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NATO has been dominated by the American way of war from the beginning. This American way of war rested on superior industrial output, domination at sea and domination in the air. Most European countries gave up on the pre-1945 model of European (land) warfare in which every army expected little support from the air and knew that wartime (=mobilised) strength matters, not peacetime active strength (=only relevant for training the reserves and officer cadre).
Then, when the Americans withdrew from the ground war in South Vietnam, the American Way of War changed: They began pursuing "overwhelming power", "total air dominance" and so on - not just to win battles, but to fight and win battles ideally without taking blows themselves. They also moved to an all-professional (and volunteer reserves) model of military forces, which led them and almost everyone in NATO away from obsessing about mobilised strength and instead focusing on peacetime military strength.
The navies were the most extreme. They were and are largely lacking air/sea battle experience in the missile era and totally lacking sea/sea experience in the missile era. No veteran of naval battles from the gun era is still training or advising, either. Warships are designed with the intent of stopping each and every incoming missile. A single hit may be manageable or catastrophic. The answer was largely to seek air defences that would not permit any incoming missiles to leak the defensive umbrella and hit the ship. We have marginal ship-missile combat experience and none to back up any such infallible force field attitudes. We do have much more land-missile and land-aircraft combat experiences and track records, and they point at air defence lethality that's way too bad to support confidence in quasi infallible naval air defences. In the end, navies have kind of forgotten that they would take terrible blows in major war at sea and the concept that surface warships may be survivable enough only far away from a hostile great power does not appear to be present in force development. I see no writing about modern transport submarines (transport submarines were used by Germany (WW1), Italy (WW2) and Japan (WW2) before) as a reaction to doubts about the ability to convoy to Guam or even Taiwan during wartime.
The most extreme facet is BMD. There's the ambition to had kill (shoot down) every incoming BMD missile that may hit a relevant target. Factor in "hypersonic" glide vehicles that can manoeuvre a lot. This makes it impossible to rule out that any incoming missile may miss its target (something that Iron Dome is able to do against purely ballistic rockets) until it's too late to intercept. The costs of even only trying to establish a near-100% hard kill BMD protection is ridiculous. The Iranians show even to the public that the attacker can defeat such aspirations by launching more relatively cheap quasiballistic rockets. First you shoot your lesser quality rockets to deplete the defender's intercept missile stocks, then you strike with your most accurate missiles. Hard kill BMD is a losing proposition.
That aforementioned post-Vietnam American Way of War - turbocharged during the Reagan administration and seemingly vindicated during the Gulf War 1991 - requires two things to shine:
(1) giant budgets and (2) avoidance of hot conflict with opposition capable enough to tear down the Potemkin' facade.
Europe panicked about Russia and Germany in particular (but also Poland) reacted with ludicrously increased military budgets. The extremely poor display of Russian armed forces against Ukraine (a country that never properly spent to prepare for defence until 2022) doesn't keep people who slept over the entire defence topic from getting scared shitless. Nor do such people compare actual military power. European NATO could attack Russia and occupy Moscow within a few weeks (if not days) of campaigning without any force increase, simply by first moving its peacetime strength into position for attack. This would also be true if Russia achieved victory in Ukraine first and Russian (first) use of nukes would not change the outcome. The only ways how Russia could defeat European NATO is by exploiting that our politicians are weak pussies, selected by our political systems for prowess in domestic political fights, not for character. To spend more on armed forces doesn't eliminate this weak point. I may write more about this later.
So back to the core issue: People need to understand that you take blows in warfare. No boxer can block all punches during his career, or even only finish every fight without bleeding. The pursuit of invulnerability is bollocks and a waste of resources. We need a way of war that works for us, and we should not pursue more than that, for all extras require wasteful spending. Most of all, we in European NATO need to deal with the one real weak spot that undermines our security: Useless pussy politicians in power that are toys to the likes of Putin regardless of military power.
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