When U.S. President Donald Trump introduced his “5 percent doctrine,” referring to his demand that NATO allies spend 5 percent of their GDP on defense and security by 2035, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte called it a “transformational leap.” Indeed, the alliance’s own practice is to assess allied contributions primarily through a fixed percentage of GDP devoted to defense spending. But while this measure may be politically expedient, on its own it is far from sufficient to strengthen allies’ military capabilities.
In countries where the perception of military threat is low and the armed forces play a marginal role in domestic politics and public debate, this metric can even be counterproductive. Pressuring governments to spend more does not, by itself, produce stronger militaries—and in some cases, it can actively undermine military effectiveness.
When U.S. President Donald Trump introduced his “5 percent doctrine,” referring to his demand that NATO allies spend 5 percent of their GDP on defense and security by 2035, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte called it a “transformational leap.” Indeed, the alliance’s own practice is to assess allied contributions primarily through a fixed percentage of GDP devoted to defense spending. But while this measure may be politically expedient, on its own it is far from sufficient to strengthen allies’ military capabilities.
In countries where the perception of military threat is low and the armed forces play a marginal role in domestic politics and public debate, this metric can even be counterproductive. Pressuring governments to spend more does not, by itself, produce stronger militaries—and in some cases, it can actively undermine military effectiveness.
Italy illustrates the problem clearly. Italian society does not perceive a direct military threat to national security, and a large gap separates the armed forces from civilians. As a result, the push to raise defense spending has not translated into greater military effectiveness.
Italy has pursued two strategies that allow it to respond to allied pressure without meaningfully strengthening its armed forces.
On one hand, Italy prioritized formal compliance with NATO—and especially U.S.—spending benchmarks over a substantive increase in defense resources. In 2025, Italy reported a defense budget of roughly 45 billion euros to NATO, even though actual defense spending was closer to 31 billion euros, largely through the reclassification of expenditures from other ministries. Second, and more consequentially, additional resources have been directed toward military activities that primarily serve domestic political objectives rather than toward improving operational readiness and combat capability. The result is a familiar NATO pattern: the appearance of a stronger ally without a corresponding increase in real military effectiveness.
In Italy, relations between the armed forces and society have been profoundly shaped by the legacy of the World War II. Emerging from that conflict defeated, the Italian military lost much of its prestige, authority, and relevance within society. Although there were important differences, this situation resembled that of postwar Germany and Japan. For decades, Italian society rejected the use of force in international relations and struggled to grasp the very purpose of having armed forces. This attitude inevitably diminished the military’s role and widened the gap between it and society, resulting in widespread ignorance, indifference, and, in some cases, distrust toward military institutions.
This situation began to change after the end of the Cold War. Especially in Italy, the armed forces started to be employed extensively in operations and gradually earned public trust. Yet the sustainability of this trust and of such extensive use of the military has always depended on adherence to certain fundamental principles that were meant to guide the organization and employment of the armed forces—such as the imposition of strict and restrictive rules of engagement, the need to conceal the combat dimension as much as possible, and a strong emphasis on humanitarian- and assistance-related functions.
Operationally, two elements characterize civil-military relations in Italy. The first is the very limited knowledge of military institutions and their operational requirements, not only among the general public but also within academia and the political class. In Italy, very few experts truly understand how the armed forces are organized, resulting in a widespread lack of understanding of military needs both among citizens and policymakers—an issue that also affects countries such as Germany and Spain. Consequently, there is little awareness of what is actually required for effective combat performance. The second element is the reluctance—shared by the public and, therefore, political actors—to accept the costs associated with meeting these requirements. Enhancing the military’s effectiveness entails higher spending on training, firing ranges, and ammunition, choices that yield little visible impact on salient domestic issues such as employment, internal security, and economic development.
The first problem that can arise is when a country reports an increase in its defense budget without actually allocating additional funds. This approach allows it to meet the required spending threshold without paying a political price domestically. This very issue has recently sparked a wide debate in Italy. The controversy began after NATO published a report last year showing that Italy, like several other member states, had declared a defense budget equivalent to 2 percent of its GDP. This figure surprised many observers, both in Italy and abroad, since the country had spent around 1.5 percent of its GDP on defense the previous year. Many thus wondered how Rome could have increased its defense budget by roughly 0.5 percent—about 14 billion euros—in just a few months.
In Italy, many expected answers in the Documento Programmatico Pluriennale (DPP), the planning document through which the Defense Ministry details how it will use the funds allocated under the national budget law. However, those seeking to understand how Italy had managed to reach the 2 percent target struggled to find a clear answer. The DPP does not specify precisely how the 2 percent figure was achieved. It merely notes that, for 2025, the calculation of the defense budget reported to NATO also included expenditures related to military mobility and other defense-related spending from different sectors, most likely cyberdefense.
