A Congressman’s Five Questions for Munich

T he Munich Security Conference is the world’s preeminent gathering for defense, security, and foreign policy — where heads of state, defense ministers, industry leaders, and the broader security community take the measure of a shifting strategic landscape. It is where assumptions surface, priorities collide, and the future of the Western alliance comes into clearer focus. This year will be my first MSC, and it could not come at a more consequential moment for American security planning — or for the future of the Western alliance itself.

I will attend the conference in support of the work of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, representing a district where national security is not abstract. Washington State’s Fairchild Air Force Base — central to the Air Force’s global airpower and mobility missions — sits in our backyard. That proximity sharpens how I will listen at Munich: Decisions about capability, integration, and deterrence translate directly into operational reality for the men and women who sustain U.S. and allied airpower every day.

Here is the core test I’m bringing to Munich: Are our allies building capability to bind themselves more tightly to the alliance — or building national escape hatches in case the alliance frays? That distinction is the real story of 2026. America’s NATO allies and close partners have raised defense spending targets after decades of underinvestment. The question now is whether that spending is being converted into usable capability and durable cohesion or whether we end up with a Europe and a West that are better armed but less aligned.

Here are five questions I will seek answers for in Munich.

1) Who are the allies with the most skin in the game, and what does their risk perception tell us about the alliance’s future? At the MSC, I’ll listen hardest to the allies that feel the threat most directly and are acting on it — frontline states like Poland, Romania, and Finland — and major force providers like Turkey, with large militaries and distinct strategic geographies. These countries aren’t theorizing about deterrence; their diagnosis is sharper — and their urgency higher — than what you hear elsewhere in Europe.

Poland, for example, is spending 4.5 percent of GDP on defense and rapidly buying tanks, artillery, and F-35s, while most outside NATO’s eastern flank sit on NATO’s 2 percent benchmark, treating it more as a ceiling than as a floor. If one partner sees Moscow as an existential threat and another sees it as a distant irritant, strategy fractures fast — even if budgets grow.

2) Will rearmament strengthen alliance decision-making or widen political fault lines? More capable allies are an asset only if they reinforce shared strategy and political alignment. The alliance must maintain disciplined consultation, shared red lines, and credible escalation management. If rearmament produces more capability but less unity in strategy, we will have bought strength at the price of cohesion. I’ll be watching for whether our allies are converging on a shared theory of deterrence — or drifting into parallel political strategies that look aligned on paper but diverge when decisions get hard.

3) Can we move weapons and capability to the front line at speed or are we still financing delay? Ukraine has proven that deterrence is now a result of the speed of production. A handful of advanced systems — Patriots, HIMARS, or fifth-generation aircraft — are a distraction if you can’t replace what gets used up every day: artillery shells, drones, spare parts, and air-defense interceptors. I’ll be listening for enforceable timelines on licensing, production, and delivery so that allied commitments are measured in months, not years. Fast lanes for trusted partners are not a luxury; they are what credibility looks like in an era of modern high-intensity conflict.

Ukraine consumes artillery shells by the tens of thousands per week, drones by the hundreds or thousands per month, air defense interceptors faster than they can be replaced, and maintenance capacity as fast as platforms are fielded. That means credibility rests on industrial throughput, logistics and sustainment, and bureaucratic speed — not just intent. In too many cases, however, the Western production base is falling short. The EU pledged to send Ukraine one million shells in 2023. It delivered only about 300,000 — proving that without manufacturing surge and procurement reform, good intentions break under fire.

4) Are we building an integrated warfighting system or parallel national forces? Spending targets are not a strategy. NATO can’t be 31 procurement plans stapled together. It has to be a cohesive warfighting system. Deterrence works only if forces can plug into each other — same communications, same logistics, same kill chains. In 2023, Germany’s Puma fighting vehicles all failed — 18 out of 18 — during a key NATO readiness exercise, forcing Berlin to fall back on Cold War–era systems. That wasn’t a spending problem; it was a cohesion and reliability problem.

5) Are we rebuilding the alliance innovation base or letting it become a strategic vulnerability? The decisive technologies of the next conflict — AI, autonomous drones, cyber, space, advanced microelectronics, and synthetic biology — live in global commercial markets. No nation can hoard them. The arsenal of democracy in the 21st century is not a single factory town; it’s a network of research universities, national labs, data centers, test ranges, and production lines that run across the alliance. If controls are seen as unilateral gatekeeping or disguised industrial protectionism, our allies will route around them — and our adversaries will benefit.

For example, as the U.S. prioritizes and leads on AI innovation, the EU’s strict AI legislation could constrain its own firms more than China’s. Innovation slows when one partner prioritizes rules and the other prioritizes speedy innovation.  No alliance can win a long competition if it lets one side build the tools while the other side writes the rules.

I’ve argued elsewhere for a “Freedom’s Forge for the 21st century”: a defense system built for speed, scale, and allied production — not Cold War bottlenecks. The Munich Security Conference will reveal whether we’re building it. Hedging won’t be said out loud, but you’ll hear it: “freedom of action” without reciprocity, politics-first procurement, and independence masquerading as resilience. Convergence is the opposite — common standards, shared production, enforceable timelines, and political commitments that match the war plans. If that’s the signal, Munich won’t just measure anxiety. It will mark a turn for substance, not slogans: an alliance built around interoperability, throughput, timelines that bite, and cohesion that holds.