Practice Makes Perfect: Using Tabletop Exercises to Prioritise Defence
Erlingur Erlingsson – a visiting fellow at the Institute of International Affairs at the University of Iceland and head of wargaming at Varða – argues that as Iceland prepares to scale up defence spending sharply over the next decade, tabletop exercises offer a low-cost way to assess threats and prioritise where that money should go.
A changed world. Iceland faces a transformed and damaged international order, with the UN weaker than ever and Russia's illegal war of conquest having upended European defence. The unipolar moment is over: China is building capacity that approaches the United States', whose generals now call it a "peer competitor," pointing toward a bipolar US–China order of uncertain shape. Iceland must therefore prepare for many scenarios – and think about how to be a worthy ally, since it will always depend on others in wartime.
The United States pulls back. He argues US foreign policy has become unpredictable and transactional, driven by an "America First," zero-sum approach that strains trust among the oldest allies. He cites threats to leave NATO, economic pressure on allies, stated designs on Greenland – even by force – interference in European politics, and unilateral troop drawdowns. Iceland, relying entirely on allied defence, is thus squeezed between the Russian threat and American unpredictability.
Iceland's position and options. The government has deepened cooperation with neighbours – over a dozen agreements since the 2006 US departure – and the Althingi this year adopted Iceland's first defence and security policy. Its pillars remain NATO and the 1951 US defence agreement, though he notes that agreement would lapse automatically if the US left NATO. The Foreign Minister has spoken of "adding pillars," the most significant being possible EU membership, to be tested in an autumn referendum.
The government's task. While some spending stays directly military – the air-defence system, host-nation facilities – most will go toward domestic resilience, including dual-use investments useful in peacetime, measured against NATO's resilience benchmarks. Allocating it well, he argues, demands broad consultation across government, business and the public, and attention to fast-moving technology (AI, drones, quantum) and climate-driven challenges.
Tabletop exercises as the tool. Wargaming, used increasingly within NATO but rare in Icelandic government, can assess threats and weaknesses, bring different actors together, and shape investment around credible scenarios. The one concrete domestic example is the 2025 "Iceland Unplugged" exercise, where nearly 200 experts worked through the severing of all subsea cables. Varða has begun introducing the method; it is cheap, increasingly powerful with AI, and breaks down administrative silos. Unlike field exercises that test equipment, tabletop exercises test decision-making under pressure, revealing where procedures thought robust turn brittle in a crisis.
His conclusion. As Iceland weighs tens of billions in defence and resilience investment, it should take a broad, consultative approach and use varied tools to address both foreseeable and unforeseeable threats, ensuring that investment also strengthens NATO's collective resilience and shows allies Iceland can be a worthy ally. Tabletop exercises, he concludes, can and should be an important part of that.