How to actually share America’s defense burden with allies

The Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy, released with little fanfare earlier this year, makes an easy-to-grasp argument: America is stretched, simultaneous threats are real, and the United States cannot carry every burden alone. It calls for allies and partners to spend more, field more, and take greater responsibility in their regions. The logic is enticing: Defense and deterrence become more credible when coalitions can generate meaningful combat power quickly and sustain it over time.

Here’s the problem. You can’t “do more” if you don’t have the underlying capacity and resilience to take a punch and still function under duress. In modern conflict, the critical question is not only how much capability exists on paper, but whether militaries and societies can continue to operate through disruption, regenerate after damage, and keep fighting when key systems degrade. Burden-sharing will fail as a strategy if allied power is not actually usable under attack. This is the enabling layer of deterrence itself.

Strategies that ask allies to do more are only credible if they address how allies—and coalitions—will function when adversaries attack the connective tissue of war: energy, logistics, communications, and the digital systems that orchestrate them. This idea of staying power under pressure is deterrence by resilience.

Contemporary U.S. adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran prefer hybrid campaigns against U.S. allies because they can all-too-often achieve strategic objectives without the traditional costs and risks of immediate conventional escalation. Rather than opening with large-scale conventional military actions, adversaries aim to interrupt what makes allied militaries (and societies) function: power, fuel, ports, rail lines, bridges, communications networks, and the information systems that coordinate logistics and command. The purpose is not simply to cause discomfort or create headlines. It is to slow mobilization, fracture alliance cohesion, and create windows of opportunity in which a rapid fait accompli becomes possible.

Cyber operations are central to this hybrid approach of U.S. adversaries. Offensive cyber can disable or manipulate the digital systems that underpin transportation, energy distribution, port operations, fuel accounting, satellite and terrestrial communications, and the industrial base. Just as importantly, cyber can obscure attribution, complicate proportional response, and generate a fog of uncertainty that benefits the attacker. A coalition does not have to be defeated in the field if it can be delayed, paralyzed, or forced into indecision while its critical systems are degraded.

The reality should change how policymakers interpret burden-sharing. “Spend more” and “buy more” will not be enough. What matters is whether allied forces can move, communicate, fuel, repair, and fight through a sustained, cyber-enabled disruption campaign.

The credibility of deterrence on Europe’s eastern flank depends on speed and continuity of reinforcement. Forward presence matters, but the decisive variable is whether the alliance can surge forces and keep them moving after disruption. Rail chokepoints, bridges, tunnels, port cranes, fuel distribution nodes, and telecom networks are not civilian side notes; they are the operating system of reinforcement.

An adversary does not need to destroy Europe and NATO’s combat power to undermine deterrence. It can target the systems that turn available combat power into arriving combat power. A cyber-enabled sabotage campaign against rail dispatch systems, logistics software, port operations, or regional substations could delay movement long enough to present NATO with a stark choice: escalate quickly into a broader war under unfavorable conditions, or accept a slower, riskier response while facts on the ground harden.

Deterrence becomes brittle when it depends on a rapid timeline but rests on fragile infrastructure and untested cross-border procedures. A few days of delay can be strategically decisive—not because it ends the war, but because it changes the decision space.

Now consider the Indo-Pacific. In this region, distance is the structural constraint. Ports and runways are scarce and obvious targets. Logistics chains are long, complex, and heavily dependent on information systems. Cyber operations can disrupt shipping schedules, port throughput, fuel distribution, and maintenance pipelines without firing a shot. A partner can acquire high-end platforms and still see their effective value collapse early if bases lose power, fuel storage becomes inaccessible, port operations pause, or command-and-control becomes unreliable.

In that environment, the decisive advantage is not only who possesses more ships and missiles. It is who can keep operating, repairing, and resupplying when key nodes are contested and when networks are degraded. Deterrence rests on the coalition’s ability to sustain operations under stress and regenerate capability faster than an adversary can destroy or disable it.

If the federal government wants allies genuinely to carry more weight, it must prioritize and support allied resilience. Doing so will require a focused U.S. program of security cooperation and foreign assistance that helps allies and partners build the resilience needed to operate under attack. This would include increased funding, advise-and-assist, joint planning, exercises, and cyber cooperation. Such a shift does not require an open-ended commitment or a permanent subsidy, but it does require a time-bound and significant ramp up of U.S. support tied to clear priorities and allied co-investment.

U.S. support should treat cyber and resilience as a single integrated problem. Hardening physical infrastructure without hardening the digital systems that run it is insufficient. Building cyber defenses without addressing power, fuel, and repair capacity is equally insufficient. The objective is operational continuity: the ability to fight through disruption and recover quickly.

What would U.S. support for allied resilience look like in practice?

The US should work to make allied logistics hard to break, physically and digitally

The United States should help partners identify the handful of corridors and nodes that matter most for reinforcement and sustainment, then prioritize support to harden them, add redundancy, and pre-position repair capacity. This would include physical measures—bridge repair kits, runway patching materials, port-clearing equipment, spare transformers, and standing contracts and trained teams to use them quickly.

