241671 Review eng2 - NATO...28-29 June 2004, and related background information SECURITY THROUGH...

NATOREVIEW

NATO Public Diplomacy Division1110 Brussels

BelgiumWeb site: www.nato.int

E-mail: [email protected]

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Examining NATO’s Transformation

SPECIAL ISSUE SPRING 2005

All enquiries and orders for print copies should be addressed to:Public Diplomacy Division – Distribution UnitNATO, 1110 Brussels, BelgiumTel: +32 2 707 5009Fax: +32 2 707 1252E-mail: [email protected]

Electronic versions of these publications are available on NATO’s web site at www.nato.int.The web site also publishes official statements, press releases and speeches, NATO Update, a weekly update on Alliance activities, NATO Review and other information on NATO structures, policies and activities, and offers several on-line services.

ALL PUBLICATIONS ARE AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH, MANY ARE AVAILABLE IN OTHER LANGUAGES

FOR AND AGAINST: Debating Euro-Atlantic security options Publication bringing together and reproducing the debates that appeared in the on-line edition of NATO Review in 2002 and 2003

NATO TransformedA comprehensive introduction to NATO describing how the Alliance works and

covering its ongoing transformation

NATO in the 21st CenturyIntroductory brochure on the Alliance, giving an overview of its history, policies and activities

NATO BriefingsSeries examining topical Alliance issues, including NATO’s role in Afghanistan,

crisis management, Operation Active Endeavour, improving capabilities, the NATO Response Force and NATO in the Balkans

Cooperation case studiesSeries illustrating NATO’s practical cooperation activities, including building the Virtual Silk Highway, disposing of anti-personnel mines in Albania, flood prevention in Ukraine, limiting the damage from earthquake-induced disasters, AWACS aircraft and tackling challenges of defence reform

Security through Partnership Publication examining NATO cooperation with Partner countries through the

Partnership for Peace and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council

Istanbul Summit Reader’s GuideAn overview of the decisions taken at the NATO Summit in Istanbul, Turkey, 28-29 June 2004, and related background information

SECURIT Y THROUGH PARTNERSHIP

3EXAMINING NATO’S TRANSFORMATIONNATOREVIEW

NATO’s credibility rests on its cohesion and military competence – its proven ability to foster cooperation between its member nations and to engage them in demanding military operations in regions of vital strategic importance. In the face of a whole new set of risks and threats to our common security, we must strengthen our political dialogue to ensure continued Allied cohesion. In short, we must transform.

A lot of public attention has focused on NATO’s contributions to peace and stability in the Balkans, the Mediterranean Sea, Afghanistan and recently Iraq. There has been considerable interest also in the widening of NATO’s membership and the deepening of its partnership relations. But there is more to NATO’s transformation. We have adapted our strategy and concepts, our military command and force structures, and our internal organisation and procedures. Alliance Command Transformation is a key driver in the military transformation process. And with the NATO Response Force and our Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defence

Battalion, we now have force packages in place that are specifically geared to some of the most pressing requirements. Each of our 26 member nations has been taking a hard look at its own defence programmes and structures, to make sure that they are relevant to today’s demands. A lot has already been achieved. But NATO’s transformation is still very much a work in progress. In addition, we must ensure that NATO Headquarters structure is geared to support this process.

The three main strands of this work are clear. First, we need to further enhance the usability, availability and sustainability of our forces – to make sure that a much larger proportion of our militaries is readily available for operations away from Alliance territory. Second, we must continue to better align our political and operational decisions – by further improving our defence-planning and force-generation processes, and by creating greater clarity on resourcing through a better balance between national and common funding. Finally, but fundamentally, we need enhanced political debate to muster and sustain the transatlantic consensus that has been, and will remain, crucial to the success of any Alliance undertaking. I am encouraged by our February Summit, where NATO leaders committed to strengthen the Alliance as a forum for strategic and political consultations and coordination.

In order to succeed, the Alliance’s transformation will require continued careful attention to the efficiency of the NATO Headquarters structure, and strong engagement by the governments and parliaments of our member nations. I want to do my utmost to make sure that NATO’s transformation continues. It is critical to the Alliance’s ability to provide security well into the future.

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer

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4 EXAMINING NATO’S TRANSFORMATIONNATOREVIEW

26ESDP transformed?Jean-Yves Haine assesses the evolution of the European Security and Defence Policy.

30Reinventing NATO (yet again) politicallyRonald D. Asmus examines the remake NATO requires to meet the challenges of the post-post Cold War era.

12The need for changeHenning Riecke considers the need for change in international organisations.

Debate

16Should NATO play a more political role?Espen Barth Eide versus Frédéric Bozo

Analysis

22NATO’s transformation scorecardRobert G. Bell assesses implementa-tion of NATO’s Prague, Norfolk and Munich transformation agendas.

contentsChallenge

6Remaining relevantJonathan Parish offers a personal account of NATO’s transformation.

8The transformation challengeJohn J. Garstka examines the concept of transformation.

Editor: Christopher BennettProduction assistant: Felicity BreezePublisher: Jean FournetTel: +32 2 707 4719Fax: +32 2 707 4579E-mail: [email protected] [email protected] address: www.nato.int/review

NATOREVIEWPublished under the authority of the Secretary General, NATO Review is intended to contribute to a constructive discussion of Atlantic issues. Articles, therefore, do not necessarily represent official opinion or policy of member governments or NATO.

NATO Review is an electronic magazine published four times a year on the NATO web site that can be read in 22 NATO languages as well as Russian and Ukrainian at www.nato.int/review.

Articles may be reproduced, after permission has been obtained from the editor, provided mention is made of NATO Review and signed articles are reproduced with the author’s name.

Every mention of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia is marked by an asterisk (*). This refers to the following footnote: Turkey recognises the Republic of Macedonia with its constitutional name.


33Taking the transformation agenda forwardMark Joyce examines how NATO has been transforming.

Military matters

36Rethinking NATO’s force transformationAnthony H. Cordesman analyses the rationale behind force transformation.

39Matching capabilities to commitmentsSteve Sturm examines how NATO is seeking to improve its force-generation and defence-planning processes.

April 2005

Operations

42Afghanistan’s transformational challengeDiego A. Ruiz Palmer examines the impact of Afghanistan on the Alliance’s transformation.

45Transforming attitudesJeffrey Schwerzel considers the importance of cultural and religious factors in peace-support operations.

Interviews

48Nick Witney: Europe’s capabilities’ conscience

52Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope: DSACT

Combating terrorism

56Expanding NATO’s counter-terrorism roleC. Richard Nelson analyses NATO’s contribution to the fight against terrorism.

60Combating terrorism through technologyMarshall Billingslea examines how NATO is developing technology to counter terrorism.


Challenge

T he navigation was easy. All I had to do was keep the big fence on my left and continue south. My passenger was from the British Frontier Service and he knew

every inch of the fence. My task was to fly him along our sector so that he could check for any unusual signs of activity on the other side. But this was no normal fence – this was the Inner German Border in March 1983 – and every move I took in my British Army Gazelle helicopter was closely mirrored on the other side of the border by a Soviet Hind helicopter.

For the next six years I flew anti-tank helicopters in the Federal Republic of Germany. Every morning started with the same routine: a weather forecast for the area, and then a detailed study of Warsaw Pact and NATO military equipment so that we would be able to differentiate between them on the battlefield when launching our anti-tank missiles.

Following my tour in Germany and staff training in the United Kingdom, I was posted to SHAPE in 1990. My colleagues joked that my golf would improve because SHAPE stood for Superb Holidays At Public Expense. This was the image that had been generated by over 40 years of the Cold War, NATO’s static headquarters, pre-planned military options and stovepipe responsibilities. The plans for defeating the Soviet armoured masses on the plains of northern Germany required little updating, so my predecessors, when not

enjoying superb holidays, had all managed to reduce their golf handicaps.

However, I arrived at SHAPE only a year after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and shortly after the London Declaration On A Transformed North Atlantic Alliance. And it soon became clear that NATO was no longer the same organisation that it had been when I’d been flying that border patrol. NATO’s transformation had already started.

But what is transformation? It appears to mean different things to different people and I cannot find an agreed Alliance definition of the term. I would suggest that the purpose of transformation is to keep the Alliance relevant to the security environment and capable of carrying out effectively the roles it wishes to undertake.

The changes initiated by the London Declaration in 1990 were prompted by the end of the Cold War. They can be summed up as a change from an approach to security that was defensive and reactive, to one that was more proactive and focused on spreading security and stability. While the collective security commitment embodied in the Washington Treaty continued, and will continue, to underpin the Alliance and bind Europe and North America, NATO’s transformation in the last decade of the 20th century was most visibly demonstrated by partnership and crisis management.

Crisis management kept me busy during the 1990s. At SHAPE in the early part of the decade, I was involved in NATO’s first

Remaining relevant Jonathan Parish offers a personal account of both NATO’s and his own transformation.

Jonathan Parish is senior planning officer in the Policy Planning and Speechwriting Section of NATO’s Political Affairs and Security Policy Division.

Transformational vision: The 1990 London Declaration was the genesis for NATO’s ongoing transformation and the Prague Summit kept that process moving in the right direction

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operational deployment when support was provided to Turkey during the first Gulf War. I was also kept busy as NATO assisted in the airlifting of humanitarian aid to the former Soviet Union. And I was even busier when NATO became progressively more involved in the Balkans, initially supporting UN monitoring of heavy weapons, then monitoring the “no-fly” zone, and subsequently with maritime operations in support of UN sanctions.

During the latter part of that decade, I was in national military appointments and commanding a helicopter regiment. This involved further work resulting from NATO’s crisis-management role: operational deployments to Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as intervention in Kosovo.

