During last year’s JAPCC Conference theme, Dominance Disrupted? The Future of Air Superiority, we challenged the NATO Joint Air and Space Power community to examine the future of Joint Air and Space Power based on one uncomfortable premise: the era of NATO’s air power dominance is over. Those discussions often gravitated towards our air power tools: technologies, capabilities and systems to generate effects and regain the air power advantage.
This year, the JAPCC expands its focus away from the tools and towards the workspace. In particular, we look to the edge: NATO’s many flanks, fronts, and frontiers. The 2026 JAPCC Conference theme, Air Power at the Edge: Securing NATO’s New Frontiers, treats the edge as more than the edge of the battlespace. It is the periphery across dimensions, the obscure or distant places in which defence and deterrence are most challenging. It is geographic, extending operational reach into the High North, the Southern approaches, and the Indo-Pacific. It is vertical, beyond traditional altitude boundaries into near-space. It is cognitive, where, despite the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) the human mind remains our ultimate asymmetric advantage. And it is digital and logistical, where power must be sustained in austere environments and along contested supply and energy networks.
As we look to the edges and examine Alliance vulnerabilities, we should quickly come to a reasonable but uncomfortable conclusion: we don’t know when, where and how the next crisis or conflict will arise.
This is not a new problem. In 1941, American attention was fixed on the Atlantic and a war in Europe; the blow fell in the Pacific. In 2001, an Alliance built for large-scale ground war in Central Europe embarked on a protracted irregular warfare campaign in Central Asia. Speaking at West Point in 2011, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put the record plainly when it comes to predicting the next conflict: ‘since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right.’1 He was speaking about the US military, but the observation endures. Futures practitioners state it more sharply still: the image of the most likely future has historically proved to be the one least likely to occur.2
After nearly two decades of attempting to forge a peaceful, strategic partnership with Russia, NATO is clear-eyed about the Russian threat. The Alliance’s attention has refocused on Russia, and particularly on the Eastern Flank, because it is the most plausible flashpoint, the one with the clearest historical pattern and the most legible warning signs. But in our efforts to counter the threat we know, we must also keep our eyes fixed on the horizon, scanning for those that aren’t yet fully in focus. Fixation on one scenario should not come at the expense of the multitude of potential contingencies, but those invested in a prevailing paradigm tend to discount the evidence that the paradigm is about to break.3
NATO is not unaware of the multi-vector threat. The 360-degree approach formally commits the Alliance to watch every direction and every domain at once; that commitment is not in question. But strategy does not necessarily beget disciplined execution. Around the edges and far from the Eastern Flank, the Alliance’s focus thins. NATO will inevitably have to respond to a crisis or mobilise for conflict, and as a defensive Alliance, it will likely do so without first-mover advantage.
The case for prioritising the Eastern Flank is strong; the force posture, the signals of intent and the historical pattern are real and demand NATO’s diligence. However, weaker signals persist. The Indo-Pacific, the High North and cyber and grey-zone threats and vulnerabilities are too real to dismiss, even in the face of what seems most urgent. Underlying tensions among the 32 members over what is most important and most deserving of finite national capacity complicate this further. From Norway to Poland to Türkiye to Italy, and across the Atlantic to North America, the Alliance holds several views on what constitutes the premier threat to the Euro-Atlantic area, and they are all right. And wrong. Therefore, NATO’s challenge is to shape the preferred future against the full range of threat vectors, not only the most likely.
So where does the Alliance go from here? Balancing risk across all flanks, fronts, and frontiers starts with recognising that risk is not uniform. The difference is one of resolution: the nearer a threat, the sharper its outline and the narrower its likely form. The further out, the blurrier it becomes and the more shapes it might take. Russian aggression on NATO’s edges is close and sharply drawn due to the conflict in Ukraine. We know where and, roughly, how conflict may develop. But further out the scenarios are less well defined. An example is the High North, where vast distances and harsh environmental conditions prevent robust infrastructure and strain early warning capabilities. A global conflict stemming from People’s Republic of China (PRC) action against Taiwan is more distant still, and its direct implications for NATO less certain. A contested near-space environment or a logistics network that degrades under sustained pressure is harder to picture than a border crossing, and no less consequential. The risk lies not in prioritising the sharpest threat, but in mistaking resolution for magnitude, believing that what sits in front of us matters more than what exists on the edges. The answer is not to see further, but to be prepared and move faster.
Agility, or the readiness to act while maintaining the ability to pivot, is where Joint Air and Space Power enters the discussion.
Alliance Air and Space Power offers a critical strategic hedge. Its reach, speed and flexibility allow a rapid response to the threats we see most sharply, and its sensors are often what bring them into focus in the first place. But air power’s value compounds the further out the risk horizon extends, providing the agility to respond to unanticipated events, whether to defend, deter, manage crises or strengthen cooperative security.
Joint Air and Space Power creates the opportunity to secure these edges, but not automatically. At the geographic edge, the seam between NATO and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in the Arctic splits the region across two command structures. At the vertical edge, the seam between traditional air operations and the space domain sits too high for the airspace control architecture and too low for space treaties. At the digital edge, decision superiority in a degraded environment depends on processing at the tactical edge rather than a centralised headquarters. And at the cognitive edge, the pace of machine-speed decision-making is outrunning the human judgement it is meant to serve. NATO must close or connect each of these before an adversary tests them.
No single seam, or the frontier it represents, can absorb all of NATO’s attention. Our operational minds naturally gravitate towards focused, compartmentalised problems to solve. The future, however, requires a broad strategic examination.
With careful preparation, NATO can posture for multiple possible futures through the NATO Defence Planning Process (NDPP), strategy refinement, joint exercises and, above all, continuous horizon scanning that does not sacrifice the important for what seems to be the most urgent. How Joint Air and Space Power evolves to meet that 360-degree challenge is where this discussion begins. It takes the widest view: the flanks, fronts, and frontiers where the Alliance meets its limits. For each, the question worth asking is how clearly we see that edge and what Joint Air and Space Power can do to shape and deter approaching threats.
Those limits are where the Alliance’s new frontiers begin. Securing them means asking how air power can help achieve a preferred future across every edge on which NATO now operates. Shaping the future, rather than predicting it, takes a proactive approach to defence and constitutes the essence of deterrence. The 2026 JAPCC Air and Space Power Conference asks you to take a clear-eyed view of the future and keep watch at the edge of your scan pattern. The threats that matter most may be the ones we can barely see.