In short, like seven other NATO members that had fallen short of the alliance’s defense investment pledge until 2024, Italy has now met the spending target—but the resources reaching its armed forces are less substantial than the headline figures suggest. This outcome may be inevitable in a country such as Italy, where public opinion remains skeptical about raising defense spending and is reluctant to accept the allocation of significant resources to strengthen the military’s combat capabilities, despite Russia’s war in Ukraine and the growing instability affecting the wider Mediterranean region. In such contexts, genuine increases in defense budgets are only possible when the public can be convinced that the spending serves objectives that are not strictly military in nature. This, for instance, was the case in 2014, when the government launched a large-scale naval modernization program and justified it by emphasizing that the new ships would primarily be used for immigration control and civil protection operations.
An analysis of Italy’s defense budget reveals another major problem in Italian defense policy and in the way Rome has chosen to increase spending. To the extent that Italy has increased defense spending over the past four years, it has done so by prioritizing domestic political considerations over the strengthening of the armed forces’ core military capabilities. Two elements stand out in particular.
First, since 2022 Italy has committed substantial resources to large-scale investment programs, most notably in armored land forces. Nearly 23 billion euros has been allocated to this area, an unprecedented initiative that is set to reshape Italy’s land defense industrial base. These investments carry significant economic and political benefits: They are largely produced domestically and promise employment, industrial growth, and regional spillovers. Yet this emphasis on capital-intensive programs has come at the expense of far less costly measures that would have contributed more directly to combat effectiveness.
Despite the scale of these investments, Italy has not increased spending on operations, maintenance, or training—areas that have historically been underfunded and that are essential for readiness. On the contrary, these budget lines have remained flat or are even projected to decline. Nor has Italy addressed other critical structural weaknesses. Its armed forces remain among the oldest in Europe, with no publicly funded initiatives aimed at lowering the average age. The country still lacks a genuine operational reserve, leaving it without a pool of trained personnel who could be mobilized rapidly in a major crisis. Recruitment rules, which rely heavily on permanent contracts and contribute to the aging profile of the force, have likewise gone largely unreformed, further exacerbating Italy’s already severe recruitment challenges, particularly in technical specialties such as engineering, medicine, and cyber-expertise.
Second, Italy has continued—and in some cases expanded—missions that divert troops away from combat training. Even after the invasion of Ukraine, the defense budget allocates roughly 250 million euros per year to army deployments in support of domestic policing tasks. As existing research has shown, these missions are politically salient but come at a cost: They reduce the time available for training and readiness, thereby weakening the armed forces’ overall military effectiveness.
In short, Italy has increased defense spending mainly in areas that are politically acceptable: domestic policing missions and large industrial investment programs with strong economic returns. What it has avoided is equally telling. Rome has not meaningfully invested in the politically difficult but militarily essential areas—training and readiness, the creation of a reserve force, and reform of the recruitment system—even though these measures would have likely required far fewer resources than the multibillion-euro investments in armored platforms. The result is a defense buildup that satisfies political and industrial priorities while leaving Italy’s core military effectiveness largely unchanged.
If the goal is to strengthen allies’ military capabilities, a fixed share of GDP as a benchmark can be ineffective in countries such as Italy, where a deep gap between the armed forces and society makes it difficult for the public to understand and accept the requirements implied by that objective. In such contexts, the first priority must be to narrow that gap and improve the relationship between the military and society.
Research indicates three pathways for change. The first is the emergence of a significant external threat. This is likely what we are seeing across much of Central and Eastern Europe, where fear of Russian revisionism is driving substantial shifts in civil-military relations and a firm commitment to strengthening the armed forces. This dynamic, however, is not evident in countries such as Italy or Spain, where the Russian threat is not perceived as especially acute.
The second is to promote a public debate on defense. This debate must be honest and nonideological, without concealing the true purpose of the armed forces—namely, to fight. For this to happen, the debate must involve not only universities but also the armed forces themselves. The third initiative is to bring the population physically closer to the armed forces. In this respect, many advocate conscription. The effect of conscription on the civil-military gap, however, is unclear: Some argue that it helps bridge the divide, others that it worsens it. Perhaps a more effective approach would be to invest in the creation or strengthening of regionally based reserve forces: voluntary enlistments that allow individuals to maintain a normal lifestyle while gaining direct experience with the military.
If NATO wants its members to build real capability, it should not simply push for bigger budgets but pair that pressure with initiatives to close the civil-military gap. That requires fostering deeper, better-informed public debate about the armed forces—yet this remains difficult in much of Europe, where the study of military affairs, security dynamics, and defense policy is still marginal within academia and often viewed with ideological suspicion. Addressing this gap would require sustained investment in funded university and think tank projects, public lectures and workshops, school outreach, open-base days, internships and fellowships, and pilot programs to create or strengthen regional reserve units. Without a more open and intellectually pluralistic academic environment—one that treats military effectiveness and defense industrial cooperation as legitimate objects of study—higher defense spending is unlikely to translate into genuine military capability.