At the beginning of this decade, I joined the International Military Staff at NATO Headquarters. It was there I witnessed the next stage in NATO’s transformation with the Alliance decision in 2002 to break out of its Euro-Atlantic geographic straitjacket. But I was surprised that so many people spoke then, and continue to speak now, of Prague as the Transformation Summit. For me, London had already set the course; Prague was a hand on the tiller.

The threat from terrorism and the dangers posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, mean that Allies’ security has become increasingly dependent on events a long way from their national territory. At Prague, the Alliance recognised this and further adapted accordingly. Part of this adaptation was the understanding that in the face of these new threats, the widest possible cooperation is required, not just with states, but also with other international organisations and institutions, hence the Prague call of “new members” and “new relationships”.

But these areas of transformation were only taking further the changes we had already undertaken: they were not entirely new initiatives. In London in 1990, NATO was an Alliance of 16 countries and by the time of Prague membership had already increased to 19. In 1990, NATO had initiated a comprehensive partnership policy by extending the hand of friendship to the East. The hand of friendship had been extended South to the countries of North Africa and the Middle East in 1994 (and last year at Istanbul was extended further afield to the states of the Gulf region). In addition, by the time of Prague, NATO had already taken its place within the network of international organisations, cooperating increasingly with the European Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the United Nations.

It is a similar story for “new capabilities”. The Prague decision to create the NATO Response Force was a logical step in taking further the London call for highly mobile and versatile multinational forces, which had led to the establishment of the Allied Command Europe Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC). Changes to the NATO Command Structure announced in Prague built on an earlier decision in the 1990s to reduce the

three major NATO Commands to two by eliminating Allied Command Channel. The Prague Capabilities Commitment focused on the capabilities required to defend against terrorism and gave additional impetus to the acquisition of better equipment that had already been instigated with the Defence Capabilities Initiative at the Washington Summit in 1999 (when three new members joined the Alliance and the new NATO Strategic Concept was approved).

Looking back, both London and Prague can be seen to be reactions to changes that happened around NATO. Whereas London was a response to the end of the Cold War, Prague was a response to the terrorist attacks on the United States on 9/11. So Prague was not the Transformation Summit, but it ensured that the Alliance remained on the path it had embarked upon in London – ensuring NATO’s continued relevance by undertaking new roles and acquiring the capabilities necessary to carry them out effectively.

We need to acknowledge, however, that even access to unlimited quantities of the most advanced military hardware will be worthless if the Allies cannot agree when and how to use it. Recent events have shown that there are also changes within NATO that now demand “transformational” attention. Whereas previous threats united Allies, current threats bring the potential to divide them, as demonstrated by the Iraq crisis in 2003. It is therefore essential that a common vision, a common understanding and a common sense of purpose underpin NATO’s roles and capabilities. That is why the Secretary General has recently campaigned to promote political dialogue within NATO, and indeed, Allies had stated their intention to enhance the Alliance’s political component in the London Declaration back in 1990.

In conclusion, I believe the London Declaration was the genesis for NATO’s ongoing transformation and that Prague kept that process moving in the right direction. My work over the years has involved me in the consequences of many of the transformational initiatives from these summits. However, I feel that all these initiatives will be rendered worthless unless NATO urgently transforms itself to promote greater political dialogue. A common position will never be found among Allies if they shy away from the controversial political and security issues. In today’s security environment, these issues must be discussed; they must be discussed early; and they must be discussed widely. If Allies are not prepared to confront the challenge of debating these issues within NATO, then the Alliance will lose its relevance and an alternative forum will be found. I am convinced that NATO is the ideal forum for these debates, but I am also concerned that if we don’t use it, we’ll lose it.

PS I, too, have transformed. Last year I swapped my green military uniform for a grey civilian suit and the most dangerous weapon that I am now permitted to handle is a sharp pencil. It is for others to judge whether I have managed to remain relevant and capable.

Challenge


Challenge

T ransformation is about sustained, purposeful change, often on a large scale, undertaken with the strategic objective of creating or maintaining competitive

advantage, or of countering an advantage put in place by an existing or a new competitor. The concept is relevant to organisations that are faced with challenges and opportunities that cannot be effectively dealt with by employing proven methodologies for making incremental improvements to existing organisations, processes, technologies, human resources management and business models. The need for transformation can exist in both private and public sectors.

The impetus to transform may vary. In some cases, transformation is stimulated by rapid deterioration in an organisation’s competitive position resulting from unforeseen and unanticipated changes to the competitive environment, or by hitherto unknown rates of change. In other cases, transformation is opportunity driven, resulting from the desire to create or enhance competitive advantage by exploiting a new or emerging technology. This often requires organisational, process or people changes. In the case often referred to as a business turnaround, consistently ineffective leadership or management may cause a firm’s competitive position to deteriorate to such a degree that a transformational perspective may be required to restore its competitive advantage.

Assessing competitive advantage

An organisation is said to possess a competitive advantage when it achieves a superior competitive position vis-à-vis one or more competitors. Competitive position is a relative measure of performance. In a practical sense, it can be measured by comparing the integrated capabilities of competitors in a competitive environment. Examples of capabilities in business include product design, production, marketing, sales and distribution. In warfare, examples include manoeuvre, strike, logistics and command and control. Whether in business or warfare, an organisation can assess its current and future competitive position by answering the following questions:

Current competitive position:• Who are the current competitors and what are their

capabilities?• How well do current organisational capabilities compare with

competitors’ capabilities?

• How does the rate at which the current organisation is learning, adapting and improving current capabilities compare to the competitors?

• What is the likelihood that new competitors will emerge in the near term?

Future competitive position:• Who are the likely future competitors and what are their likely

capabilities?• When are new competitors likely to appear?• What are the anticipated future capabilities of the

organisation?• What actions can be taken now to dissuade potential future

competitors?• What actions should be taken now to create future competitive

advantage should dissuasion fail?

The answers to these questions will characterise an organisation’s current competitive position and provide an estimate of its future competitive position. In some cases, the answers are not clear-cut, since they involve uncertainty, ambiguity and the assessment of risk. This often leads to honest disagreement and stimulates debate within an organisation. If consensus can be reached regarding the existence of a competitive shortfall – current or future – then dialogue can begin on potential courses of action to enhance the competitive position. It is at this point, after consensus has been reached regarding the need for change, that transformation should be considered as a means to accomplish it.

Capabilities as focus of transformation

If one accepts the premise that capabilities are the primary basis by which organisations compete, then efforts to develop or enhance competitive advantage should be capabilities-based. In this way, a primary focus of transformation should be developing and enhancing capabilities.

Conceptually, capabilities can be viewed as having the components of people, process, organisation and technology. This implies that capabilities can be enhanced through innovation and change at the component level. When incremental change at the component level involves sustaining innovation, traditional innovation methodologies are typically adequate. However, when capability enhancement or development requires synchronisation of innovations in two or more components, or when innovation at the component level is disruptive, transformation methodologies are usually required.

The transformation challengeJohn J. Garstka examines the concept of transformation, the role it plays in both commercial and military organisations, as well as aspects of NATO’s transformation.

John J. Garstka is assistant director, concepts and operations, in the US Department of Defense’s Office of Force Transformation.


Challenge

A capabilities-based focus for transformation implies the following elements and relationships:• Transformation is a continuous process that creates and

maintains competitive advantage;• Transformation encompasses the co-evolution of processes,

organisations, technologies and human capital, which, when viewed together, enhance existing capabilities and enable new capabilities;

• Transformation broadens the existing capabilities base through the creation of new competitive areas and com-petencies, thereby revaluing existing competitive attributes;

• Transformation seeks to affect current or future competitive advantage by identifying shifts in underlying principles or emerging rule sets;

• Transformation involves identifying new sources of power that, if exploited, could enhance competitive advantage; and

• Transformation focuses on the human component of change, developing leaders who can lead change and creating an organisational culture that is open to change and supportive of innovation, learning and risk-taking.

These elements provide a framework for thinking about transformation and structuring transformation initiatives. Clearly, the specifics of an organisation’s competitive situation will determine the scope, pace and intensity of initiatives required to achieve desired strategic objectives. Consequently, the correct answer to the question “What do you mean by transformation and what does it look like?” is often “It depends on the specifics of the competitive situation that an organisation finds itself in.”

Transformation and commercial organisations

In the commercial sector, an executive’s decision to launch his or her company on a major transformation is typically driven by an eroded competitive position resulting from changes in the industry or the competitive environment. This may be the result of changes in the regulatory structure, the behaviour of competitors or the emergence of a new product or production technology.

Transformation efforts in the commercial sector to enhance or develop new capabilities can be proactive, as in the case of Dell’s pre-emptive move into direct distribution and just-in-time manufacturing in the PC market. Transformation can also be reactive in response to a competitor’s move, as in the case of competitor responses to Dell’s relentless cost-reduction and share-gain drives. Compaq and HP merged in an attempt to gain scale advantage; IBM effectively surrendered, announcing the sale of its PC business to China’s Lenovo and a new focus on services to corporate customers.

The opportunity for transformation to create or enhance competitive advantage by enhancing a capability through exploitation of a new technology is illustrated by Dell’s shift to direct distribution. This shift was enabled and accelerated by

the internet, which allowed for lower-cost direct distribution and supplemented a direct-sales force and telesales. The Dell experience also demonstrates that exploiting technology can require organisational, process and people changes. At Dell, the entire delivery system was reworked and the leadership team almost completely rebuilt with external talent as the business grew.

Transformation and military organisations

The US Department of Defense defines transformation as “a process that shapes the changing nature of military competition and cooperation through new combinations of concepts, capabilities, people and organisations that exploit our nation’s advantages and protect against our asymmetric vulnerabilities to sustain our strategic position, which helps underpin peace and stability in the world.”

