In February, Operation Epic Fury, the United States’ war against Iran, revealed that the cloud—the rented stack of data centers, compute, and software services—is a core part of operations, not a back-office IT service. During the campaign, peak daily usage of one Pentagon AI targeting system rose 4,425 percent. Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI officer, summed up the lesson: “My biggest fear is really not the adversary at this point. My biggest fear is, can we keep up?”
For NATO, the answer is no. Allies are each making procurement decisions about cloud infrastructure for national civilian and defense purposes that will boost capacity—but they’re being pulled in opposite directions in harmful ways that will compound over the coming decades.
The first pressure, driven by politics, is the balkanization of cloud capacity. When the International Criminal Court’s lead prosecutor, Karim Khan, suddenly found himself locked out of his Microsoft email account in 2025 after U.S. sanctions targeted the court, allied governments awoke to a hard fact. The digital substrate on which their states, militaries, and economies run is not neutral plumbing. It is broadly American, and it can be turned off. French President Emmanuel Macron put the lesson plainly: “There is no such thing as happy vassalage.”
