Regional Defence Plans (Operational Priorities)
Forward Defence & Eastern Flank Deterrence
The Regional Defence Plans sit at the core of NATO’s post-2022 shift back to hard territorial defence and forward deterrence on the Eastern flank. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine exposed the limits of a posture based primarily on reinforcement and crisis management, forcing the Alliance to plan for large-scale, multi-domain warfighting on Allied soil under short-notice conditions. In response, NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept and the Madrid and Vilnius Summits established a new baseline: defending “every inch” of Allied territory through deterrence by denial, backed by pre-assigned forces, pre-positioned stocks and detailed regional war plans. In parallel, the EU’s Strategic Compass, new military mobility initiatives and the European Defence Industrial Strategy repositioned energy, infrastructure and industrial readiness as pillars of European security, explicitly in support of NATO’s Eastern posture. Regional Defence Plans are the operational hinge between these political commitments and the concrete requirement to move brigades, air squadrons and naval forces into battle-ready configurations from the High North to the Black Sea within defined timelines.
This analysis explains in detail how those plans work and why they matter for armed forces, defence industries, research actors and investors. It reconstructs the mission sets, theatres and scenarios that NATO planners use for the Baltic, Black Sea and North Atlantic/High North regions, and shows how land, air, maritime, cyber and space operations are expected to interact in each case. It then unpacks the force posture and readiness model underpinning the plans – from forward brigades, pre-positioned stocks and the NATO Force Model, to the expanded command-and-control architecture built around SHAPE and the three Joint Force Commands. Subsequent sections map the capability families and tactical building blocks (heavy armour, IAMD, ISR/C4ISR, logistics, nuclear enablers), identify performance requirements and documented shortfalls, and connect these directly to technology clusters and industrial value chains. A set of downloadable, structured tables complements the narrative, giving readers ready-to-use matrices of mission architectures, capability families, technology clusters, industrial actors, research institutions and capital providers, so that the findings can be integrated into planning, procurement, capability development and investment decisions.