This definition of transformation reinforces the centrality of capability development and enhancement to military transformation and highlights the proactive nature of the transformation process. In a defence context, the four principal components of capability – people, process, organisation and technology – can be expanded to include additional capability building blocks. In the US Department of Defense, this corresponds to the construct of Doctrine, Organisation, Training, Material, Leadership and Education, Personnel, and Facilities. The corresponding relationships between the four principal elements and the expanded US elements are as follows:• People – Personnel, Leadership and Education, and Training• Process – Doctrine• Organisation – Organisation• Technology – Material and Facilities

This simple framework highlights the principal dimensions of change for military forces and provides a mechanism to communicate clearly and succinctly the changes that can be pursued in “transforming” military forces. It also provides a useful perspective from which to re-examine the past and to develop strategies to meet the challenges of implementing military transformation.

Historic military transformation

Successful military transformations have all resulted in the development of new war-fighting capabilities. The development of new war-fighting capabilities almost always involved evolutionary changes in some or all of the principal components of technology, process, organisation and people. The net result of these evolutionary changes had a revolutionary impact on competitive advantage in combat when competitors’ capability development lagged.

In many cases, the source of this competitive advantage resulted from exploitation of an innovation in a key component of capability. Examples include the Roman Phalanx


Challenge

(organisational innovation), gunpowder (technology innovation), cryptography (process innovation) and professional armies (people innovation). In some cases, however, innovation solely at the component level is inadequate to significantly enhance war-fighting capability. This is often the case when technology innovation enables an order-of-magnitude improvement (which corresponds to a factor of ten change) in a vital dimension of warfare. This ten-fold improvement occurred with carrier aviation (range of engagement), mechanised warfare (speed of manoeuvre), and air defence (detection range). In each of these cases, various combinations of technology, process, organisational and people innovation were required to realise new war-fighting capability. These cases highlight the challenges associated with identifying and exploiting new sources of power to develop new capabilities. They also shed light on the critical success factors for military transformation.

Technology, process and organisational innovation

With mechanised warfare, the primary enabling innovation was a technology innovation in the form of the tank, which, when mature, enabled the mechanised elements of armies to cover hundreds of miles in a day. This compared to distances of tens of miles for armies travelling on foot or horseback. The British, French, and German armies developed tanks and explored various means for employing them. However, only the German Army was able to successfully combine technology innovation with process and organisational innovation to create a new war-fighting capability. What, in retrospect, appear relatively simple process and organisational-change issues were a major point of contention and disagreement within the major armies that held the British and French armies back.

The process change argument revolved around whether tanks should support infantry or vice versa. The human element was core to this argument, since its outcome would determine whether the status of the existing war-fighting elites – the infantry and the cavalry – would be maintained and reinforced, or diminished. Once initial technology and process innovations had gained a foothold within the German Army, the issue to address was the organisational forms to best exploit the technology and process innovations. Specifically, the organisational-change issues evolved around the sizes of mechanised units that should be created, whether Panzer Brigades or Panzer Divisions.

The net impact of evolutionary changes in each of these areas – combined with effective use of radio and close air support – was the transformation of land warfare. This enabled Germany to rapidly defeat Poland in 1939 and France and her allies in 1940.

The importance of people innovations

The potential of some types of war-fighting innovation to disrupt the existing elite’s way of life poses one of the core challenges to military transformation. This was the case with the development of mechanised warfare as well as with the development of carrier aviation. The human component of change is the most complicated factor in transformation, regardless of whether the setting is private, public or military. Consequently, leaders charged with guiding change must focus on the human element.

Accelerating innovation with continuous learning

One factor complicating military transformation is the need to demonstrate the potential operational effectiveness of a new concept. In the case of inter-war carrier aviation and mechanised warfare, the initial operational concepts and associated technologies failed to perform as well as existing capabilities. Few appreciated the potential

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Climbing aboard: To be effective, the NATO Response Force will require technology innovation to deploy modern and interoperable command and control systems


Challenge

impact that the operational concepts and technologies would have as they matured. In both cases, the ability to conduct a mutually reinforcing series of experiments, exercises and war-games was critical to enabling visionary leaders to accelerate learning rates and obtain evidence to support investing in emerging capabilities. In the case of mechanised warfare, a critical mass of individuals in the German Army was able to learn about how mechanised forces could be employed much faster than their peers in the British, French or Polish armies.

Transformation and NATO

In looking at NATO through the lens of transformation, it is important to ask the questions posed above regarding current and future competitive advantage. Answering these questions can provide useful insight into the degree to which transformation is required and the pace with which initiatives should be pursued.

There is broad consensus that NATO’s current “competitive environment” has changed. The comparatively static competitive environment of the Cold War has been replaced by an extremely fluid and complex security landscape. The combination of new competitors and their existing and emerging capabilities creates a new security challenge. New competitors include transnational and non-state actors lacking many of the familiar identifying attributes of territory, borders and fixed bases, possessing a diverse set of aspirations and motives, and operating by different rules.

NATO has responded to the new competitive environment by seeking to manage risk by creating a force with new capabilities and new competitive attributes to counter current and emerging threats. At the 2002 Prague Summit, Allies agreed that NATO forces needed to be more agile, deployable and sustainable. The degree of change required to create a force with an integrated set of appropriate capabilities clearly meets the criterion of transformation. Moreover, the primary engine for this is the NATO Response Force (NRF).

The NRF is envisioned as a 20,000-strong rapid-reaction force, prepared for combat, able to deploy in between 5 and 30 days and sustainable for 30 days. Each NRF is intended to be a combined arms team with assets that include a brigade-sized ground force, air assets and command and control capabilities to support up to 200 sorties per day, as well as maritime forces. To be deployable, these forces must be expeditionary. This requires technology change in the form of strategic airlift and people innovation in the form of soldiers and airmen who can deploy outside their national borders.

To be effective as an integrated combined arms team, the NRF will require technology innovation to deploy modern and interoperable command and control systems. And to be

sustainable, the NRF will require the development of effective, robust and adaptable logistics capabilities. Achieving improvements in sustainability will require innovations in the areas of process, organisation and technology.

The need for enhanced interoperability poses one of the most significant challenges for any single nation’s armed forces and is particularly challenging for NATO. However, what makes the NRF an even more powerful engine for NATO transformation is the linkage of the NRF to NATO’s concept for Network-Enabled Capability (NEC). This link has the potential to enable NATO forces to improve interoperability and better exploit the new source of power associated with information sharing. But realising this potential in the current fiscal environment and translating the NATO NEC concept into reality will inevitably involve hard spending choices.

The necessity of investing in network-enabled capabilities creates an opportunity for collaborative concept development and experimentation focused on establishing the performance of networked coalition forces across the likely range of operations. If properly executed, this approach would also help develop the empirical evidence needed to support NATO when it comes to member states’ investment in the core enablers of network-enabled capabilities. A key challenge for accelerating implementation of NATO NEC is improving Allies’ capacity to learn from each other’s experiences with networked forces in operations, exercises and experimentation. The deployment of the German/Netherlands Corps in Afghanistan, for example, provided an opportunity for in-depth learning regarding the feasibility of employing network-enabled and satellite-based communications in a coalition environment.

An emerging mechanism for accelerating organisational learning in this area is the Network-Centric Operations Short Course. This executive-level course will be offered by Allied Command Transformation, in collaboration with NATO’s Centre of Excellence for Command and Control and the US Department of Defense’s Office of Force Transformation, from June 2005.

In looking at the full range of NATO transformation initiatives, the creation of Allied Command Transformation stands out as an important organisational innovation that promises to continue to contribute greatly to NATO’s ongoing transformation. This Command’s work and that of NATO’s emerging centres of excellence provide a strong foundation to facilitate sustained Alliance transformation. In determining the success of military transformation, history highlights the importance of leaders who can lead change and the value of a culture that is open to change, tolerant of debate and supportive of innovation. Only time will tell whether NATO has put together the factors critical to success. However, based on progress to date, the outlook is hopeful.


W hen the German Chancellor went on record at this year’s annual Munich Security Conference in February saying that NATO was “no longer

the primary venue where transatlantic partners discuss and coordinate strategies”, he was only stating the obvious. But what is most troubling is that there is no other such venue. The reason Gerhard Schröder chose to highlight the Alliance’s predicament is that NATO is designed, in part, to build consensus between Europe and North America in the security field and he believed it should be doing a better job. Schröder proposed the creation of a high-level panel to discuss how to improve transatlantic relations, with the goal, among others, of re-establishing a culture of strategic dialogue within the Alliance. To achieve this, NATO has to adapt.

The Alliance is not, of course, the only international institution that has to adapt to today’s fluid and complex security environment. Both the European Union and the United Nations have to be equally reform-minded and ambitious, if they, too, are to move with the times and contribute to building a more stable world. Nor is it the first time that NATO has found itself in such a situation. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a time that the Alliance has not been in the process of reinventing itself.

Though frequently written-off over the years as irrelevant or dying by critics and advocates alike, NATO has made adapting to new challenges something of a speciality. That said, change has not always come easily. Indeed, more often than not, the process has been characterised by frustration, friction and protracted consultations, making the Alliance appear at times a hotbed of infighting rather than a consensus-building institution. But no matter how acrimonious the discussions leading to eventual compromise, such adaptation has been critical to NATO’s successful evolution as well as to maintaining wider stability. Moreover, NATO is currently in the process of an extremely dynamic military transformation. Why then does the Alliance appear so divided politically?

Understanding the way that NATO adapts requires an analysis of the driving forces behind Alliance cohesion. At times when the security environment changes, issues

such as a joint threat perception, a shared interest in maintaining the US presence in Europe and common values inevitably come under scrutiny. This was very much the case, for example, in the 1960s when the United States became vulnerable for the first time as a result of the development of Soviet intercontinental missiles. At the time, the Alliance responded by changing its strategic doctrine from one of massive retaliation to one of flexible response and, following adoption of the Harmel Report in 1967, by redefining the Alliance’s future purposes as both providing deterrence and promoting détente.

