RUSI Missile Defence Conference Report 2022

On 23 and 24 February 2022, RUSI held its 23rd Missile Defence Conference. Participants considered how integrated deterrence against long-range precision strike might be delivered at a NATO level. Discussions were framed around the Russian long-range precision strike threat, which has supplanted other threat vectors as NATO’s pacing challenge. Over the course of the conference, several key themes emerged:

• The air and missile threat environment is becoming more complex as the discrete categories that guided defenders are becoming increasingly blurred by new capabilities.
• To meet this, NATO integrated air and missile defence (IAMD) will need to be nested within a multidomain concept of operations which similarly blurs previously well-defined barriers within NATO systems.
• This approach will need to embrace strike, active defence and resilience in a synergistic way.
• This in turn will require both technical adaptations – in particular, leveraging domains such as space – but also vital organisational adaptations to create structures capable of supporting multidomain approaches to IAMD.