The NATO summit in Ankara was a watershed moment for European defense. After decades of underinvestment, new political commitments to increase spending will allow Europe to regenerate urgently needed military capability. Yet with the revolutionary changes AI is bringing, if that investment is not carefully steered, Europe risks rearming for a battlespace that has already moved on.
The ways NATO can prepare for the next strategic battlefield is at the heart of Scale's new whitepaper, The Agentic Coalition. In modern conflict, the decisive question is not simply how much capability NATO fields, but how quickly the Alliance can sense, decide, and act. Adversaries have learned to wage asymmetric campaigns calibrated just below the Article 5 threshold through tactics including sabotage, cyberattacks, GPS spoofing and disinformation. These efforts are engineered to exploit the seam where NATO is slowest: its staff-heavy, consensus-bound decision-making. Russia does not need to win a protracted war if it can outpace the Alliance in the first 72 hours, seizing ground and daring NATO to reverse a fait accompli.
The most immediate deterrence multiplier available to NATO now is not another platform. It is the ability to sense, interpret and decide faster than the adversary. Agentic AI is how. As outlined in Scale's foundational Agentic Warfare whitepaper, a new generation of AI agents sense, reason, and orchestrate multi-step actions under human authority, compressing the gap between insight and execution. Already piloted in U.S. combatant commands, agentic AI systems give commanders a tireless digital staff able to triage sensor data, stress-test thousands of scenarios in parallel, and keep plans alive as conditions change. Deterrence strengthens when an adversary knows NATO can see the battlespace more clearly, adapt more rapidly, and synchronize thousands of assets more precisely. In this way, agentic AI realizes deterrence by decision advantage. Crucially, agentic AI systems can be built on federation and sovereign interoperability, so allies integrate at the decision layer without surrendering national control.
The hardware commitments made in Ankara matter. But they will only prove decisive if NATO also invests in the decision architecture that turns mass into coordinated action at speed. The 2026 summit is the moment to lock in that direction, committing allies to a common, interoperable framework for agentic AI. NATO must become an Agentic Coalition. It is the most cost-effective path to the stronger deterrence we all seek, one that newly developed AI technology enables, and one we urge the Alliance's leaders to adopt.
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