At the recent summit in The Hague, NATO reaffirmed its commitment to a “new war of production.” With fresh funding, heightened urgency, and rising expectations, the Alliance is cultivating a mindset that is focused, specialized, and execution-driven. But war rarely conforms to that kind of conveyor-belt thinking.

Take something as seemingly straightforward as securing artillery supply. Shells are seen as NATO’s most predictable wartime need. Yet the next war may not resemble Ukraine’s grinding attrition — and if it does, it could upend NATO’s core approach to warfare. Even here, therefore, the Alliance must decide what to produce, what to stockpile, and what to forgo, without knowing which bets will pay off.

While many writers have applauded NATO’s new posture, praising its discipline and urgency as hallmarks of a wartime mentality, what they’re really praising is the kind of clarity and energy we wish existed in peacetime, when priorities can be set, plans followed, and outcomes measured. War is not so cooperative.

A true wartime mindset is in many ways the opposite. Conflict demands thinking that is often undirected, contradictory, and redundant. Since no plan survives first contact with the enemy, supple thinking becomes the reserve that absorbs crisis and enables paradoxical action.

The coming weeks will be critical in determining whether NATO can cultivate the cognitive flexibility it needs. Organizational reforms are underway that promise to give individual divisions in HQ more autonomy in policy planning, shifting responsibility away from the secretary-general’s private office. Responsibility for external engagement — long a source of innovation within the Alliance — is being relocated to the divisions best positioned to integrate it into daily work. These are promising developments.

But they may be incidental to a larger institutional momentum: a drive toward efficiency and a cultural tendency toward busyness.

If the complacency of peacetime dulled NATO’s edge, the current rush to turbocharge material capabilities could swing too far in the opposite direction. The danger is a system that prizes output over insight, speed over adaptability, and the appearance of unity over the benefits of dissent.

This summer, the Alliance risks succumbing to a kind of strategic Dutch disease — more resources leading to worse results. This essay identifies the thinking NATO needs to resist that.

Organizational Thinking Matters

For NATO, out-thinking adversaries is not so much a tactical edge as an organizational one. It means making sense of the world, and of its own actions, faster and more effectively than the opponent — anticipating earlier, adapting more readily, and learning more deeply. It also means accepting uncertainty not as a problem to be solved, but as a constant operating condition.

History offers ample examples of military bureaucracies that were well-equipped with hardware but crippled by brittle “thinking software.”

Some mistook planning for innovation — US PowerPoint culture in Afghanistan. Others stopped innovating when it threatened their plans — Imperial Japan’s rigged wargames. Some failed in anticipation, blind to incoming signals — Israel in 1973. Others failed in strategic reflection, preoccupied with how they looked to the outside — Britain’s many hearts-and-minds campaigns.

Yet there are also many positive examples of adaptive thinking: administrations that broke hierarchies, brought in new blood, or empowered overlooked networks.

But these moments of disruption are often romanticized, to the detriment of subtler factors like organizational culture or the physical environment in which bureaucrats operate. Moreover, what works in one setting can easily fail in another. The US planning reforms codified in the Goldwater-Nichols Act brought battlefield coherence in the Gulf War. Some NATO allies now see them as a source of over-planning.

Finally, NATO itself is its own kind of beast, shaped by consensus, caveats, and caution. Any perception that it is “thinking for itself” often draws skepticism, even from smaller Allies who would otherwise find their thinking shaped by larger ones. These are structural facts. They can’t be wished away.

The Thinking That Matters in This Moment

To be clear, none of this is easy, least of all because there are no obvious models for NATO to follow: “the ability to think beyond boundaries, to develop ideas that are more than pat answers to recognized problems is almost impossible to find in institutions today.” So how can we tell whether NATO is cultivating the right organizational mindset?

The Alliance undertakes four core thinking tasks: planning, innovation, readiness, and strategic reflection. These may seem neatly sequential — plan in peacetime, innovate as tempo builds, surge to readiness in crisis, reflect when tensions ease. But conflict rarely unfolds in sequence. Today NATO must do all four tasks at once. NATO staff must plan as if the future is knowable, innovate in ways that might outpace those plans, reflect deeply enough to tear them up, and remain ready to act at a moment’s notice.

One basic benchmark, then, is whether each of NATO’s four thinking tasks strikes the right balance between discipline and adaptability. Planning, innovation, readiness, and reflection each demand structure. But the systems that succeed will be those that reduce friction and confusion without stifling the capacity to learn, rethink, or surprise.

At bottom, though, success may hinge on something simpler: whether NATO’s people have the time and physical space to think. Are they permitted to connect the dots across functions, imagine alternative futures, and make sense of their work? Or has a culture of urgency and perpetual motion crowded out the room for deep, deliberate, spacious thinking?

