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“My center is giving way, my right is retreating, excellent situation, I attack.” French Gen. Ferdinand Foch pronounced these desperate words in September 1914 as German troops massed 25 miles from Paris for their final assault. The same words could be used today by analysts and diplomats still willing to promote greater cooperation between the United States and its European allies. Just like Foch’s lines, international arms development seems in full retreat as European leaders express unease about their dependence on American weapons and technologies — from the F-35 to digital services. And yet, the case for more defense-industrial cooperation has arguably never been stronger. What we might increasingly see, however, is cooperation between smaller groups of selected partners for limited but strategic industrial sectors. Such “minilateral” frameworks could hold the key to NATO allies successfully ramping up their capabilities, not least in the technologically complex and costly realm of shipbuilding.

NATO’s Neglected Child

NATO is currently faced with a degraded security environment, with Russia’s ongoing assault against Ukraine as well as continuing pressure in Eastern Europe and the Arctic. Confronted with intensifying competition with Russia and China, NATO’s strategic posture has evolved toward forward presence and rapid response. The shift reflects not only the growing likelihood of conventional conflict in Europe and the North Atlantic, but also an upsurge in attacks on critical undersea infrastructure such as telecommunications cables and energy pipelines.

Alongside demands for increased burden-sharing from the Trump administration, this worsening outlook has driven dramatic changes in the defense policies of many NATO members. While some of them had long underinvested in their armed forces, the alliance collectively pledged to increase defense and security spending to five percent of GDP by 2035. But many of the same countries face severe financial constraints with new tariffs, high inflation, public debt burdens, and energy costs hampering their ability to deliver on these pledges, while their atrophied industries seem hardly capable of absorbing the sudden increase in demand.

These shortcomings are even more acute for one of the most complex and expensive sectors of defense industry: naval shipbuilding. As NATO continues to adapt to an era of heightened geopolitical tension, its naval forces are both a strategic cornerstone and a point of vulnerability. Russia’s submarine fleet, China’s expanding blue-water navy, and non-state threats such as the Houthis threaten the sea lanes upon which NATO depends for security and on which the global economy relies for trade. Maritime power underpins the alliance’s ability to project force, deter adversaries, and secure vital sea lines of communication between North America and Europe.

The post-Cold War decades saw many NATO members redirect resources from maritime forces toward land-based counter-terrorism, peacekeeping, and crisis management operations as the alliance’s naval command structure abandoned the regionalization and specialization that used to characterize it. The result has been ageing fleets, maintenance backlogs, and reduced industrial capacity to deliver replacements or upgrades on time. Fleet downsizing has left fewer ships available for deployments, limiting NATO’s operational flexibility and its ability to sustain a persistent presence in contested waters.

Despite the new spending increases announced by NATO, as well as ongoing multinational defense projects, naval procurement is still conspicuously absent from the alliance’s agenda, save for limited investment in unmanned systems. This omission underscores a key reality: NATO’s maritime muscle is overwhelmingly dependent on the national programs of its three largest and most capable naval powers — the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. But their ability to project maritime power is confronted with major challenges.

Making the Case for Minilateralism

The U.S. Navy, while still the world’s most capable, sees ships retiring faster than they are replaced. At the same time, its mission includes securing the North Atlantic, developing Arctic operations, fighting in the Middle East, and balancing China’s blue-water capabilities in the Indo-Pacific. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy remains technologically advanced but constrained by its small size. Delays in replacing Type 23 frigates, coupled with persistent technical issues, reduce the availability of both major surface combatants and submarines. Similarly, the French Navy is a capable and globally deployable force but also limited in size and redundancy. Its single aircraft carrier creates vast availability gaps during maintenance, while the number of high-end escorts and submarines is insufficient for sustained operations across multiple theaters.

Challenges in the shipbuilding sector severely compound these operational shortfalls. Demand for new warships has fallen sharply since the Cold War, with the current combined fleets of the United States (approximately 300 ships), the United Kingdom (approximately 70 ships), and France (approximately 80 ships) being significantly smaller than the fleet that the U.S. Navy alone could field in the early 1990s (approximately 600 ships). This reduction has concurrently shrunk the industrial base and eroded the workforce. The United Kingdom’s River Clyde shipbuilding industry, for instance, has seen a significant drop in available workers, as highly skilled welders, electricians, and marine engineers are attracted away to other industries such as offshore wind and transport manufacturing. The United States experiences similar retention issues.

These challenges make cooperation between the three allies essential. Their outsized combined impact within NATO, both in terms of operational and industrial capacity, should make them natural partners in their quest to build more and better naval capabilities. But while larger multinational shipbuilding programs could, in theory, spread costs and achieve economies of scale, they face a perennial challenge in reconciling divergent national requirements. Projects with too few partners lack critical mass, while projects with too many partners face potentially difficult discussions on common standards, stalling progress from design to production. What remains is cooperation among a few willing partners in small, flexible, and goal-oriented — or “minilateral” — frameworks.

