IISS Prague Defence Summit 2026: Reflections

Hello, and welcome to Sound Strategic. I'm Maya Nouns, Senior Fellow for Chinese Security and Defense Policy and host of the WWS Sound Strategic Podcast. Today's episode reflects on this year's WWS Prague Defense Summit, which took place from 16 to 18 September 2026 in Prague, where political, military, and industry leaders from across the Euro-Atlantic, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East gathered to discuss how to build defense capacity in a new era. Over two and a half days, the summit covered a wide range of issues, from the urgency of European rearmament and ramping up defense production, to integrating Ukraine into Europe's defense industrial ecosystem, South Korea-Europe security cooperation, land warfare, sustainment, and the challenge of turning ambitious plans into real capability. Joining me to discuss this summit are two of the most important leaders in the world, and to discuss all these issues and more are fantastic colleagues from the WWS, Dr. Lami Kim, WWS Korea Chair in Advanced Technologies, National Security and Defense, Ruben Stewart, Senior Fellow for Land Warfare, Fenella McGurty, Senior Fellow for Defense Economics, and James Hackett, Head of Defense and Military Analysis. Welcome on to the show, Lami Ruben, Fenella James. Ruben, European land forces not yet the conventional backbone NATO needs. Key gaps in personnel, artillery, air defense, and sustainment are unlikely to close before 2030. Given that NATO's new defense plans are built on forward defense and rapid reinforcement, how serious is that mismatch and what happens if deterrence fails before the capability catches up? The mismatch is serious because NATO has changed its operational plans and requirements faster than armies have been able to change their force structure. As you said, the regional plans envisage forward defense primarily through forward land forces. As you said, the regional plans envisage forward defense primarily through forward land size. The forces within NATO are signed against regional plans and do rely on rapid reinforcement and then sustainment. NATO has expanded substantially the NATO force model, but those plans themselves do not generate combat power. Our assessment in the dossier for the Prague Defence Summit is that European land forces still have significant deficiencies in personnel, artillery, air defence, magazines, magazine depth, sustainment and readiness. And we concluded that European allies are unlikely to be able to provide a conventional backbone of European defence before 2030. And obviously, without significant US resources adds an extra element of doubt in that as well. The biggest challenge, I guess, to address this is the time. And here it's interesting to look at side-by-side, but I think it's also important to look at the time. And I think it's the procurement processes, which often measured in timeframes such as three, four or five years ahead, and the military planning, which is occurring for a contingency tomorrow or to fight tonight, for example, is the common phrase that we hear. So there is a mismatch between the delivery time of some of the capabilities and the planning that the militaries are undertaking now. National territory is no longer a sanctuary from long range strikes, sabotage and UAV incursions. That's a profound shift from how European societies have thought about defence for decades. How ready are governments and publics to actually absorb and act on that reality? Again, I think there's a mismatch here in that governments understand the problem, at least in an intellectual sense. But European societies are much less prepared for those consequences. And watching even after Prague, I think there's a little bit of a misguidance there. I think there's a little bit of a misguidance there. And Macron, for example, seemed to indicate there is a recognition by the politicians that they need to bring their societies up to a higher level of readiness. NATO's new resilience requirements assume that there are going to be attacks on civilians and critical national infrastructure and some of the hybrid attacks that we are seeing underway almost on a daily basis at the moment. And that changes the geography of European defence from primarily, you know, not just in Europe, but all over the world. And I think there's a little bit of a misguidance there. I think there's a little bit of a misguidance Carsten Breuer, who was also a keynote speaker at the Prague Summit, argued that the balance between legacy systems and new technologies was needed. It's not a question of drone or tank, it's drone and tank. And exactly that force mix and how you approach that is key to ensuring that you have full capability gaps, but also looking towards future capabilities as well. With Germany, we do have the proposed 2027 budget, and that does place a greater emphasis on spending on things like space systems, digitalisation, networks, transformation of the Bundeswehr. So that shift is happening. You can see it across most countries in Europe that there is that what used to be a 90-10% split between legacy and novel. There is a bit more of a shift within the procurement budget to try and bolster that novel technologies or emerging technologies share. So that is Germany where the debate has actually moved on from not spending enough to not spending what is right. France and UK are still stuck on not spending enough. But I think more generally across the region, we're not seeing multi-year orders, long-term investment plans. Even in major countries, these are lacking. We are still seeing a shift in the procurement budget, but we're not seeing a shift in the procurement budget. We are seeing some industrial plans, defence industrial plans emerging, and these are welcome, but they do not provide enough clarity on things like spending plans and priorities in the longer term, unfortunately. South Korea and Europe are expanding their security ties, but you've argued there's room for a more reciprocal relationship. What would genuine mutual cooperation actually look like in practice? Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, South Korea has emerged as an important arms supplier to Europe, most notably to Poland, but also to Estonia, Romania, Finland, and Norway. Between 2021 and 2025, South Korea was the second largest supplier of major arms to European NATO countries among non-European suppliers, only after the United States. But much of this relationship has so far been centred on European procurement of Korean equipment to fill Europe's urgent capability gaps, but this model alone is unlikely to provide the basis for a durable strategic partnership. European countries are significantly increasing their defence spending while also seeking to rebuild their own defence industrial base. So over the long term, South Korea will need to develop a more reciprocal relationship in which both sides contribute to and benefit from defence cooperation. And I think we are already beginning to see that transition in Poland. The initial Korean sales largely involved systems manufactured in South Korea and delivered to Poland, but cooperation is increasingly moving towards localisation, technology transfer, workforce training, and participation of the Polish industry. For example, the first several batches of K2 tanks were delivered to Poland and incorporated into the Polish armed forces, but under a new contract signed in 2025, roughly one third of the 180 tanks are to be produced in Poland, with deliveries beginning in 2028, which will mark the first time that Poland produces tanks domestically in almost two decades. So Poland is not simply buying complete Korean products. It's acquiring the ability to revitalise its own production capacity. And just as South Korea can help European security, Europe can also contribute to South Korea's transition toward defence innovation and preparation for future warfare, as European countries possess significant capabilities in aerospace, quantum technologies, cyber, sensors, and electronic warfare. South Korea, meanwhile, has particular strengths in defence manufacturing and is investing heavily in physical AI. These strengths can be complementary, as neither side possesses all the necessary capabilities independently, and both lag behind the two tech superpowers, namely the United States and China. Europe and South Korea could pool their resources, pool their strengths, and enhance their capabilities through joint R&D, co-production, technology exchanges, and other forms of collaboration. And defence industrial supply chains are another promising area for cooperation. Both South Korea and European countries, in particular, remain vulnerable to China's export controls on critical minerals and rare earth elements. So the two sides could cooperate to diversify suppliers, develop alternative sources, expand possessing capacity, and recycle critical materials to enhance their defence supply chain resilience. I'm wondering whether you could give us a sense of how these discussions about European and Asia Pacific, and in particular, Korean defence cooperation, evolved or at least featured at this year's Prague Defence Summit. Sometimes the discussion about European security rightly focuses inwards. There's a lot happening with regards to European spending, NATO planning, or European land forces developments. So how much space is there at a summit like the Prague Defence Summit for discussions around Indo-Pacific dimensions and South Korea's role in European security? And do you think it received the attention that it deserved? I think there is considerable room for greater defence cooperation and discussions on that between Europe and Indo-Pacific partners, particularly South Korea and Japan. As security of Europe and Indo-Pacific regions are becoming increasingly interconnected, as North Korea has been supporting Russia's war efforts directly with weapons and trips, and while China has supported the Russian economy by buying Russian natural resources and supply dual-use goods relevant to Russia's war efforts, at the same time, European governments increasingly view China as a strategic competitor, and are seeking to reduce dependencies on China and restrict cooperation in defence and security technologies, as Dr. Bansheer's 2025 IASS report has suggested. Additionally, both European and Indo-Pacific allies face growing uncertainty over whether Washington has the will and capacity to supply them with weapons, as it's expanding significant quantities of their weapon systems in its war against Iran. That gives US allies an additional incentive to fight. As a result, China and the United States have co-opted the Indo-Pacific partnership, which has been a very positive initiative to diversify suppliers and cooperate more closely with one another. South Korea is already contributing to that diversification in Europe, and Japan could increasingly do so as well. In April this year, Japan significantly loosened its defence equipment export restrictions, opening greater possibilities for international defence industrial cooperation. At this summit, however, Indo-Pacific partners were not a significant part of this transition, as they have also been a key part of the transition process. However, Europe's defence industrial capacity has been a key factor in building strong European capabilities. Of course, building stronger European capabilities should indeed be the long-term objective, but defence industrial capacity cannot be created overnight, and while Europe rebuilds and expands its own defence industrial base, it has significant and urgent capability gaps that need to be filled today. And European partners such as South Korea and Japan can contribute during that transition, while Europe in turn has technologies and capabilities that can also benefit its Asian partners. So I personally hope to see more discussion of defence cooperation between Europe and its Indo-Pacific partners going forward. James, the Prague Defence Summit Strategic Dossier Defending Europe in a New Era describes defence self-reliance as unfinished business and points to real industrial progress, but it also pointed to persistent bottlenecks in supply chains, lead times, and skilled labour. From a logistics and sustainment perspective, how significant are those bottlenecks and are they getting enough attention relative to the headline spending numbers? How did you view the conversations at this year's AAWS Prague Defence Summit, and did it give you any confidence that those industrial constraints are being taken seriously enough? Some of these issues on security of supply, as you just highlighted, labour shortages, really do matter if you're looking to ramp up and sustain a defence industrial production. They featured in a way throughout many of these sessions. When you're talking about NATO's land forces, you've got to secure and supply. James: You've got to secure and supply the material and the ammunition for them, and then defence industrial sustainment more broadly. Of course, all of that infused those discussions. The answer has to be sort of up to a point in terms of how these are being taken seriously. They're being taken seriously in that they're being acknowledged, but actually doing something about these challenges in such a way that you can produce resilient infrastructures, if that's the right way of putting it, that's a much harder task. And in a way, it's because they're just really difficult things to talk about. When you're talking about budget figures, there's a quantifiable number that you can discuss, even though, of course, there's a lot that goes on under the hood in terms of what countries actually count when they count their defence spending figures, the ones that they declare to, for instance, NATO. But we're talking about the harder to fix issues, for instance, supply chain problems, labour shortages. They're just not so quantifiable. Securing adequate supplies of products, and before that, securing the workforce to produce adequate supplies of finished materials and goods from which you make defence products, so to say, and securing the workforce to manufacture them, remains essential to ramping up production and sustaining it. It's really, really important. The problem is it takes a very long time to address those issues, to generate the workforce, to train the workforce, to sustain them, to give them enough work to have their employment sustained such that you don't have skill fade, people move to other sectors, et cetera, et cetera. And it takes action across government departments. It's not just a defence job. Often these, it will be an education and training task. It's something for, going back to the whole of government issue. It's a broader coordination challenge within states, but then you've got the problem across states as well, where talk about supply chains, for instance. You've got conversations that are happening and need to happen between states about the degree to which they friendshore and onshore their supplies. We've seen all of these tensions about China's securitisation of raw materials and things like that. That's playing out into the European defence space. The conversations, I think, still really need to happen about, well, who's actually responsible for that? If you're looking at securing these, is it companies or is it countries? And how much risk are countries, if they're doing it, willing to take in terms of friendshoring and onshoring, or as is the case with some of them, still relying on the global networks of supply. And we've seen the pinch points that can arise in that and people have highlighted could arise more in future. Yes, the industrial constraints are being taken seriously, but addressing them and fixing them is a long-term task that requires consistent attention. The dossier suggests that the foundation for a more capable European pillar of NATO is now in place, but stresses that, as you say, the pace needs to increase. Given what you've found on the logistical challenges, railways, sea lift, fuel supply, command architecture and others, is the pace actually accelerating fast enough? The pace to meet what challenge? If you think about some of the timelines that are being posed in terms of a potential Russian challenge to NATO member states, the degree to which the Russians are able to reconstitute and what they could have the capability to do, that's going to be a big challenge. And I think that's going to be a big to do by a certain time period. Some senior military officials across Europe will put sort of 2030s, early 2030s, 2030 in some cases as the forcing number. And then you look at some of the issues that you've just highlighted in terms of those logistical challenges. Yes, command transformation has taken place within NATO in the sense of establishment of JSEC a few years ago, Joint Support and Enabling Command. NATO is now pushing a lot of the support structures that you would need in terms of support for high intensity warfare, medical evacuation at scale, all of that sort of stuff is now forming part of core NATO planning activity. So yes, some of these architectural and structural changes are taking place such that could support military activity on a large scale where it needed. But then the broader sustainability challenges that you've identified, railway, sea lift, fuel supply, they take a long time to fix. The EU highlighted it in a dossier actually, the EU identified that many roads in its member states are unsuitable for the transit of main battle tanks. So that's probably, I don't know what their metric was in terms of judging weights. But if you're looking at some of the Abrams, I think it's about 70 tonnes or something like that, then you've got the heavy equipment transporter it's on. You need the bridges and roads that are able to take that weight. Then you need main supply routes that are able to take military convoys and potentially handle things like civilian traffic moving back from an area of military operations. Building in this sort of resilience and redundancy, you've got to be able to take that weight. And you've got to be able to take that weight back. And that redundancy is something that hasn't really been looked at for decades in NATO member states and across Europe. Fixing this is a long-term challenge. It's the same with railways. The dossier again identified some of the gauge changes that still exist in Eastern Europe. Rail Baltico in the Baltic states is trying to move towards standard European rail gauges. So you don't have to transship equipment, et cetera, et cetera, to new flatbeds, but it takes time. Sealift are the points of disembarkation able to handle the military throughput at the same time as handling all the civilian freight traffic that these ports have to cope with. And it is the case, as the dossier identified, that a number of the principal European ports of disembarkation are also the main civilian freight terminals. That equals a problem if you've got a lot of kit moving through there. And of course, all this stuff needs to be defended. And there is progress in all of these. These are all being looked at. There's a lot of work to be done. Some of these shortfalls are now identified, but making the change is harder because it takes a long time and it's just difficult in terms of getting all the government departments, the