Emma Salisbury
NATO has finally unveiled its new Alliance Maritime Strategy, refreshing a document that had not been publicly updated since 2011. While high-level strategy texts of this kind tend not to be riveting reads, the new strategy stands out in its sense of renewed urgency. It not only frames the maritime domain as a decisive front in our era of revived great-power competition but also centers maritime power as the backbone of NATO’s ability to “fight tonight” and “fight tomorrow.”
At its core, the strategy acknowledges that the oceans are the global commons of competition. Sea lanes, undersea cables, pipelines, and ports no longer serve merely as trade and communications arteries—they are strategic pressure points. NATO’s vision is to bind its maritime posture into a coherent whole, integrating naval forces, industrial bases, and emerging technologies into a system capable of deterrence, resilience, and warfighting at scale. It’s a maritime strategy built not for the expeditionary policing of 2011 but for high-end, sustained combat in defense of allied territory.
The strategy’s vision is crisp yet expansive—credible maritime power is indispensable to collective defense. This power is based on four pillars: readiness, advanced technology, the protection of sea lines of communication, and the ability to prevail in conflict. NATO’s navies must be able to surge and sustain operations at a moment’s notice, supported by ships and systems that are not only numerous but networked, fueled by emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, autonomy, and uncrewed systems. The strategy’s repeated emphasis that the alliance must be able to “prevail” signals a shift from deterrence as posture to deterrence through capability. It is a vision grounded in the realism of a more dangerous world—a world where Western maritime dominance is no longer assured but must be continually earned.
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