NATO burden-sharing: past, present, future

ABSTRACT How can NATO upgrade its understanding of (and metrics for) fair burden-sharing? Alliance burden-sharing is a lasting concern for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and will remain a focal point of the NATO 2022 Strategic Concept. Public discussions of NATO burden-sharing and the 2014 Defense Investment Pledge overemphasize defense expenditure and fail to account for alternative frameworks for understanding alliance burden-sharing and specifically, NATO’s optimal burden-share distribution. The U.S. Military Academy’s February 2022 NATO Strategic Concept Seminar featured a panel on burden-sharing frameworks and metrics. In this article, we present the main ideas and arguments, placed within the existing literature on alliance burden-sharing. We argue that, in the long-run, NATO can develop more fair, effective, and efficient burden-sharing arrangements by encouraging weapons and capability specialization, increasing inexpensive but influential operations such as advisory missions, and adapting flexible command and control structures when partnering with non-NATO actors on future battlefields. We argue that, in the short-run, NATO can refine the Defense Investment Pledge with a balanced focus on Cash, Capabilities, and Contributions while also extending the deadline for complete compliance with existing expenditure benchmarks until 2030.