NATO deterrence is still based on an old assumption that credibility comes mainly from visible military capability, exercises, and declaratory posture. Adversaries have moved past that assumption. Every time a government responds to a cyberattack, enforces a sanctions package, or coordinates a crisis across ministries, it produces information about how it would perform under real pressure, and adversaries read that information the way they read troop movements. This brief argues that institutional performance should be treated as a strategic signal in its own right. A government that responds slowly, implements unevenly, or abandons commitments under political strain broadcasts exploitable weakness, regardless of what its armed forces can do. Speed, coordination, follow-through, and consistency deter independently of military posture. There are three recommendations in this brief. NATO should write institutional performance explicitly into its resilience doctrine, build readiness indicators for institutions alongside existing military readiness metrics, and communicate that performance with the same discipline it applies to the Steadfast exercise series. 

The Problem: Deterrence Measured Too Narrowly 

Contemporary strategic competition increasingly unfolds below the threshold of armed conflict. Hybrid campaigns combine cyber operations, economic coercion, political interference, sabotage, and information operations to impose costs without triggering a conventional military response. (Hybrid CoE, n.d.) In this environment, the primary object of competition is no longer military forces, but state institutions. It looks like the Viasat satellite network going dark across Ukraine and parts of Europe hours before the 2022 invasion. It looks like a disinformation campaign shaping the first round of Romania's 2024 presidential election so effectively that the country's constitutional court annulled the result. (Atlantic Council 2024) None of these episodes required an armed attack in the Article 5 sense. They tested whether the targeted state's institutions could detect, attribute, decide, and respond before the damage compounded. Actions, such as cyber operations, economic coercion, sabotage, and political interference operate below the threshold that triggers a military response. Their success is based on institutional performance. 

NATO has spent the past decade investing heavily in the traditional instruments of deterrence: forward-deployed battlegroups, enhanced air policing, and  nuclear posture reviews. Resilience appears in NATO's Article 3 commitments and the seven baseline requirements agreed at the 2016 Warsaw Summit (NATO 2024), but it is still framed largely as a precondition not a deterrent signal. Adversaries calibrate hybrid campaigns against institutional weaknesses precisely because those weaknesses are rarely factored into how allies think about deterrence at all.

Institutional Performance as Strategic Signaling 

Institutional signaling is the observable performance of a state’s institutions, communicating to adversaries what that state can absorb, coordinate, and sustain under pressure. Resilience literature treats institutional capacity as something to protect: a precondition that keeps the state functional. This brief treats its visible performance as doing deterrent work directly, the way a missile test communicates something, whether or not the missile is ever used. Four dimensions determine how convincingly that signal works. They reinforce each other and an adversary reads all four at once.

1. Speed 

How quickly a government can move from detection to decision matters more than most deterrence literature acknowledges. Estonia's 2007 response to the coordinated cyberattacks that followed the relocation of the Bronze Soldier statue is instructive less for what happened during the attack than for what happened afterwards. (International Centre for Defence and Security 2019) The pace of that institutional response gave every subsequent adversary some information about the cost of testing Estonia again. When Poland and Lithuania faced the 2021 instrumentalization of migrants at the Belarusian border, both governments moved to declare states of emergency and adjust border procedures within days. (House of Commons Library 2021) The same logic applies to every occasion mentioned here. Whatever the merits of the specific measures, the speed itself signaled that these were not states that would be caught flat-footed by a manufactured crisis. 

2. Coordination 

A fast decision made by one ministry acting alone is a weaker signal than a quick decision that required several institutions to work together. Finland's comprehensive security model, which formally links government ministries, businesses, and civil society into a single preparedness structure, demonstrates that a coordinated state is harder to coerce. (Finnish Ministry of Defence 2025) An adversary calculating whether economic pressure will divide a government internally is making a bet about coordination capacity specifically. The UK's COBRA crisis mechanism exists to produce visible, cross-departmental coherence during a crisis, and its existence is part of what makes threats against the UK less attractive to test. (Institute for Government 2025) Interagency friction can also become visible during a crisis, particularly when ministries or intelligence services give contradictory public accounts.

3. Implementation 

Announcing a sanctions package is not the same as enforcing one. The EU's sanctions regime against Russia since 2022 shows how quickly credibility can erode at the implementation stage. (Council of the European Union 2024) The speed of the initial packages sent a significant signal. The persistent circumvention through third countries, the slow closing of loopholes in shipping and dual-use technology, and the uneven enforcement across member states have weakened the force of measure announced on paper. Persistent circumvention through third countries and uneven enforcement across member states have therefore reduced the credibility of some of these measures, while also giving Russia opportunities to adapt its sanctions-evasion methods.

4. Consistency 

Poland's rule-of-law disputes with the European Commission between 2015 and 2023 show how domestic political conflict can become external evidence. (European Commission 2017) Prolonged disputes over judicial independence gave outside actors a data point about the durability of domestic political consensus. The Baltic states offer a different record. Their sustained increase in defence spending across multiple changes of government, regardless of which coalition holds power, has shown that a commitment can survive electoral turnover. (OSW Centre for Eastern Studies 2024) Consistency is the dimension most exposed to domestic politics, and for that reason, it is often the most informative one to an adversary trying to judge whether current resolve will survive the next election cycle.

Why Hybrid Campaigns Target Institutions 

Hybrid campaigns work only because they can inflict real damage while staying under the threshold that triggers a military response. A state’s armed forces are largely irrelevant to whether a cyberattack on a hospital network is contained in hours or weeks; the adversary focuses on matters such as incident response capacity, public information management and the four dimensions above. When those dimensions fail visibly, the damage gives a very strong signal past the incident itself: it tells the adversary further pressure will be cheap, and it tells allies that the affected state may be the alliance’s weak link. In the hybrid domain, institutional credibility carries much of deterrence’s weight. 

