NATO–EU Strategic Priority: Integrated Air & Missile Defence (IAMD)
Integrated Air and Missile Defence has moved from being a specialist concern of planners to one of the central tests of whether NATO and the European Union are able to protect their territory, populations and critical infrastructure. The large-scale use of missiles, drones and guided munitions in Ukraine has shown how quickly an adversary can attempt to paralyse a country’s energy system, transport network and command structures through sustained strikes from the air. At the same time, the rapid spread of increasingly sophisticated systems – from long-range cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons to cheap loitering munitions and commercial drones – is eroding the comfort once provided by distance and geography. For European and allied democracies, this raises a set of very concrete questions: who controls the airspace over the Alliance in a crisis; how resilient are current air- and missile-defence systems under sustained pressure; which parts of the industrial base and supply chain limit the scale and speed at which protection can be increased; and what this means for the credibility of deterrence by denial on NATO’s eastern flank and beyond. The debate on European Sky Shield, the future of ballistic-missile defence, and the ability to counter drone swarms and cruise missiles is, in substance, a debate on whether liberal democracies can remain militarily and industrially secure in an environment defined by long-range precision strike.
The report offered to subscribers takes these questions and organises them into a structured, end-to-end analysis of Integrated Air and Missile Defence as a strategic priority for NATO, the EU and allied states. The first section reconstructs the political and strategic rationale, linking IAMD to key doctrinal documents and to the changing threat environment; the second translates this into the operational and multidomain architecture now being built, from regional plans to sensor and command networks. The third section derives the concrete tactical and capability requirements, examining in detail the families of systems needed, from radars and C2 to interceptors and counter-UAS, and how these requirements connect to emerging technologies. The fourth analyses the administrative, regulatory and industrial instruments through which institutions are attempting to implement the priority, from EDF, EDIP and ASAP to national procurement reforms and European Sky Shield. The fifth maps the structural bottlenecks and strategic dependencies that still constrain IAMD, including production capacity, critical materials, microelectronics and regulatory frictions. The final section explains how this priority structures the opportunity space for companies, research actors and capital, indicating which types of enterprises, technologies and investors are positioned at the centre of the emerging IAMD ecosystem.