In this way, adaptation relates not only to the instruments at the Alliance’s disposal, but also to the purpose of NATO as a whole, and to the rules that guide cooperation. The emergence of non-traditional threats since the end of the Cold War has made negotiations about a shared perception of security difficult. At the same time, however, responding to these threats has demanded greater openness and flexibility in strategic planning so as to prepare the Alliance for a wider range of tasks.

Global threats

Today’s global security threats have two qualities that make efficient application of pre-designed tools difficult. Firstly, non-traditional threats stem from societal developments rather than from governmental decisions, thereby forcing strategists to reconsider traditional instruments such as military intervention and deterrence. Secondly, uncertainty is a defining feature of security policy today, since the motivation, intentions and capabilities of non-state adversaries are often unknown. Moreover, calculating the impact of events and actions on one side of the world on the security of the other is extremely difficult, making exaggeration of the threat at least as likely as com-placency about it.

In these uncertain circumstances, NATO members have had to develop forces that are rapidly deployable to wherever they might be needed. At the same time, Allies have also sought to reduce levels of uncertainty by helping build political stability and transparency in crisis regions. This dual approach has guided the adaptation process that, albeit hesitantly, NATO has undergone since the end of the Cold War, in which it is possible to identify three elements, each with its own motives and driving forces.

The need for changeHenning Riecke considers the need for change in international organisations, arguing that NATO’s transformation must be based on a firm political foundation.

Henning Riecke is a resident fellow at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik in Berlin, specialising in European and transatlantic security.

Challenge


Challenge

The first element has been the construction of security partnerships aimed at extending the zone of stability within Europe. In response to the vacuum created by the demise of the Warsaw Pact, NATO offered cooperative structures to tie in former adversaries, including eventually a mechanism for joining the Alliance, and to integrate Partner militaries into crisis-management operations in Europe. The second element relates to the growing willingness of NATO to use force in crisis management and stabilisation – first in the Balkans, now in Central Asia. Having started out as an organisation focused on maintaining security in Europe, extending the scope and range of its operations

has at times been divisive for NATO, with some members seeking to resist the process.

The third element grew out of the restructuring of Cold-War forces during the 1990s and has evolved into today’s ambitious force-transformation programme. The military requirements of the Alliance’s new operations put the original reforms under strain. In response, principles like flexibility, deployability, sustainability, technological superiority, effectiveness and most of all interoperability have become the cornerstones of NATO’s relevance as a security organisation.

Action man: The NRF is now the focal point for force transformation, serving as a testing ground for new technology, doctrine and procedures

© N

AT

O


Challenge

Military transformation

In this area, the United States effectively acts as a political entrepreneur pushing the agenda forward. Indeed, NATO’s military transformation consists largely of the transfer of the technological, doctrinal and structural innovations, the revolution in military affairs that has transformed the way in which the United States is able to conduct military operations, to the rest of the Alliance. This process gathered momentum during the first term of George W. Bush’s presidency and may be viewed as a means of developing interoperable forces for coalition operations, thereby ensuring that Allied militaries are equipped to operate alongside US forces in the future.

Military transformation is a dynamic process without a foreseeable end, with implications for soldiers, equipment and technology, as well as structures and principles guiding force deployment and the conduct of military operations. In this way, NATO is not only overseeing transformation inside its members’ forces, but is itself subject to transformation.

The most visible manifestations of NATO’s military trans-formation have been the establishment of Allied Command Transformation in Norfolk, Virginia, in the United States and the development of the NATO Response Force (NRF). The NRF is now the focal point for force transformation, serving as a testing ground for new technology, doctrine and procedures. Since there is regular and frequent rotation of forces, returning contingents are rapidly able to bring back expertise and skills developed within the NRF and inject them into their national forces. Since the NRF consists predominantly of Europeans, it also serves as a vehicle for fostering more coherent procurement policies within Europe. Clearly, transformation is no longer simply an item on NATO’s agenda, but has become a defining feature of the Alliance today.

Transformation is not, however, of itself a sufficiently convincing common purpose to keep the Allies together and NATO united. Alliance cohesion in a changing world requires more fundamental agreement on the nature of the security challenges and approaches to dealing with them. However, although most observers consider the Alliance’s 1999 Strategic Concept – the agreed document analysing the strategic environment and the ways the Alliance addresses the threats it faces – to be out of date, the transatlantic disputes of the past two years have undermined any prospect of updating it. Indeed, it is revealing that The Strategic Vision, the document providing the strategic underpinning of the transformation process, is not an official Alliance-agreed document but a publication

issued by the Alliance’s Supreme Commanders: Supreme Allied Commander, Europe General James L. Jones and Supreme Allied Commander, Transformation Admiral Edmund P. Giambastiani.

As noted above, NATO is not the only security organisation in need of reform. Two other organisations with close ties to the Alliance have also been adapting to changes in the security environment, but with different results. The rapid development of a European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) has contributed to giving the European Union a security personality in its own right. By contrast, the slow pace and administrative nature of reform at the United Nations risks undermining the legal underpinning of international stabilisation efforts. Given the interrelationship between NATO and these two organisations, it is worth examining the reform processes currently underway there.

EU evolution

The European Union has been developing ESDP as an important element of its foreign policy to add military vigour

to the economic power that was already at its disposal. With a view to addressing the root causes of threats such as those posed by extremism, migration and organised crime, the European Union had long focused on non-military instruments to foster stability abroad. The military element of the Common Foreign and Security Policy is now helping to rebalance this approach and provide the European Union with greater policy options, though the European Union’s willingness to think

of itself as a military player is growing only slowly.

The European Union’s Security Strategy of 2003, drafted and negotiated by the Council’s secretariat, has helped create a new dynamic in its internal security debate. The document is both a compromise, bridging differing positions on the legitimate use of force, and a provocative call for action, demanding more and earlier European engagement, as well as greater efforts to make European foreign-policy instruments more coherent. These new approaches are now being tested both in Bosnia and Herzegovina and elsewhere. Moreover, many of the coherence problems have been addressed in the course of negotiations about the EU Constitution. In this way, even if the Constitution is not ratified, many of these measures would survive, including the creation of a European Defence Agency to help coordinate military procurement.

Increasingly, as a result of operations in the former Yugoslavia, the European Union and NATO are working effectively together in accordance with the Berlin-Plus

Frequently written-off

over the years, NATO has

made adapting to new

challenges something

of a speciality


Challenge

arrangements by which the European Union has access to NATO assets. Despite this practical cooperation, many analysts predict that the two institutions may eventually become competitors. Many Europeans believe that the set of multi-dimensional instruments they hope to establish for EU foreign policy are more appropriate tools to address modern security challenges than any approach based on military might. That said, the strategic consensus at both the European Union and at NATO is actually very similar. Moreover, only very few EU members wish to build the European Union into a counterweight to the United States. The majority simply want Europe to become more powerful in order to be a more attractive and therefore more influential partner for the United States. While the motives behind ESDP might be diverse, the conviction underpinning it is sufficiently great to drive the process forward.

UN reform

The reform process at the United Nations is an example of organisational adaptation in the absence of both a lead nation to act as the political driving force and converging interests among member states. In this case, the Secretary-General and his team are influential players, but do not have sufficient weight to achieve more than efficiency gains in the UN administration and are unable to initiate a thorough transformation of the United Nations organisation as a whole.

The end of the Cold War appeared to herald new possibilities for the long-paralysed UN Security Council. The 1992 Agenda for Peace offered a bold outline for peacekeeping and peace-enforcement tasks for the United Nations and helped guide the streamlining of the UN Department for Peacekeeping Operations. Moreover, in the following years, the secretariat was reformed to make it more efficient and effective. However, any change requiring both consensus and commitment from the member states has been more difficult to achieve.

One element of this complex endeavour is the reform of the UN Security Council itself. While there is general agreement that the Security Council would be a more credible instrument if it more accurately reflected the actual distribution of population and power in the world, there is no consensus on its reform in sight. To break the stalemate, Secretary-General Kofi Annan set up a high-ranking committee that reported last December. In addition to presenting streamlined proposals for Security Council reform, the committee suggested a number of radical changes to the United Nations, including specifying criteria for preventive military action. The report has therefore generated additional pressure for comprehensive reform and serves as a much-publicised reference document for the debate.

The future shape and effectiveness of the United Nations is important to NATO’s transformation. This is because legitimacy based in international law, such as a Security Council mandate, is an important, if not necessary precondition for most European Allies to consider the use of force. A close connection between NATO and the United Nations when it comes to the deployment of the NRF would therefore help reinforce the Alliance’s transformation with greater political consensus.

NATO prospects

During the 1990s following the end of the Cold War, NATO managed to stay alive and remain in business by focusing on crisis management in Europe. While this work has been critical to wider European security and stability, it has been no substitute for the existential threat previously posed by the Soviet Union in terms of fostering political cohesion and a common Alliance identity. Likewise, the transformation agenda that has driven the Alliance forward effectively since 9/11 and in particular since the Prague Summit of 2002 has failed to overcome political divisions among Allies.

Some analysts believe that the current transformation agenda represents the greatest possible degree of consensus that can be achieved today in NATO. As a result, they fear that whatever consensus does exist will likely disintegrate as soon as the Alliance has to confront decisions about the use or the threat of force, humanitarian intervention or engagement in some more remote strategic region, thereby putting NATO’s existence in jeopardy once again. Alternatively, the Alliance might survive but only as a service provider making available capabilities for coalition operations led by the United States and possibly in the future by the European Union.