nations agreed on what the standard requirements are, putting the money in place and then just getting on and building. But as I said, there is progress across these areas and then in fuel supply, which is one of the others that you mentioned. That's an area where at the moment, you know, NATO's bulk fuel supply stops at the old Cold War border. But now there was a commitment, a funding commitment, to get the fuel supply to the old Cold War border. There was a commitment of about 27 billion euros, I think, at the NATO summit earlier this year to move that supply line further east. So you've actually got the more secure, protected fuel distribution networks. The bigger challenge, you know, bringing all of this together, I suppose, is that the most serious of all these physical shortfalls are the ones that take the longest time to fix. And that's where you have the timeline challenge. Does the West plan to address and fix these logistical challenges, meet the potential threat timeline? And that's a harder question to decide on an answer that there is enough being done, because that all depends on the timelines that we take as fact. So looking ahead, what issue from this year's WWS Prague Defense Summit do you think will matter most over the next year? Lami? I think one of the most important issues to watch over the next year will be Europe's ability to strengthen its integrated air and missile defense systems and also counter UAS, counter drone capabilities, which were mentioned several times in the past. So I think that's one of the most important issues to watch over the next year. So I think one of the most important issues to watch over the next year. during the summit as one of the most critical capability gaps in Europe today. Europe's demand for air defense systems has increased significantly as European countries have transferred their systems to Ukraine, while simultaneously confronting growing threats by Russia themselves. At the same time, supplies from the United States are uncertain. Europe does possess capable indigenous systems, but production capacity remains constrained. And there are still important gaps in particularly against ballistic missiles and long-range missiles. countries from outside and learning lessons in terms of production and agility, and that's ROK, other non-regional providers, including defense industries from Ukraine, learning the right lessons from Ukraine's industrial experience, aligning programs, Lamy mentioned IMD, you know, and County UAS and stuff like that. There are a number of DPS initiatives, deep precision strike initiatives underway in Europe, there are a number of integrated air and missile defense initiatives underway, aligning them, so we reduce duplication and deliver capability at the right speed is going to be key. And then making real progress on interoperability. And as was discussed at the summit, also interchangeability, interoperability, so that forces have common operating pictures, common procedures are refined and exercised between states, but also on the interchangeability, making sure that as there are initiatives underway on this at the moment, such that there's reduced friction between states in that, say, the military materiel, the ammunition, etc, etc, that will be positioned forward for alliance defense, because allies and partners know that blowing in follow on forces could be very difficult. There's a lot of stress also, as was discussed at the defense summit about the positioning of forward land forces in Europe's east. I think one of the key things that emerged from all of the plenaries was that resilience. So it's the wider efforts and the wider societal or civil preparedness that's needed in order to make sure that those funding increases are effective. On the other hand, including plenary Ambassador Whittaker, Permanent Secretary to NATO for the US, did say, don't increase spending for spending's sake, spend it effectively. And in order to support that spending, the other element of the NATO pledge, that 1.5% is really crucial to ensure that there is wider societal preparedness and resilience for any crises that emerge. And it's interesting to see that message now spread across Europe. On next year's summit, there might be more of a focus on this, as well as obviously the event that IISS against NATO will be. I think what struck me in preparing the dossier was that the active duty personnel figures for their land forces, which are both army and the marines, for example, had effectively flatlined over the last decade. So despite the warnings of the annexation of Crimea, the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 22, active duty land force personnel in Europe remained stagnant across its totality. There are some exceptions to that. Poland has almost doubled the size of its army. Latvia, Lithuania have also made large expansions to their land forces. But for every expansion, there was also a reduction in other states. The numbers, while I say flatlined, in actual fact, the number of active duty land forces amongst European states between 2016 and 2026 actually declined by 7,000 personnel. Despite, like I say, significant Russian operations in Ukraine to varying degrees. That would be an indicator to watch in the next 12 months period. Whilst procurement orders and checks have been cut to procure equipment and capabilities, those all depend on factories to churn them out to deliver those and for those to be integrated. Whereas the numbers of personnel can be addressed relatively quickly if governments and societies choose to increase that area of capability. So I think that's an early indicator of how seriously Europe is taking its defense will be the state of those land forces in the next 12 months. That's all we have time for today. So thank you, Lamy, Ruben, Fenella, James for sharing your insights. And thank you all for listening. We hope you enjoyed the episode. You can find more information on the topics discussed today in our show notes, including the latest double I double S Prague Defense Summit strategic dossier, the defense of Europe in a new era and assessment. For further analysis and coverage of this year's double I double S Prague Defense Summit, visit the double I double S website at double I double s.org. Please do follow rate and subscribe to Sound Strategic wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts to keep up to date with all the latest episodes. Thank you and see you next time.