By Robin Ashby, Director General UK Defence Forum; Rapporteur, High North Observatory
Strategy without industrial foundation is aspiration. The previous paper in this series described the command architecture that NATO and the Nordic nations have constructed for the High North — the structures, the headquarters, the exercise cycles. This paper examines what fills those structures: the platforms, the weapons, the training programmes, and the procurement relationships that will determine whether the Alliance's northern reconstitution matches its ambition or falls short of what the threat requires.
The lesson running through all of it is one that defence establishments periodically forget and are obliged to relearn at cost: that capability, once allowed to atrophy, does not reconstitute quickly, and that the industrial relationships underpinning it take longer to rebuild than the political decisions that dismantled them.