But in a cyber-enabled conflict, it also includes the digital systems that make logistics function: port management software, rail dispatch and signaling, fuel inventory and distribution systems, and the enterprise tools that coordinate movement and sustainment. Resilience planning should assume these systems will be targeted and should build graceful degradation into operations: segmented networks for operational technology, offline restoration pathways, audited backups, and manual procedures that are practiced rather than merely documented. U.S. support here can combine planning assistance, technical standards support, joint assessments, and targeted co-funding for the highest-value nodes rather than diffuse spending across every vulnerability.

Allied energy resilience should be treated as combat power and become a US priority for contested conditions

Bases and critical transport nodes need backup power that works under pressure: microgrids, protected generation, prioritized restoration, and redundancy in fuel distribution. Energy resilience is the difference between moving forces and halting, between maintaining a functioning medical system and a cascading failure.

Cyber considerations must be built into energy resilience from the start. Many of the systems that control generation and distribution are vulnerable precisely because they were designed for efficiency, connectivity, and centralized management—attributes that become liabilities during conflict. Resilience means reducing single points of failure, limiting unnecessary connectivity, and ensuring restoration can occur even when normal digital control pathways are disrupted. Targeted U.S. support should help on all these fronts through joint planning, technical assistance, and selective financing for the installations and transport nodes that matter most to coalition operations.

The US should advise-and-assist communications and command systems that fail gracefully

Allies should assume communications will be contested. The requirement is not perfect connectivity; it is a reliable function under degraded conditions. That means redundant pathways, prioritized traffic, and the ability to operate when high-end networks are down or untrusted. It also means joint restoration playbooks that cut across military and civilian providers, because the same fiber line or satellite link that supports civilian life often supports the base down the road.

This is also where offensive and defensive cyber integration matters. A coalition that expects to fight through disruption should also be prepared to impose costs on the adversary’s disruption campaign: disrupting malicious infrastructure, degrading reconnaissance and access pathways, and limiting an adversary’s ability to scale effects. The point is not escalation for its own sake. The point is to reduce the attacker’s confidence that cyber-enabled paralysis will succeed. U.S. support can accelerate this by helping allies build degraded-operations procedures, joint restoration playbooks, and integrated cyber planning that connects defensive continuity with options to disrupt an adversary’s disruption campaign.

US-enabled support should scale allied repair, replenishment, and cyber response

Burden-sharing collapses if every damaged platform or compromised system must wait on a transoceanic supply chain and a centralized response team. Coalitions need forward repair hubs, shared stocks of critical spares, and standardization where feasible. They also need shared cyber incident response capacity—particularly for operational technology and critical infrastructure—because cyber disruptions will target the same nodes that sustain combat operations.

In practice, this means joint cyber defense teams that can deploy quickly, shared playbooks for restoration, and routine “hunt and harden” efforts on the systems that matter most for reinforcement and sustainment. Done well, this does not replace sovereign responsibility—it multiplies it by ensuring that allied investments translate into operational continuity. This is also the right place to expand U.S. Cyber Command hunt forward operations, where U.S. forces are invited to work in tandem with partners to address cyber threats, and related partner-facing cyber support teams. These efforts directly strengthen shared detection, incident response, and pre-crisis hardening on the systems most likely to be targeted first.

Make rehearsal of national stress a US-supported component of military readiness

Continuity of government, mass-casualty capacity, population movement, and realistic national exercises are not domestic trivia. They are part of the deterrence bargain because panic, paralysis, and political fracture are weapons in hybrid conflict. If adversaries believe a society will freeze under sustained disruption—especially cyber-enabled disruption of basic services—then military capability alone will not restore deterrence.

Exercises should reflect the likely opening conditions of modern conflict: degraded communications, disrupted energy distribution, compromised logistics systems, and contested information environments. U.S. and partner military and civilian responders should train together because the response chain is inherently interdependent. Washington can support this through combined exercises, planning cells, scenario design, and after-action processes that help allies turn lessons into funded readiness improvements.

A surge in U.S. resilience support to allies and partners, structured as targeted burden-sharing assistance, will strengthen deterrence in two main ways. Operationally, it reduces the attacker’s ability to create decisive delays and paralysis, making coalition power more likely to arrive and persist. Politically, it increases alliance confidence by demonstrating that deterrence is not a rhetorical commitment but a practical capacity: the capacity to function under attack.

This approach is also cost-effective relative to the combat power it preserves. A hardened corridor, a credible restoration plan for key substations and port systems, pre-positioned repair stocks, and routine cyber hardening of logistics nodes can prevent the rapid loss of combat power that would otherwise occur in the first days of conflict. These investments do not replace high-end platforms. They make high-end platforms usable.

If the Trump administration is serious about actually shifting burdens, it needs to drastically ramp up U.S. support for allied resilience in the short term, with a laser focus on the systems that determine whether coalition combat power can actually be employed. Otherwise, we are asking allies to buy capability while leaving them vulnerable to the very methods adversaries will use to neutralize it.