A senior NATO commander has warned that Western nations lack the industrial capacity to produce weapons at the scale needed to counter modern threats, days after alliance members pledged tens of billions of dollars towards new air and missile defence systems. French Admiral Pierre Vandier, NATO's top transformation commander, said the war in Ukraine and conflicts in the Middle East have exposed serious shortfalls in the West's ability to manufacture munitions and defence systems fast enough, arguing that current arsenals and production lines were designed for a different era of warfare.

Vandier said "the math is not in favour of the West," highlighting that there is "no way to produce 50,000 Patriots a year" under existing industrial arrangements, illustrating the scale of the mismatch between demand and manufacturing capacity. He called for a fundamental redesign of Western weapons systems and defence supply chains to withstand attacks at the intensity now being seen in Ukraine, framing this as an urgent priority following NATO's recent commitment of significant new funding to air and missile defence.