Risk 1. Planning Without the Pluralism

Planning in NATO has always been managerial in theory, but political in practice. Because the Alliance must balance the interests of sovereign members, allied planning is a negotiated truth. At best, this yields decisions that are both technically rigorous and politically acceptable. At worst, it leads to delay and dysfunction.

NATO’s posture on its eastern flank before 2022 confirmed the cost of getting this balance wrong. Internal assessments had flagged key vulnerabilities, but political sensitivities prevented their acceptance. By the time consensus was reached, valuable time had already been lost.

Now there is a danger of overcorrecting. Where once there was excessive diplomatic accommodation, the temptation now is to close space for dissent. With more Allies and more staff to accommodate, unity of thought and action has become harder to maintain. Those who take analytical risks or challenge prevailing views may find less room to do so.

At NATO headquarters, the design of the building — and a recent paring down of civilian divisions — ought to create greater symmetry between civilian and military staff. Long corridors physically connect the two communities, allowing planners to sit just across from one another and put their heads together with ease. This proximity enables quick, informal exchanges that can cut through bureaucracy.

But broader disagreements within the enterprise seem to be channeled into structured formats like red-teaming and scenario-building. These have value — but they are no substitute for the trust and candor that emerge from real, unfiltered conversation.

To avoid reaching a point where even close partners hesitate to speak openly, the answer is not tighter message discipline but greater space for disagreement. Trust grows through open thinking — and that trust is what makes shared strategy possible.

For planners across the enterprise, it is becoming hard to tell whether the Alliance’s signals to the outside world reflect true intent — or just buy time, manage optics, or paper over internal divides. Continental European staff seem to have found a new purpose in galvanizing their home countries to meet commitments. But American and British personnel, often in key positions, seem to be struggling to find the guidance needed for big decisions.

Risk 2. Over-Engineering Innovation

Innovation isn’t the same as invention. It depends less on raw creativity than on connection — that is, less on producing exquisite new solutions than on matching existing ones to persistent problems. That kind of innovation can be supported by classical management: mapping needs, clearing blockages, and resisting the impulse to valorize novelty for its own sake.

In an organization like NATO, this may require something as simple as an official with the ear of the secretary-general who moves laterally across the system, linking problems to solutions, clearing bureaucratic obstacles, and signaling where disruptive approaches will be justified.

But it helps to have the right conditions in place, and that means creating opportunities for unplanned collisions between people and ideas. NATO’s headquarters was purpose-built to encourage that kind of connection. Its central feature is the Agora: a vast, hangar-like space engineered for spontaneous exchange.

Yet in a culture of busyness, it often has the opposite effect. In a glass-walled building where activity is highly visible, lingering in unstructured conversation can feel unproductive. Ironically, the former headquarters, cramped and arranged on an uninspired grid, left staff with no choice but to cross paths in quiet corners. Without intending to, it made innovation more likely.

Today efforts like DIANA, NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator, reflect a clear intent to make innovation more systematic. But the more the process is managed and measured, the more those conditions erode: “In a desire to achieve, we become efficient, developing habits that are rigid, stifling curiosity and rejecting change.”

The current push to systematize innovation risks overlooking where novel solutions and problems often meet: at the fringe. This typically involves motivated individuals working in a side corridor, away from delivery pressures, and encountering other perspectives that don’t fit neatly within NATO’s core structures. Of course, some of this depends on chance. But it is far from clear that large-scale innovation programs and performance metrics deliver better results.

Risk 3. Practiced But Not Ready

Readiness depends on teams who can create order when plans break down — people who recognize patterns from joint training and navigate the unknown together. Organizational theorists liken it to jazz improvisation.

Technical mastery and practice isn’t enough under uncertainty. What matters is the ability to orient, signal the need for help, and adapt as a group. Yet NATO still views the future through the lens of “multi-domain operations” — a mindset shaped by US military culture and the Goldwater-Nichols tradition. War is framed as a series of domains and permutations to be rehearsed across land, sea, air, cyber, and space.

Scenarios are now designed less to prepare for the unexpected than to enforce coordination between services and nations. In 2022, one such scenario had been rehearsed. But when the real-world moment came — shaped by decoys and ambiguity — the impulse to act decisively did not follow.

This is not to deny that NATO is building improvisational muscle. But as in the other three thinking tasks we’re interested in, it has split what should be a basic, unit-level habit — making sense of experience — into separate bureaucratic tasks. Allied Command Transformation (ACT) in Norfolk, Virginia, owns the future. Military historians at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers (SHAPE), in Mons, Belgium, curate the past. A specialist agency in Lisbon turns past experience into future guidance.