Policy Recommendations 

1. Integrate institutional signalling into NATO’s resilience framework 

NATO’s resilience architecture already tracks most of the material this brief is concerned with, from the 2016 Warsaw baseline requirements through the 2021 Strengthened Resilience Commitment to the Resilience Committee established in 2022. (NATO 2021; NATO 2024) What it does not do is treat the visible performance of that material as a deterrent signal, distinct from its role as a precondition for military effectiveness. NATO’s resilience guidance should directly address how allies perform during a crisis. The Resilience Committee should assess institutional performance after major incidents specifically for its signalling value, alongside its existing recovery-focused mandate, and report those assessments to the North Atlantic Council. This requires no new capability and no new budget line, only a reframing of assessments NATO already runs, and it closes the doctrinal gap above. 

2. Develop institutional readiness indicators 

Military readiness is measured constantly: force generation timelines, equipment availability, and exercise performance. Institutional readiness gets nothing like the same rigour, despite being just as observable to adversaries. NATO should develop a small set of indicators that allies report on a comparable basis: time from incident detection to formal government decision, the share of announced sanctions or emergency measures that reaches full implementation within a defined window, the frequency and realism of cross-government coordination exercises, and continuity-of-government drill outcomes. These indicators, unlike much of the current baseline-requirements assessment, would produce numbers trackable over time and comparable across allies. Allies would gain an honest internal picture of where institutional signalling is weak before an adversary does, and NATO would gain a concrete basis for the public communication proposed in the next paragraph. 

3. Communicate institutional performance as deliberately as military exercises 

NATO already treats exercises like the Steadfast series as communication events, with press coverage, allied observers, and public messaging built into the planning. Successful institutional performance gets none of that. A fast, well-coordinated response rarely generates any public signal at all. That leaves adversaries to learn mainly from failures. If changed this could be used as an additional filar of modern deterrence. NATO and individual allies should select a small number of institutional successes each year, chosen using the readiness indicators above, and publicise them with the same deliberateness applied to military exercises: joint statements, allied press briefings, and public after-action summaries where security allows. Targeting adversary perception leaves them less prone to probe.

Conclusion 

Deterrence built only on military posture worked in the XX century, but not now. It stops short of where most contemporary pressure campaigns actually operate. Nowadays adversaries test institutions more so than armies. NATO should address it publicly and act on it, because we see more and more examples on how adversaries have been grading allied institutions for years. The July 2026 arrest of a Canadian intern at NATO's military headquarters in Belgium on alleged spying charges is a recent reminder that adversaries also seek access to the institutions around the alliance's armed forces. (CBC News 2026). The three recommendations here are a good start for eliminating that gap. Adversaries already read speed, coordination, and follow-through as intelligence. NATO should start reading them the same way and say so out loud. 

References

Atlantic Council. 2024. "Romania Annulled Its Presidential Election Results amid Alleged Russian Interference. What Happens Next?" Atlantic Council, December 6, 2024. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/romania-annulled-its-presidential-election-results-amid-alleged-russian-interference-what-happens-next/.

CBC News. 2026. "Canadian Intern at NATO Military Headquarters in Belgium Faces Spying Charges after Home, Workplace Search." CBC News, July 25, 2026. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-intern-nato-spying-9.7283752.

Council of the European Union. 2024. "Russia's War of Aggression against Ukraine: Comprehensive EU's 14th Package of Sanctions Cracks Down on Circumvention and Adopts Energy Measures." Council of the EU, June 24, 2024. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2024/06/24/russia-s-war-of-aggression-against-ukraine-comprehensive-eu-s-14th-package-of-sanctions-cracks-down-on-circumvention-and-adopts-energy-measures/.

European Commission. 2017. "Rule of Law: European Commission Acts to Defend Judicial Independence in Poland." European Commission, December 20, 2017. https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/just/items/611518.

Finnish Ministry of Defence. 2025. "Finland's Comprehensive Security Reinforced through New Security Strategy for Society." Ministry of Defence of Finland, January 16, 2025. https://defmin.fi/en/-/finland-s-comprehensive-security-reinforced-through-new-security-strategy-for-society.

House of Commons Library. 2021. "Migrant Crisis on Belarusian Border with EU." UK Parliament, November 15, 2021. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/migrant-crisis-on-belarusian-border-with-eu/.

Hybrid CoE. n.d. "Hybrid Threats as a Concept." The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats. Accessed August 18, 2026. https://www.hybridcoe.fi/hybrid-threats-as-a-phenomenon/.

Institute for Government. 2025. "COBR (COBRA)." Institute for Government, July 22, 2025. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/cobr-cobra.

International Centre for Defence and Security. 2019. "How Estonia Uses Cybersecurity to Strengthen Its Position in NATO." ICDS, May 27, 2019. https://icds.ee/en/how-estonia-uses-cybersecurity-to-strengthen-its-position-in-nato/.

NATO. 2021. "Strengthened Resilience Commitment." North Atlantic Treaty Organization, June 14, 2021. https://www.nato.int/en/about-us/official-texts-and-resources/official-texts/2021/06/14/strengthened-resilience-commitment.

NATO. 2024. "Resilience, Civil Preparedness and Article 3." North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Updated November 13, 2024. https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/deterrence-and-defence/resilience-civil-preparedness-and-article-3.

OSW Centre for Eastern Studies. 2024. "On the Warpath: The Development and Modernisation of the Baltic States' Armed Forces." OSW Commentary, June 6, 2024. https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2024-05-10/warpath-development-and-modernisation-baltic-states-armed.