In drawing attention to the lack of strategic discussion at NATO, Schröder is putting these very issues on the table. He may well also have launched precisely the kind of dialogue that he believes is necessary to revive the transatlantic relationship. While his suggestion to create a high-level panel has not been taken up, US representatives have been quick to indicate that they, too, are eager for such dialogue and that they also have a purpose for NATO. “Should not NATO’s motivating purpose now be to help extend the flag of freedom, security and peace to peoples and countries farther south and east?” former US NATO Ambassador Nicholas Burns asked in a newspaper interview on the eve of his departure from Brussels. The question is whether this is a flag that Europeans can follow.

For more on the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik, see www.dgap.org

Dear Frédéric,

With the transatlantic drama over Iraq now seemingly behind us, it’s time for calm debate about the future relationship between Europe and North America, and NATO’s role within it. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s remarks to February’s Wehrkunde conference in Munich and subsequent comments from both sides of the Atlantic have brought the question of what the transatlantic alliance is about today into the open. This is a good thing, because it’s in everybody’s interest for this debate to be transparent, far-reaching and constructive. Transatlantic relations in the 21st century will clearly be different from what they were in the

second half of the 20th. But “different” does not have to mean “worse”.

NATO is a highly successful alliance immersed in an identity crisis from which it is unlikely to emerge soon. This is not, of course, the first time that the Alliance has questioned its rationale. France’s withdrawal from NATO’s integrated military structure in 1966 was a similarly seminal moment, which led a year later to the Harmel Report On The Future Tasks of the Alliance. Fifteen years ago, the dismantling of both the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union triggered a debate about whether a politico-military alliance linking Europe and North America was still necessary. That debate led to

the decision to go “out of area” (as opposed to out of business) with the result that for most of the 1990s the Alliance was engaged in three large projects in the intersection between political and military spheres. These were peacekeeping and peace-enforcement operations in the Balkans; preparing a number of Central and East European states for membership in NATO and, by extension, the transatlantic community; and providing a forum for a coordinated response to events in Russia. Combined with the continued security guarantee, this provided enough of an answer to the question of “why NATO” for more than a decade. It should be noted, however, that all three projects related directly to the

yesEspen Barth Eide

is director of the International Politics

Department at the Norwegian Institute

of International Affairs in Oslo.

noFrédéric Bozo is a professor at the University of Nantes and a senior research associate specialising in transatlantic relations at L’Institut français des relations internationales in Paris.

Debate

is a professor at the University of

research associate specialising in transatlantic relations at L’Institut français des relations internationales


European continent in a climate of continued US focus on the European security scene.

More than the end of the Cold War, therefore, it’s the post-9/11 world that has brought NATO’s purpose into question. This began with the Afghan campaign, though not as a result of any disagreement within NATO. Indeed, on the contrary, as French daily Le Monde put it, we were “all Americans” then. The problem was rather a feeling of irrelevance. Given that NATO had invoked Article 5 for the first time in response to 9/11, US talk of “the mission defining the coalition” was the op- posite of what European Atlanticists wanted to hear. It took almost two years for NATO to commit on a major scale to Afghanistan. That followed the Iraq crisis and deep disagreement over both NATO’s role in the defence of Turkey and the legitimacy of the war itself.

The tone of the debate has changed radically since then. Neither Washington nor any European capital wishes to repeat the experiences of the past two to three years. The recent visits of President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Europe – as well as the way they were received – symbolised a mutual desire to demonstrate unity and commitment. But beyond expressions of good will, details of a new “consensus” remain unclear.

In my view, today’s challenge is two-fold: first, to make a realistic assessment of the Alliance’s role in new political circumstances; and

second, to repoliticise the Alliance rather than allowing it to atrophy into little more than a military “toolbox”.

The starting point for an assessment of NATO’s role is recognition that Europe’s political landscape has fundamentally changed. Today, the European Union is a player in international security in its own right. Indeed, an increasingly ambitious European Union is currently adding military capacities to its existing “soft-power” toolbox. Many future transatlantic debates will have to take place between the European Union and the United States simply because the agenda has to be broader than that provided in NATO’s more classical security forum. Many key issues on the current international agenda – the curbing of Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions, plans to lift the arms embargo on China and the need to help Africa emerge from its several complex crises – require multifaceted approaches. Atlanticists should stop deploring this. Attempts to use NATO to blunt the European Union’s political ambitions are doomed to fail. Encouraging the European Union’s political development while simultaneously forging a vibrant security partnership with NATO is the way to go. There will still be plenty for NATO to do. The Alliance remains the most logical forum for everything from coordinating military instruments to strategic debate about common security challenges between the two main pillars of the West. Moreover, it should aim at remaining so, recognising that this is the Alliance’s contribution to a broader, transatlantic security architecture.

This requires a “repoliticisation” of NATO. The Alliance must once again become a forum for open dialogue about the major issues it is to engage in. A sincere transatlantic dialogue about how to deal with terrorism, for example, is greatly needed precisely because Allies have differing perspectives on how to

respond to this common challenge. NATO will also likely remain active in places like Afghanistan and Kosovo and continue to provide the military muscle behind future multilateral, peace-enforcement efforts. Where to engage, and how to do so, may prove controversial. Decisions should, therefore, be rooted in a broader political consensus within the Alliance than is currently the case. And where the Alliance provides the military backbone of broader international peace-building efforts, it needs to be better connected to the overall political processes relating to the political future of these situations. Again, this requires a more political NATO and enhanced cooperation with other organisations, including the United Nations.

NATO’s challenge is not merely to survive – nobody is actually suggesting that it should die – but to remain a key player and a key forum in the very area in which it has already proved so effective. But it will only remain effective if the Allies develop a common political understanding of its role. There is no common enemy to substitute for the threat posed by Communism or the Soviet Union. “Terrorism” doesn’t do the trick. Instead, the Alliance today is an expression of the continued relevance of the “West” in international security. In a renewed transatlantic political forum, however, we must expect further disagreement. The challenge is not to pretend that differences aren’t there, but to confront them head on.

Yours,Espen

Espen Barth Eide versus Frédéric Bozo

The Alliance must once again become a forum for open dialogue about the

major issues it is to engage in

Espen Barth Eide

It was only when NATO intervened in Bosnia and

Herzegovina that the Alliance’s claim to a central role in Euro-Atlantic security was secured

Frédéric Bozo


Dear Espen,

Just two years ago, in the run up to the Iraq War, NATO was on a collision course. One group of countries, led by the United Kingdom and the United States, accused the other, led by France and Germany, of betraying the collective-defence commitment, which is the cornerstone of the Alliance. The issue, one recalls, was the defence of Turkey. The latter accused the former of destroying the foundations of collective security on which the very same Alliance was created. The issue, of course, was their willingness to wage war without UN Security Council authorisation. The viability of the Alliance and the future of transatlantic relations were at stake.

To be sure, NATO has recovered from this crisis. By the June 2004 Istanbul Summit, the wounds had essentially healed. Yet unlike most previous NATO crises, the Iraq affair has not led – at least not to date – to a new beginning, as was the case with

the Harmel Report, for example, after France’s withdrawal from the integrated military structure. Instead, the Alliance seems today to be suffering from anaemia. The symptoms are there for everyone to see. NATO has been struggling to persuade Allies to deliver on their force commitments both in regard to ISAF and the training of Iraqi forces. The Alliance’s role in the broader Middle East initiative remains little more than a slogan. Finally, and perhaps more seriously, in the words of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the Alliance is no longer the “primary venue” where its members “discuss and coordinate strategies”.

If nothing is done, anaemia risks degenerating into something worse leading eventually, some time down the road, to death. Since nobody wants the Alliance to fade away – least of all the French, who are among its most committed members when it comes to contributing to the NATO Response Force or appointing high-ranking officers to key positions in the military structure – something has to be done.

So is politicisation, as you and others suggest, the right medication and would a more political role for NATO infuse new life into the Alliance? A reading of NATO’s history suggests this might well present a way forward. At key moments in the past, politicising NATO has provided the answer to a lingering malaise or an acute crisis. In addition to the Harmel exercise, one recalls the Report of the Three Wise Men in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez Crisis. In both instances, it was about making NATO more “political” in order to bolster ailing legitimacy and strengthen internal cohesion.

More recently, NATO’s successful renewal in the 1990s was premised on the idea that, in the absence of the Soviet threat, the Alliance had to become more political to compensate for a declining military rationale. In

essence, since NATO was no longer needed to prepare for the defence of Europe, it justified its continued existence by taking on a wider role for European security and thereby contributing to the continent’s post-Cold War stability.

It seemed to work, and by the mid-1990s, NATO, which many had assumed would slowly waste away after the Cold War, was again thriving and positioning itself as the cornerstone of European security. Yet one needs to take a closer look at what made this unexpected revival possible. Until autumn 1995, the relevance of NATO’s “new” security missions and, by extension, its future as a vibrant alliance was very much in question against the backdrop of its divisions and inaction in response to the wars of Yugoslav dissolution. Indeed, it was only when NATO intervened in Bosnia and Herzegovina and then deployed the Implementation Force to oversee the peace process there that the Alliance’s claim to a central role in Euro-Atlantic security was secured. Moreover, this position was reinforced three years later by intervention in Kosovo.

The bottom line, it seems to me, was that NATO’s future was assured only when the Allies demonstrated its continued vitality as a military instrument in a new strategic environ-ment, dealing with non-Article 5, out-of-area contingencies. In the absence of such a demonstration, seeking to rejuvenate NATO at the time by “politicising” the organisation would simply have led to the creation of a talk shop.

Today’s problem with NATO is that its usefulness or at least its centrality, especially in military terms, is no longer seen as a given by its members. There are two explanations for this. The first is by no means new. The United States no longer sees NATO as the institution of choice for conducting military operations, even under US command. This has been


NATO has to sharpen its politico- military machinery in a way that

both Allies and Partners perceive as relevant for the challenges of

a new century

Espen Barth Eide


clear since the Kosovo campaign, which was an experience that the US military did not enjoy. The way in which Washington shunned Allied offers of support during the Afghan campaign in autumn 2001 confirmed this state of affairs.

