Air Chief Marshal Sir John Stringer, NATO’s DSACEUR, told #DroneSummit2026 that if NATO’s 32 nations cannot outproduce Russia across drones and munitions, “frankly we should be shot.”
Speaking at the Drone Summit in Riga, Stringer, who took over as DSACEUR from Admiral Sir Keith Blount in March 2026, said NATO must become a genuinely proactive deterrent alliance rooted in constant domain operations capability. He spoke about the challenge around what he called four enoughs: “good enough, fast enough in terms of delivery, cheap enough, and just enough.”
Stringer said the collision of technology, concept, industry, adaptation and data lessons represents “the greatest accelerant in the changing character of warfare in at least 40 years,” and warned that command and control architectures require rapid overhaul in speed, resilience and capacity. He was direct about the need for offensive as well as defensive capability. “You cannot be defensive unless you have a good offense,” he said. “It goes against the tenets of military thinking, practice, and experience over centuries.”
A fundamental cultural shift in procurement is also required, Stringer argued. “We need to get people to be comfortable with procurement cycles which are far, far faster than what they have been brought up in,” he said, adding that the alliance needs to be testing, adjusting, learning and procuring in cycles measured in weeks and months rather than years and decades. He drew on a visit to Eastern Europe the previous week, where he met Ukrainian defence companies, none of which were more than four years old and none of which had been established in a traditional defence context, describing them as deeply impressive.
Drone investment alone is insufficient without corresponding investment in communications, targeting, intelligence and command and control infrastructure, Stringer warned. “You can buy as many drones as you like, but if you’ve not invested in your communication and information systems, your targeting, your intelligence and your C2, then you don’t actually have a balanced force.”
Industrial capacity underpins everything, he said. NATO’s 32 nations must be able to replace losses faster than they are consumed, and if the alliance went into conflict with a stockpile of one million munitions and drones of all types, the industrial base must be capable of replacing them at the rate they are expended.
Pointing to Ukraine as proof of what is achievable even in the most difficult circumstances, he said the country is on track to outproduce Russia despite starting from a position of producing only in the thousands in 2022. “If we can’t do that across 32 nations, then frankly we should be shot,” he said.
Stringer is the first RAF officer to hold the DSACEUR post since 1984 and only the third RAF officer in history to serve in the role, which is always held by a British officer.
