience into Allied planning, capability development, and defence-industrial cooperation.