The second factor is slowly emerging and is to a large extent a consequence of the first. Europeans are increasingly reluctant to commit forces within a US-dominated framework in which the United States hardly commits forces itself, as illustrated by ISAF in Afghanistan. Hence their eagerness to beef up the European Union as a potential first choice for operations and to take the lead in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,* in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and sooner or later in Kosovo.

If current trends continue, NATO risks becoming an empty shell because it no longer matches the emerging structure of the transatlantic relationship, which is the result of US detachment from Europe and of Europe’s new politico-strategic assertiveness. This, of course, would be terribly wrong. NATO is still needed, if only because Americans and Europeans need each other militarily. Europeans continue to need US protection, though less so than earlier, and definitely require US support to conduct demanding military operations, as is the case in Bosnia and Herzegovina under Berlin-Plus type arrangements. The United States needs Europe’s military manpower in peacekeeping operations in which it is reluctant to commit forces, such as ISAF.

The conclusion, in my view, is simple. While NATO in its present configuration is not likely to remain an attractive framework for either entity, there is ample room and need for its transformation into what we really need, namely an instrument to maintain and promote the military connection between the European Union and the United States. I am

aware that this requires a radical departure from old thinking in the Alliance. But I am convinced that if we do not seriously think of ways to reconcile NATO with the new reality of EU-US relations, it will just fade away, doing irreparable damage to the transatlantic community in the wider sense. Politicising NATO is not the issue and amounts to little more than an empty slogan, unless we tackle the fundamentals and thereby make the Alliance, once again, the key venue for strategic coordination between America and Europe. This, in turn, means making the EU-US connection work, in particular in military terms.

Yours,Frédéric

Dear Frédéric

Our analysis of both recent history and the current situation coincide to a large degree. We both believe that the Alliance has to be reconciled with the new reality of EU-US relations. We also concur that NATO must continue to see the military connection between Europe and the United States as a cornerstone of its raison d’être. After all, a military alliance without a military task is hardly sustainable.

Where we apparently disagree is on the conclusion: whether “repoliticisation” is the way forward. You seem to believe this is little more than an empty slogan and that what is needed is “strategic coordination between America and Europe” and “an instrument to maintain and promote the military connection between the European Union and the United States”.

My point is that I do not believe that a “pure” military connection can be maintained over time without a strong political underpinning – and that this political underpinning does not come by itself. We should

remember that transatlantic political cohesion was crucial – though often implicit – throughout the Cold War. Both Western European and North American Allies agreed on deterring the perceived Soviet threat, and both also agreed that an American commitment to Europe had a stabilising effect well beyond the existence of a common threat. Indeed, the success of the project of European integration that has led to the European Union should be seen in this light. The transatlantic security partnership helped provide the conditions for functional economic integration in Europe, since some of the most politically complicated issues could be discussed elsewhere. NATO could concentrate on its military role, because the political cohesion was there from the outset, maintained by the continued common threat. What is implicit and commonly agreed becomes so evident that there is no need to repeat it. Still, without this sense of common purpose, there would have been no NATO in the first place. And even when disagreement on strategic choices emerged


Politicising NATO amounts to little more than an

empty slogan, unless we tackle

the fundamentals

Frédéric Bozo


during the Cold War, overall political cohesion was maintained due to the perception of a common threat and common purpose.

Today, we haven’t only moved beyond the Cold War, but also beyond the transitional, post-Cold War period. What has become abundantly clear in recent years is that political cohesion between Europe and the United States cannot be taken for granted, and nostalgia alone will not keep the Alliance afloat for long. If NATO is to survive – which I both hope and believe it will – it must be the right answer to today’s, not yesterday’s, challenges.

Any use of military power remains, in Karl Von Clausewitz’s words, “the continuation of politics by other means”. This is particularly true when it comes to intervening in conflicts that do not represent existential threats to us, but rather are long-term investments in a more stable order. Joint action – like that

currently ongoing in Afghanistan – must be based on political agreement about what we are trying to achieve and where it fits into the broader picture. Here, NATO has much to offer. Beyond agreeing on committing troops, it has a developed system of political guidance to the military effort and a forum in which conflicting opinions can be aired and consensus built.

In the coming years, NATO should demonstrate that it is more than a “coalition of the willing”. Coalitions may be attractive to the coalition leader, at least as long as someone comes along. But as the United States is realising in Iraq, it cannot rely on long-term troop commitments. These come and go depending on political circumstances. For junior partners, coalitions are problematic, as they typically lack a “balanced” political framework with the result that the only way to express disagreement is to withdraw. For smaller countries in particular, multinational frameworks are more attractive in the long run. NATO – through its political structure, and with a civilian Secretary General and secretariat – can add political judgement and direction, and provide a way by which the military contribution is politically connected to the wider effort it is trying to support.

This does not happen by itself. NATO has to sharpen its politico-military machinery in a way that both Allies and Partners perceive as relevant for the challenges of a new century. Only then will it combine readily available military capabilities with an enhanced ability to create political consensus.

Yours,Espen

Dear Espen,

I agree that the much-needed military connection between Europe

and the United States, which a revamped NATO should provide, will not be sustainable without “a strong political underpinning”. But the question then becomes, what institutional framework is best suited to promote such political consensus? Throughout the Cold War, NATO was indisputably the most appropriate institutional forum because of the existence of a clear, common threat. NATO’s political centrality, in other words, was a function of its sheer military value.

Today, this is no longer the case. While we cannot and should not completely exclude scenarios in which we would collectively have to fight an external enemy presenting an existential threat, this can no longer be the privileged rationale for NATO. The war against terror, in other words, is not a functional equivalent of the Cold War. It cannot in itself provide the cement holding the Western Alliance together, because Americans and Europeans do not necessarily agree on the nature of the danger and on the ways and means to tackle it. Indeed, they often disagree. This is what the crisis of the Alliance has been about since 2001.

To be sure, most Allies will no doubt continue to view peacekeeping operations like ISAF in Afghanistan as what NATO’s military role should be about for the foreseeable future. As a result, beefing up the political dimension of such operations does make sense. But I very much doubt that a residual peacekeeping role for NATO, albeit a politicised one, can in and of itself make for a renewed transatlantic relationship.

In order to recreate the political foundations of the Alliance, we should, I believe, take on two far more demanding challenges. First, we should try to reach agreement on the conditions for the use of force in situations other than those coming under the right of self-defence. It was disagreement on the legitimacy – or


NATO’s repoliticisation is about more of the strategic debate about new threats

taking place within NATO itself

Espen Barth Eide


the legality – of preventive military action that caused the rift in the Alliance over Iraq.

Second, we should try to forge a common understanding on the ways and means to expand democracy and the rule of law. While we agree on the objective, we do not share a vision of how to achieve it. Since this is likely to remain a major preoccupation for Americans and Europeans alike, as recent events in the Middle East indicate, we urgently need to reach agreement on that score if we are serious about restoring a sense of common purpose in the Alliance, as you rightly advocate.

We will not achieve this by decree or by making “politicisation” of the old NATO the order of the day. We can only do this through a serious, in-depth dialogue between America and Europe. Because the emergence of a coherent European Union is a reality which can no longer be ignored, the bottom line is that the rejuvenation of the Alliance presupposes not only the adaptation of NATO’s military apparatus to this new situation, but also the creation of a direct strategic link between its two main entities. Only by reconciling the workings of the transatlantic relationship with the structural change that has occurred in relations between America and Europe will we be in a position to restore a sense of common purpose which makes for a sustainable Alliance.

Yours,Frédéric

Dear Frédéric,

I have argued from the outset that NATO has no alternative but to adapt to Europe’s rapidly changing political landscape. At the core of this transformation stands the emergence of the European Union as an increasingly coherent international actor. Already an

established “civilian” power, it now also boasts certain military and crisis-management capacities and the European Security Strategy provides for a self-styled European answer to the National Security Strategy of the United States. These two players – the European Union and the United States – will provide the main building blocks of what we may still refer to as the “West”.

My point is that through NATO we already have an organisation that provides a politico-military framework for this reformed transatlantic partnership, which also provides an alternative to ad hoc “coalitions of the willing”. Were NATO to focus exclusively on its military structures, its status would rapidly decline to one of a mere standards organisation. To me, NATO’s repoliticisation is about more of the strategic debate about new threats, as well as the role the Alliance can play in peace-enforcement and peace-building tasks, taking place within NATO itself. I want to see member states taking this feature of the organisation much more seriously than they have in the recent past.

Yours,Espen

Dear Espen,

We are not far apart, and this gives me hope for the future of the Alliance. After all, our two countries have traditionally had diverging perspectives on this issue. As you know, the French, ever since General de Gaulle, have been keen to distinguish between the Alliance itself – whose existence has never been at stake in French policy – and NATO’s organisational structure – which the French have seen as needing to be improved. During the Cold War, this distinction was hard for other Allies to grasp, let alone to accept. However, it seems to me that this is no longer the case, and

that now the distinction makes even more sense.

Today, it is more important than ever to build a robust and sustainable transatlantic relationship, if for no other reason than because it can no longer be taken for granted. At the same time, it is important to restructure the Alliance to transform NATO into what should essentially be a bilateral Euro-American organisation. This is the way to preserve NATO’s military relevance and thereby preserve the long-term politico-strategic connection between Europe and the United States in the framework of the transatlantic Alliance.

YoursFrédéric

For more on the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, see nupi.no

For more on L’Institut français des relations internationales, see www.ifri.org


It is important to restructure the Alliance to transform NATO

into what should essentially be a bilateral Euro-American

organisation

Frédéric Bozo


Analysis

NATO’s transformation scorecard Robert G. Bell assesses implementation of NATO’s Prague, Norfolk and Munich transformation agendas.

