NATO Military Committee Chairman Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone said the alliance holds roughly 4,000 pages of contingency plans for an eastern-flank escalation, speaking to reporters in Copenhagen on September 19, 2026, after a NATO Military Committee conference, LRT reported. "We have plans for the eastern flank, specifically - three plans that need to be prepared in case any escalation occurs there," Dragone said, describing the documents as covering "actions, movement, and response."
The plans scale from a minor incident up to Article 5
Dragone said NATO maintains readiness "from small crises or interventions on Alliance territory to Article 5 application and beyond," and that the underlying capacity is already in place: "Plans are prepared, structure is prepared, and soldiers, systems and weapons are ready." Asked what NATO would do if Alliance territory were struck, he said: "If an attack occurred, we know what to do," adding that any aggressor would face costs that outweigh any gain: "the risk of losses would greatly exceed any possible benefit."
He frames hybrid incidents as something NATO already handles
In NATO's own published opening remarks from the same day, Dragone pointed to a pattern of incidents across the alliance rather than a single flashpoint: "Incidents of sabotage, cyber-attacks, and airspace violations of multiple NATO Allies, including right here in Copenhagen, where unauthorised drones were detected near the airport, almost exactly one year ago." Per LRT's account of his remarks to reporters, he separated that pattern from direct military action: NATO "is already accustomed to hybrid attacks and, in my view, successfully deals with them," while "direct attacks are not on our agenda in the sense that we would prepare for them, but in case of direct attack, Article 5 would be immediately requested." On strikes against European defense-industry sites and ammunition depots specifically, he called them potentially both "criminal acts" and "elements of hybrid warfare," and said intelligence services have stopped some but couldn't give a number: "There are many cases where threats were avoided or stopped timely, but the exact number of such cases is unknown."
The industrial-capacity message matches what NATO put in writing
Dragone told reporters that daily ammunition consumption in the war in Ukraine is "very large" and that allies must "accelerate their delivery capacity." At the same Copenhagen press conference, he put the message to industry directly and on the record: "A direct message to the defence industry: Allies are ready to buy at scale. Investment is rising, demand is clear, and industry must be able to deliver."
This is a declared capability, not a new deployment - Dragone described existing plans and existing stock, not a troop movement or a change to force posture on NATO's eastern border. Read alongside the airspace incursions and border-security statements AirVeto has tracked this month - alleged Russian jets over Lithuanian airspace and Estonia's stated border-closure trigger - it's NATO's own answer to the same pattern: not a new alarm, but a public statement that the alliance's standing response to that pattern is already written down.
The live map shows current conditions over the Baltic region.