NATO’s North Atlantic Council has approved the alliance’s common funding plan for the coming years and a major investment in fuel infrastructure.
The Council approved the 2027-2031 Common Funding Resource Plan on Wednesday 22 July, setting out how the alliance will invest in shared priorities over the next five years. According to NATO, the plan gives allies a forward-looking picture of expected resource needs and is intended to ensure common funding keeps pace with the alliance’s increased level of ambition in a more challenging security environment.
As part of the decision, allies agreed the 2027 funding ceilings for NATO’s Military Budget, Civil Budget and Security Investment Programme, raising total common funding to up to €6.5 billion.
The Council also approved the NATO Fuel Supply Chain Capability Programme Plan, a €27 billion investment to modernise the alliance’s existing fuel storage and distribution infrastructure. According to NATO, it will support new facilities, including pipelines, in the eastern and south-eastern part of the alliance, and ensure NATO forces have the energy supplies they need for warfighting readiness.
NATO said common funding supports the capabilities and infrastructure that help keep one billion citizens safe, strengthening deterrence and defence, enabling operations and missions, and underpinning the alliance’s command and control processes. The plan also provides resources for priority support to Ukraine, including the NATO Security Assistance and Training to Ukraine initiative and the NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training and Education Centre.
Common funding is the pool of money to which all members contribute according to an agreed cost-share formula, used for assets and infrastructure that serve the alliance as a whole rather than any single nation. It sits apart from the defence spending targets that individual members meet through their own national budgets, and its expansion reflects the broader increase in allied military investment agreed in recent years.
This can’t be right because I read that NATO can’t fight in Europe without US logistics and here the US only contributes 15% of this budget, the same as Germany 15% and slightly more than the UK on 10%.
27 Billion fuel plan? Pretty average prices at the pumps now!
NATO common funding is essentially the “rent, utilities, and shared Wi-Fi” for running the alliance as an organisation. The heavy lifting, buying the actual tanks, flying the jets, and fielding the armies, is paid for separately by each nation through their own domestic defence budgets. Right now, if Washington completely flipped the logistics switch off, European forces could fight, but their operational tempo, reach, and coordination would degrade rapidly.
The % are based on a GNI based cost/share formula legaly capped to prevent over burden. however … the actual logistics, warfighting capability, and defence spending happen at the national level, where the US spends nearly a trillion dollars a year, providing roughly 60% of all combined NATO defence spending and the overwhelming backbone of heavy airlift, strategic intelligence, and global logistics that make large scale operations possible.
So lets not knock the US for having our backs, even if the idea that Europe functions as an outer defence line or a strategic buffer for the United States. The calculation has always been simple for them; it’s cheaper, safer, and better for US economic and physical security to project power and contain threats thousands of miles away across the Atlantic than to wait for them to reach American shores. Maintaining bases, missile defences, and troops in Europe secures vital transatlantic trade lanes, projects stability into neighbouring unstable regions like the Middle East and North Africa, and prevents a hostile hegemon from dominating the European landmass … something that historically dragged the U.S. into two devastating world wars.
Yes! currently there is an ***** handling the levers at the moment, trust has been permanently fractured, but Trump will eventually kick the proverbial bucket at some point and diplomacy will hopefully return. However … future presidents, whether traditional Republicans or mainstream Democrats; it has long been a bipartisan mandate to expect the Europeans to carry the heavy load for their own regional defence. Future presidents may return to mature discourse and use polite diplomatic phrasing instead of public insults, but the demand will remain “We will help, but you must pay for and man the ramparts first.” … seems fair to me.
How things have changed since nordstream flowed from Russia.
Can we leverage that fund to increase our fuel resilience and supply of fuel to our Scottish bases which might become fall back positions for Nordic and Scandi ccountries as well as re-inforcing units arriving from Canada and US?