Meanwhile NATO’s educational institutions have struggled to capitalize on the fact that those who train together can improvise together. The informal international networks built during courses — vital in crisis because they create familiarity — remain largely invisible and underused.

They’ve also failed to study the new generations passing through their halls, setting the same tasks year after year but without capturing comparative or longitudinal data. As a result, tomorrow’s officers may arrive in crisis moments highly trained in NATO standards — but strangers to each other, and to the organization they are meant to lead.

Risk 4. Performing without reflection

NATO’s motto, Animus in consulendo liber — “In discussion, a free mind” — very deliberately endorses reflective thinking. It gestures toward the Roman ideal of otium: time set aside for contemplation, a necessary counterbalance to negotium, the busyness of daily affairs.

But how is this ideal embodied in practice? It lends legitimacy to the scholar-soldier archetype: officers who share reading lists and reflections in line with the image of the thinking warrior. In contrast, civilians at headquarters have few socially acceptable models of what reflective work should look like.

Otium once inspired libraries, gardens, and porticos — spaces of quiet withdrawal for spacious thought. At NATO, there is the Quiet Room: a row of hexagonal glass pods near the cafeteria. Its beehive layout suggests busy productivity; the transparency invites judgment. It is almost never used.

Like many institutions, NATO separates action and reflection — each performed in visible, managed ways. It inherits a modern habit, born of the Industrial Age: the lingering division between thinkers and doers. Deep thinking is often outsourced to places like ACT, while everyday procedures discourage reflection on-site.

This reflects a deeper cultural discomfort — a system that does not quite trust itself to protect reflection from the pull of immediate demands.

Ironically, the most effective space for thinking may be the NATO library — quiet, peripheral, and largely ignored. Precisely because few use it, it offers rare refuge for uninterrupted thought.

Yet even the most determined thinker struggles to make these paradoxes productive. Like many highly competent professionals, NATO officials often achieve breakthroughs during holidays, commutes, or informal exchanges — a phenomenon Joseph Badaracco calls “mosaic reflection.” But such insights risk being set aside, simply because they arise outside a sanctioned process, space, or chain of command.

The Opportunity for a New Culture of Thinking

Across fields from corporate leadership and creativity to wellbeing and organizational behavior, large bureaucracies are increasingly “thinking about thinking”: using reflection to resist pathological busyness in the face of persistent uncertainty. NATO, however, tends to prize activity that is visible, time-consuming, and effortful over less tangible forms of contribution. As the Alliance adopts a “wartime mindset,” that bias is likely to deepen.

This instinct is often attributed to NATO’s military character, with its emphasis on action and engineered solutions. But that explanation is reductive. Something else is at play.

NATO’s organizational culture increasingly mirrors a civilian caricature of military life. To reassure voters asked to make sacrifices, and to meet US expectations of return on investment, the Alliance adopts the language of military precision, but without embracing its underlying tolerance for friction, uncertainty, and adaptation.

NATO’s version of “Dutch disease” is therefore doubly afflicting. It reflects not only the challenge of absorbing new resources after the Hague Summit, but also a Calvinist reflex — prevalent in the Netherlands and beyond — that those given resources must be seen to work hard enough to deserve them. A former (Dutch) secretary-general once quipped, when asked how many people work at NATO: “About half.” That old managerial culture lingers. Those not visibly busy are still assumed to be slacking.

Any such performance of busyness is likely to be self-defeating. It stifles the very innovation NATO seeks to promote. And it is wasteful. When officials lack the time or permission to think, intellectual work gets outsourced — at high cost — to dedicated reflection processes or distant agencies.

Worse, attempts to project sleek efficiency outward often generate inefficiencies within. NATO’s own headquarters illustrates this paradox. Designed as two interlocking hands to symbolize unity, the building’s long, disconnected corridors hinder collaboration. Officials must walk great distances to meet — an outward symbol of cohesion that, in practice, reinforces costly internal silos.

This trajectory would reflect a mistaken assumption: that taxpayers distrust deliberation and prefer fast, simple solutions. In reality, public trust often erodes in the face of oversimplification and performative activity. While transparency and joined-up government can sometimes backfire, trust tends to grow when institutions embrace complexity — and allow themselves to be challenged.

This is most evident in staff whose commitment to NATO’s mission comes not from repetition or performance, but from a rigorous examination of its purpose and relevance.

To out-think its adversaries, NATO must create space for serious thought. Thinking is not a luxury or a liability. Increasingly, it is the work.

The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the views of any organization.

Image credit: NATO