NATO countries urgently need to rethink how they ensure their defence, but many have yet to fully grasp the scale of the challenge, particularly when it comes to boosting weapons production, a top NATO officer said on Wednesday.
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow has put its economy on a war footing and boosted its weapons production.
"Russia has changed," Pierre Vandier, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, told a security and defence forum in Paris.
"We need to be prepared for a new enemy — if we don't, we will experience what the Gulf experienced," he said, referring to Iran's retaliatory attacks on the Gulf nations after the United States and Israel attacked the Islamic republic on February 28.
Vandier said that NATO should adapt to produce more weapons faster, urging allies to make "the right choices".
"It's not a question of money. It's a question of speed," he said in English.
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He stressed the need for NATO to respond to challenges such as Russia and Iran mass-producing drones, whose capacities were rapidly evolving.
"It's a moment of truth for all of us," Vandier said.
"The question for us is not to do more of the same, it is to see what we need to do to maintain our security."
He said NATO countries were "not organised" for mass production of weapons, unlike their adversaries.
He said the military bloc was also too slow, with allies taking between two and three years to "define what we need".
Fabien Mandon, France's chief of the defence staff, has said the country must be ready in the next three or four years for a clash with Russia.
The French Institute of International Relations, a top think tank, warned in November that Europe could struggle to quickly produce enough weapons in case of a direct confrontation with Russia.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
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