The most senior military officer in NATO has spoken of the utility of “pre-emptive strike” as a “defensive action” because of the pressure he predicts there will be on the alliance being able to show credible deterrence in the future.
Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, who replaced Admiral Rob Bauer as the chair of of the NATO military committee earlier this year has spoken of the effectiveness demonstrated by enhanced, active deterrence against Russia by the alliance this year and implicitly called for consideration to be given to going further.
In remarks reported to have been made to London’s globalist-orientated financial broadsheet The Financial Times, former Harrier pilot and warship commander Admiral Dragone specifically cited the infrastructure sabotage operations of Russia’s ‘dark fleet’ of oil tankers against European states in 2023 and 2024, which evaporated after NATO’s Operation Baltic Sentry was launched. As reported in 2024, commercial vessels associated with Russia and China frequently severed underwater power and data cables by dragging their anchors on the sea floor, an act that could be explained away as an innocent mistake on an individual basis and yet which happened with astonishing regularity for over a year.
Responding to what European NATO nations plainly saw as deliberate acts of sabotage in a campaign of hybrid warfare short of all-out-war, the alliance deployed warships, surveillance aircraft, and drones to detect and deter. Admiral Dragone said of the effectiveness of that more proactive posture: “From the beginning of Baltic Sentry, nothing has happened. So this means that this deterrence is working”.
The cyber realm is another area where Dragone suggested changes could manifest. He said: “On cyber, we are kind of reactive. Being more aggressive or being proactive instead of reactive is something that we are thinking about”.
Ultimately, Admiral Dragone said, “we are studying everything”.
The NATO alliance could go even further, he is reported to have said, moving “further away from our normal way of thinking and behaviour” to consider attack as a potential form of defence. The Admiral told the paper: “How deterrence is achieved — through retaliation, through pre-emptive strike — this is something we have to analyse deeply because there could be in the future even more pressure on this”.
Russia has a built-in advantage in these regards presently because as a de facto dictatorship it is able to act boldly and without ethical concerns. Admiral Dragone said NATO and its members had “much more limits than our counterpart because of ethics, because of law, because of jurisdiction. It is an issue. I don’t want to say it’s a loser position, but it is a harder position than our counterparts’.”
NATO’s members being bound by these concerns means “being more aggressive compared with the aggressivity of our counterpart” throws up issues like ” legal framework, jurisdictional framework, who is going to do this?”, he mused.
In recent years the military committee chairman’s position has been one associated with robust rhetoric on the possibility of, and the need to deter, war and particularly with Russia. As reported, the previous incumbent Admiral Rob Bauer frequently used his platform to warn European NATO allies to prepare for a “wartime scenario”, and that such an event would come with some hardship in order to prevail.
In 2024, Admiral Bauer warned a potential Russia-NATO conflict would be a “whole of society event” and that the West was not yet ready to manage that. He said of the importance of getting the public ready for conflict: “the people, they have to understand they play a role. Society is part of the solution… you need to have water, you need to have a radio on batteries, you need to have a flashlight with batteries to make sure you can survive the first 36 hours. Things like that, that’s simple things but it starts there.”
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