An attack no one attributes is a war no one answers.
Allied retaliation against hybrid and gray-zone attacks is gated on formal state attribution, which most governments decline to shoulder — leaving Britain's thin Fairford designations as the alliance's only response.
The same conclusion keeps arriving from across the workspace's research — 1 topics independently instantiate this theme. Filter the evidence by where it came from:
Attribution comes only from an unnamed NATO source while the attacked states decline to shoulder it, so sailors dead in allied waters produce a council meeting, not a mission.
Britain's reply to an attributed IRGC plot is two thin designations that stop short of the organizers — the alliance's only response to a state-directed attack.
Absent formal attribution, a credible assassination threat against a frontline NATO government yields police work and domestic recrimination rather than any allied answer.