I don’t think of transformation as something that starts un-transformed and goes to something that is transformed. I think of it as a process where we are forced by the nature of our world in this 21st century to continue, and it’s more a matter of culture and attitude than it is technologies and platforms.

US Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld

W hile serving as Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan, George Schultz once famously compared diplomacy to trying to keep

your garden free of weeds: in both cases, he said, your work can never really be said to be done. The same can be said about “transformation”. As Secretary Rumsfeld recently observed, transformation is more a process than an end-state, with new demands, new challenges and new security environments continually requiring further change, further adaptation.

Although the word “transformation” has been in vogue only in recent years, NATO has effectively faced a “transformational” imperative since the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade and a half ago. Since then, the Alliance has time and again addressed warnings that unless it could “adapt”, “evolve”, or “reform”, it would risk both its relevance and its viability. A decade ago, NATO was challenged either to go “out of area” or “out of business”. The political processes by which the Alliance in the late 1990s ultimately reached consensus on the necessity of waging war against a state (rump Yugoslavia) that had not actually attacked NATO territory can fairly be described as the Alliance’s first great post-Cold War “transformation” success.

Today, there is no single “NATO Transformation Agenda”. Rather, it can be said that there are three, each begun for different reasons at different times, but all now overlapping and interrelated. These are the Prague Agenda, initiated by former Secretary General Lord George Robertson in 2002 in response to the “lessons of Kosovo and 9/11” and focused on changes in capabilities, missions and structures; the Norfolk Agenda, initiated by current Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer in 2004 in response to the “lessons of Afghanistan” and focused on changes in defence planning, force generation and common funding; and the Munich Agenda, initiated by German Chancellor

Gerhard Schröder in 2005 in response to the “lessons of the Iraq crisis” and focused on changes in NATO’s role (or lack thereof) as a venue for genuine transatlantic strategic consultation and decision-making.

Prague Agenda

The 78-day NATO air campaign against rump Yugoslavia in 1999 to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo exposed critical “fault lines” between US and Allied military capabilities at the high end of the conflict spectrum. The statistics are now well-known: 90 per cent of the precision-guided munitions were delivered by US fighters and bombers, and few of the Allies could even carry out secure air-to-air communications, forcing NATO formations to transmit on open channels. The United States also provided 100 per cent of NATO’s jamming capability, 90 per cent of the air-to-ground surveillance, and 80 per cent of the air refuelling tankers. Alarmed by this “gap”, Lord Robertson began articulating his mantra that the top three NATO priorities had to be “capabilities, capabilities, capabilities”.

But while the “lessons of Kosovo” were still being digested, NATO’s strategic landscape was shaken by 9/11. The Alliance showed great agility and enduring respect for the principle of collective security in immediately invoking Article 5 for the first time in its history and, later, in dispatching AWACS aircraft to patrol the skies above US cities. At their meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, in May 2002, Allied foreign ministers formally confirmed the Alliance’s resolve to go wherever necessary to combat threats to Allied security. And throughout 2002, NATO Headquarters staff diligently planned a comprehensive package of organisational changes and capability enhancements approved by Allied leaders that November at the Prague Summit, including creating the NATO Response Force (NRF), realigning its Strategic Commands, and endorsing the Prague Capabilities Commitment (PCC) modernisation programmes. Last but certainly not least, the Alliance invited seven countries to join NATO and agreed accompanying reforms in the Headquarters’ structure and procedures needed to keep the North Atlantic Council functioning smoothly “at 26”.

Two-and-a-half years on, implementation of the Prague Agenda is on balance positive, though some programmes are lagging. First, the North Atlantic Council has not proven unmanageable “at 26”. As Czech NATO Ambassador Karel Kovanda observed in a speech at the Marshall Center in Germany in October 2003: “If the four or five Allies with

Robert G. Bell was NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Defence Investment from 1999 to 2003 and now works in Brussels as a senior vice president of SAIC.


important stakes of one kind or another reach a consensus among themselves”, an overall consensus is “virtually assured”, whether the total number of Allies is 19 or 26. Second, NATO’s resolve to undertake “new missions” to “wherever” the threat required continues to be embraced and indeed extended by the Alliance, as exemplified by the Istanbul Summit decision to expand the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan and agreement at the recent Brussels gathering by all 26 Allies to contribute in one form or another to the Iraqi Training Mission. Third, NATO’s success in standing up its new Allied Command Transformation and in accelerating the

first availability of the NRF reflects exemplary leadership from the NATO Military Authorities.

The picture with regard to new capabilities, such as strategic sea- and airlift, air-to-air refuelling and Alliance Ground Surveillance programmes, is less clear, and not as positive, though there is no question that some progress is being made. The sealift initiative, led by Norway, is well-advanced, with Danish and UK ships available now for use and access to others assured. At Istanbul, defence ministers signed a Memorandum of Understanding committing the German-led strategic airlift project to achieve an operational airlift

Analysis

Transatlantic debate: At their February 2005 meeting, Alliance leaders committed themselves to “strengthening NATO’s role as a forum for strategic and political consultation and coordination among Allies”

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capacity for outsize cargo through an on-call availability charter by the end of this year using up to six Antonov An-124-100 transport aircraft. Under Spanish leadership, NATO’s working group on air-to-air refuelling has continued its planning. Alliance Ground Surveillance seems poised to advance into the design and development phase (assuming the current risk reduction effort is accepted and adequately funded by participating nations). NATO has also made definite gains since Prague in equipping its air forces with precision-guided munitions, in prioritising its armaments cooperation efforts in the defence-against-terrorism area, and in approving the blueprint for a NATO Theatre Missile Defence capability.

But in more cases than not, the “first availability” dates for these crucial strategic enablers remain years away, with the bulk of funding yet to come. In addition, as NATO Allies (including the United States) increasingly allocate defence spending to the operations and maintenance prerequisites of expanded global operations, this priority is beginning to crowd out funding that might otherwise be earmarked for the longer-term PCC modernisation programmes. Moreover, with the immediate difficulties of sustaining NATO’s many crisis-response operations demanding much of the Headquarters’ time and attention, the principal long-term PCC modernisation programmes are no longer scrutinised by the North Atlantic Council in the manner they were when Lord Robertson constantly exerted what he called his “own brand of political electro-convulsive therapy” to pressure nations to respond to his “capabilities, capabilities, capabilities” exhortations.

Norfolk Agenda

At a meeting at Allied Command Transformation last April, Secretary General De Hoop Scheffer invited debate on what he has come to term the “Norfolk Agenda”. These possible changes in defence-planning, force-generation, and common-funding arrangements are, he believes, needed to correct “a disconnect between our repeated ambitious declarations and our ability to put the required forces on the ground” and a force-generation process that “is just not working anymore”. Discouraged by constantly having to haggle with Allies over a helicopter here or a support unit there, he warned in an October 2004 speech to the US European Command that: “Unless Allies are able and willing to deploy these forces for NATO missions, the Damocles sword will hang over our operations and NATO’s future.”

As part of the Norfolk Agenda, NATO last November con-vened the first-ever “Global Force Generation” conference

to try to reconcile individual nation’s commitments to the various NRF rotations with their commitments to the crisis-response operations in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. Discussions within the Executive Working Group on the issue of improved predictability of national contributions to NATO forces have been intensified. The Chairman of the Military Committee, General Harald Kujat, has issued a Comprehensive Approach paper aimed at providing a military view on how best to rationalise the defence, operational, intelligence and resource planning disciplines.

Other force-generation options that are being explored as part of the Norfolk Agenda include receiving operational planning options and a clearer sense of individual Allies’ willingness to contribute specific capabilities before the Alliance makes the political commitment to intervene in a crisis or conflict; developing better usability and output targets to assess a nation’s ability to deploy its forces effectively in crisis-response operations; extending the time

frame for force commitments to two years to improve predictability; and requiring nations to “opt out” of that commitment rather than expecting nations to “opt in” through successive shorter-term commitments of troops or equipment to a particular crisis-response operation; and establishing new multinational structures dedicated to post-conflict stabilisation roles.

In the area of common funding reform, the Secretary General has invited discussion on increasing the common military budgets – the NATO Security Investment Programme

(NSIP) and the Military Budget – and applying them to the more operational aspects of current NATO deployments; utilising more contractor outsourcing; building NATO contingency funding into nations’ defence budgets; and establishing “NATO AWACS-like” groupings and budgets in the areas of logistics, medical services and helicopter lift.

At this stage, it is clearly too early to venture an assessment of progress in the Norfolk Agenda. Initial discussions in a number of the areas, though, suggest tough going ahead, particularly with regard to overhauling and expanding the eligibility rules for the NSIP and Military Budget accounts (where, among other things, a seemingly intractable dispute over national cost shares has produced a stalemate) and to overcoming some Allies’ reluctance to provide NATO significantly greater information on the disposition of their forces.

Munich Agenda

At the conclusion of their February meeting in Brussels, Allied leaders committed themselves to “strengthening

NATO has faced a

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imperative since

the collapse of the

Soviet Union a decade

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Analysis

NATO’s role as a forum for strategic and political consul-tation and coordination among Allies, while reaffirming its place as the essential forum for security consultation between Europe and North America”.

This initiative brought to an end a brief but intense period of consultations prompted ten days earlier by Chancellor Schröder’s written intervention (read by Defence Minister Peter Struck, since the Chancellor had fallen ill) at the Munich Conference on European Security Policy. There, the Chancellor’s assertion that NATO “was no longer the primary venue where transatlantic partners discuss and coordinate strategies” and his proposal for a “high-ranking panel of independent figures from both sides of the Atlantic to help us find a solution” for avoiding future Iraq-like crises provoked headlines and some consternation among senior NATO, as well as US, officials who had been caught off-guard.