Minilateral arms development is nothing new, although its track record is mixed. AUKUS, the most prominent recent example, is confronted with capacity challenges and the daunting task of coordinating the most complex industrial project of all: nuclear submarines. The Organisation for Joint Armament Cooperation between Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom has also coordinated multiple projects beyond submarines. France and Italy originally partnered with Britain for the development of the Horizon-class frigate, but the latter withdrew in the face of delays and disagreements on specifications. Other initiatives were more successful. The Franco-Italian Multi-Mission European Frigate program was limited to two countries and saw reduced orders and cost-per-unit overruns, but eventually delivered a modular frigate popular on the export market. The United Kingdom’s Type 26 was originally designed for the Royal Navy but was quickly sold also to Canada and Australia to become a genuine multinational endeavor. Recently, the Type 26 was selected by Norway to replace its Fridtjof Nansen-class frigates. This program now supports a large share of these countries’ respective shipbuilding sectors.

Opportunities abound for this kind of cooperation between the United States, the United Kingdom, and France in principle. Their respective navies are currently in the concept phases of multiple large-scale acquisition programs that will define their force structures in the coming decades. These include the DDG(X) and Type 83 destroyer programs, the amphibious assault Multi-Role Strike Ship, the PANG aircraft carrier, and a series of uncrewed systems projects. Each of these projects is likely to encounter the same limits of their respective national shipbuilding industries and likely cost overruns, at times of constrained financial capacities.

Conditions of Success

The key to successful minilateral shipbuilding programs seems to lie in a series of factors including design modularity, industrial efficiency, and the proper setting of — and sticking to — shared requirements.

Design modularity helps parties to adapt platforms to specific operational needs and to retain a degree of technological exclusivity by integrating systems or sub-systems from their preferred suppliers, potentially keeping part of the supply chain and support closer to home. For instance, Canada’s Type 26 program (“River class”) uses a British platform but almost exclusively American systems for better North American Aerospace Defense Command integration. Norway’s version will likely share most systems with its Royal Navy counterpart.

Industrial efficiency is the most obvious argument for a minilateral shipbuilding initiative with the prospect of better alignment of supply and demand. The perennial challenge for American, British, and French shipbuilders is to manage peaks and troughs. Some regularly see influxes of contracts they cannot absorb while others compete for too few contracts, insufficient in number and value to sustain their activities. Bigger and longer contracts, dynamically shared across a wider network of shipbuilders, would be a boon for companies eager to increase their output and skill base.

Finally, shared requirements must have a basis in the strategic outlook of the participating countries, rooted in a common set of challenges. America, Britain, and France conveniently share a broad maritime strategic outlook that sees naval power as essential for deterrence, global power projection, and the security of vital sea lines of communication. All three countries emphasize the importance of carrier strike groups, nuclear-powered submarines, and advanced surface fleets as key instruments of power underpinning NATO’s credibility. Crucially, they all also recognize that Russia’s naval activity in the Atlantic and Arctic, alongside China’s growing blue-water navy or non-state threats, makes the maritime domain a contested space.

Despite the potential, minilateral shipbuilding agreements would be confronted with immense hurdles rooted in national strategic cultures and domestic politics. France tends to emphasize strategic autonomy, including at the European level, and the ability to act independently if needed. The United Kingdom is keener to rely on the United States on military matters but also tends to prefer a Euro-centered strategic outlook, having pledged a “NATO first” approach in its latest Strategic Defence Review. And the United States also tends to prioritize its industrial supremacy by jealously protecting its technologies. Even in the best of times, regulations such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations or the Buy American Act in the United States or the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe could render cooperation cumbersome and fractious. Furthermore, NATO allies have grown skeptical of multinational acquisition after a series of delays, technical issues, and cost overruns plagued past projects such as the NH90 helicopter, the A400M transport aircraft, and the Alliance Ground Surveillance drone. Any minilateral project should therefore anticipate pushback from the wider NATO.

A strong case can and should nevertheless be made for a readjustment of priorities enabling minilateral shipbuilding cooperation. For the United States, the prospect of larger and more capable British and French navies operating from the North Atlantic to the Persian Gulf would serve America’s own stated strategic interests, as it refocuses its own forces towards the Indo-Pacific. Minilateralism with European countries would also not be incompatible with similar initiatives with Asian partners. For France, a minilateral approach would equally not be incompatible with the goal of reinforcing European defense. France and the United Kingdom could further establish themselves as naval shipbuilding hubs, retaining skilled workers and building up facilities through significant investments, while leaving countries like Germany or Poland to take on greater responsibility in other endeavors such as land systems.

Conclusion

NATO’s maritime readiness gap is not simply a matter of numbers but also a question of credibility. In an environment where adversaries are investing heavily in naval capabilities and contesting critical maritime domains, the alliance’s reliance on three overstretched national fleets is a vulnerability that could limit deterrence and operational reach. Without coordinated investment in shipbuilding capacity, workforce regeneration, and fleet modernization among some of its main players, NATO risks having a maritime strategy that outpaces the means to deliver it.

The lack of goodwill among long-time allies, both rooted in long-term trends and current affairs, should not be the end of cooperation but the start of its rethinking. As Foch pronounced his daring words, the ferocious Battle of the Marne ensued, during which the combined French and British armies repelled in extremis the German advance. Victory partly came from an unprecedented combination of airborne reconnaissance and the ad hoc requisition of hundreds of taxicabs to ferry reinforcements from Paris. By thinking outside the box, the allies cheated fate and gave themselves a chance to fight another day. Such a disruptive approach might be required today to overcome the new threats faced by these old allies.

Nicolas Jouan is senior analyst at RAND Europe.

Image: Lewis Clarke via Wikimedia Commons