Cheap Attack, Expensive Defence: NATO 5% Pledge Following Iran and Ukraine
Iran and Ukraine show cheap mass defeats expensive platforms. Unless it buys deep, low-cost defence and civilian resilience, NATO can win every engagement and still lose wars.
Two wars are teaching the same lesson. Western defence budgets and procurement priorities leave serious capability gaps when they are confronted with the asymmetry of today’s conflicts. In Ukraine, Russia – with a far larger pre-war army and a 2026 defence budget four times Ukraine’s – has failed to achieve its objectives for more than four years. In the 2026 Iran war, the US and Israel established air superiority within days, yet could not eliminate Iran’s retaliatory capability, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, or force the political outcomes they sought. In both cases, a superpower’s overwhelming advantage in troops and platforms failed to deliver decisive results. The weaker party imposed disproportionate costs on the stronger side’s munitions stocks, its economy and – in the case of the US – its political will.
The two wars carry opposite signs: in Ukraine, a young democracy attacked by an authoritarian superpower fielding a post-Soviet military; in Iran, an authoritarian regime struck by a superpower fielding the most advanced forces in the world. Yet for Europe’s budget planners and procurement officials, they yield one coherent set of lessons.
Neither Iran nor Ukraine found a way to defeat a superpower’s forces decisively on the battlefield. Both found ways to make a superpower’s victory expensive – and potentially unaffordable – by shifting the contest into domains where the Western alliance has under-invested: the economics of munitions, the protection of infrastructure far behind the front line, commercial risk, and the public’s confidence in everyday security. The vulnerability at the heart of Europe is rooted in two decades of procurement choices: exquisite platforms bought in small numbers, acquisition concentrated in a few large and often slow-moving prime contractors, a deficit of innovation and chronic neglect of precisely those civilian systems and infrastructure that adversaries now treat as the primary battlespace.
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