In the ensuing controversy, German officials went to great lengths to stress that the Chancellor had not been pro-nouncing last rites for NATO but had wanted to strengthen it. For their part, NATO and US officials tended to differentiate between the “outside panel” suggestion (which they rejected) and the underlying substantive criticism. After all, there was no question that the United States had not been willing to use NATO as the primary venue to discuss and coordinate such fundamental US strategic decisions as those on how and where to attack the Taliban and al Qaida in Afghanistan or how long to give the UN Security Council inspection process to produce results before going to war with Iraq. Nor has the North Atlantic Council been the primary venue for strategic consultations between the United States and its NATO Allies on such high-priority issues as preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons or the European Union’s intention to remove the arms embargo on China.

In effect, Chancellor Schröder was questioning whether all the transformational reforms initiated at Prague and Norfolk would be for naught if the Alliance was unable to function as a genuine partnership in the pre-conflict strategic decision-making phases. In this sense, he was not only standing General Charles de Gaulle’s dictum – “Of what use is strategic planning if the means of carrying it out are not forthcoming?” – on its head, but also echoing frustrations with the quality of political dialogue at NATO, previously broached publicly by other European leaders, including Secretary General De Hoop Scheffer himself.

By the time the Brussels Summit had convened, all parties had resolved to accentuate the positive. As President George W. Bush said at a press conference the next day: “I interpreted the comments to mean he wants NATO to be relevant, a place where there is meaningful strategic dialogue. And that was very clear to everybody sitting around the table. And the meeting ended with Jaap saying to everybody that he’s going

to come back with a plan to make sure that the strategic dialogue in NATO is relevant.”

Agreeing to produce a plan is, of course, one thing. Achieving consensus on the terms of reference for freewheeling political debate is another. For their part, those European Allies who have traditionally been least willing to allow the North Atlantic Council to discuss issues they have considered as exclusively the European Union’s business, such as Galileo or the China arms embargo, will now have to accept what before would have been seen as NATO “meddling”. And for its part, the United States will need to find some means of broaching strategic issues in the North Atlantic Council that have yet to be agreed within the US inter-agency process, let alone vetted with Congress. That said, the challenge of genuinely “consulting” with Allies as opposed to simply “informing” them of decisions already taken is no more or no less daunting than the challenge any US administration routinely faces in trying to form genuine partnerships with the Hill, or, for that matter, with its main partners within “coalitions of the willing”.

Soldiering on

NATO today is, on the one hand, being saluted by the leaders of its most powerful member as “more active than ever”, “the most successful alliance in history”, and “the vital relationship for the United States when it comes to security”. It can justifiably point with pride to its success in expanding its membership, reorganising its Command Structure and Headquarters organisation, expanding its operations and its operational reach, and making progress in modernising its inventory of capabilities to meet new threats and security challenges.

On the other hand, doubts about the risk of failure persist. From the Secretary General on down, the organisation bemoans the disconnect between Allies’ willingness to embrace new missions and new capabilities, on the one hand, and to pledge the manpower, equipment and resources needed to deliver on those missions and capabilities, on the other. In both cases, critics, and not just critics, wonder whether the requisite political will is really there. In addition, Chancellor Schröder obviously touched upon a raw nerve in publicly highlighting NATO’s diminished importance as a venue for genuine transatlantic decision-making on issues of transcending strategic importance.

But NATO will soldier on, as it always has. As the indis-pensable security alliance of the transatlantic community of nations, NATO can be counted upon to continue to pursue its three transformation agenda – Prague, Norfolk and Munich – with good intent and common purpose, however haltingly, however imperfectly. Much rides on the outcome.

For more on SAIC, see www.saic.com


E urope is once again facing a series of existential questions: how to deepen its integration process without limiting its external action; how to reconcile

its process-oriented nature with actual foreign-policy results; how to combine a constitutional debate and the implementation of a more coherent security and defence policy? The EU Constitution’s precarious ratification process will in all likelihood propel the European Union into an introspective exercise in which Europe’s identity and end-state will be the focus of debate rather than its policies. In short, there is a serious danger that Europe becomes ever more inward-looking at the very time that an uncertain and fragile international environment demands it play a more responsible and active role in foreign affairs.

Despite this, the European project provides the fundamental basis of the continent’s prosperity, and increasingly, of its security. Moreover, huge progress has been made in the realm of security and defence since the launch of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) in the wake of the 1998 St Malo meeting between French President Jacques Chirac and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Ironically, in spite of divisions over Iraq, 2003 was the year in which ESDP moved forward most decisively following agreement of a groundbreaking EU-NATO Declaration on ESDP at the end of 2002. It was also the year that the European Union launched both its first peacekeeping operation and its first police missions in the Balkans, paving the way for the European Union to take responsibility from NATO for peacekeeping in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the end of last year. And it witnessed the European Union’s first autonomous military operation, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In the field of intelligence and counter-terrorism, new efforts towards integrated actions have been launched. In the area of proliferation, the European Union has adopted a clear framework of actions and pressures to strengthen non-proliferation regimes and initiated an unprecedented, coordinated effort vis-à-vis Iran. Most importantly, an EU Security Strategy was formally endorsed in December 2003. In this historic paper, the European Union laid out a foreign-policy framework based on effective multilateralism and preventive engagement to bring stability and prosperity

to its neighbourhood, while recognising the necessity of the use of force in certain circumstances. All of this would have been unthinkable just five years ago. In many ways, ESDP has been one of the European Union’s greatest recent successes. Indeed, the European soft-power approach to world politics has been praised on both sides of the Atlantic in several recent publications – including books by T.R. Reid, Jeremy Rifkin and Mark Leonard – as the emerging model for international behaviour in the 21st century.

Yet obvious failures and crucial limits tarnish these very optimistic assessments of European influence and power. Firstly, and most fundamentally, although international security challenges demand collective answers, in practice, as both the war in Afghanistan and responses to the Madrid bombings have demonstrated, terrorist attacks are met with national rather than international responses. In times of crisis, nation states, not international institutions, remain the key actors. Moreover, the divide over Iraq, the ghosts of the project to build an autonomous EU military headquarters in Tervuren, the deep mistrust between some EU members and the game of hijacking institutions to protect national interests continue to cast a shadow over the European Union’s entire common foreign policy.

Secondly, where foreign-policy coordination is concerned, larger European countries, more often than not, maintain the illusion of acting alone while smaller countries tend to pass the buck to the European Union without providing the necessary resources to enable it properly to undertake these new responsibilities. The current battle over the diplomatic service of the future EU Foreign Minister is emblematic of the recurrent tension between small and large countries and between the Commission and the Council. Vis-à-vis the rest of the world, the need for a common approach is crucial. Yet most members prefer to develop their own special relationships with Washington and other key capitals, even though this undermines their collective impact because it invites the other side to adopt a “divide-and-conquer” approach.

Thirdly, following the European Union’s recent enlargement, formerly distant theatres like Moldova or the Caucasus have become the immediate neighbourhood. While the European Union demonstrated its crisis-management capacity in the case of Ukraine, with significant contributions from Lithuania and Poland, other areas remain beyond European influence. Indeed, even in the Balkans, where the European Union has been engaged for more than a decade, the quest for a long-

ESDP transformed? Jean-Yves Haine assesses the evolution of the European Security and Defence Policy and the military transformation required for Europe to become an effective crisis manager.

Jean-Yves Haine is European security fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. His most recent book, “Les Etats-Unis ont-ils besoin d’alliés ?”, (Payot, 2004) received the France-Amérique Prize 2004.

Analysis


Analysis

term solution in Kosovo requires the kind of special effort that Europe is currently unable or unwilling to undertake.

Lastly, the European Union is often long on declaratory principles, but short on action. Worse still, even when member states agree a common approach, they are frequently unable to achieve concrete results, as diplomatic failure in Cyprus, ongoing chaos in the Congo, inaction in Darfur and passivity in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have shown.

Strategic posture

These limitations are also reflected in the European Union’s strategic posture. By opposing regime change, the European Union emphasises the pre-eminence of stability over democratisation. By rejecting pre-emption – Germany had the wording of the draft Security Strategy changed to remove this – the European Union looks to diplomacy and preventive engagement to resolve international crises. By stressing effective multilateralism, the European Union relies more on international institutions than on its own capacity for action. In short, Europe, by and large, remains a status quo-oriented power, prompt to emphasise international law and ethics. Commission President José Manuel Barroso said recently:

“We [Europeans] are in many ways a superpower. We are a moral power.” Maybe, but it is a morality proclaimed by decree, rather than a conviction demonstrated by action.

The real failure of this ill-named, post-modern Europe, however, relates to its incapacity to reform its defence structure. ESDP capabilities continue to lag. The original objective of up to 60,000 troops deployable within 60 days, set at the 1999 Helsinki meeting of the European Council, has not been met. To be fair, a significant number of European troops are deployed all over the world on national, EU, NATO and UN missions. The point, however, was to place at the European Union’s disposal a reserve of forces, not simply to add another demand on national forces. Several problems have plagued the Helsinki Headline Goal. First, it was merely a quantitative target set on the basis of the international experience in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and therefore, ill-suited to today’s new strategic imperatives. Second, it consisted solely of a catalogue of forces, only a tiny percentage of which were actually rapidly deployable. Third, if deficiencies were identified, there were no real incentives to remedy them. Efforts on capabilities had to shift from the quantitative to the qualitative. Several initiatives have recently taken this necessity into account.

High five: The bulk of the latest EU initiatives in ESDP are focused on the post-stabilisation phase

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First, the establishment of a European Defence Agency to “support the member states in their effort to improve European defence capabilities in the field of crisis management” was finally agreed last year. The Agency is to promote equipment collaboration, research and technology projects and procurement. All this should bring invaluable synergies and economies of scale to European defence spending. In particular, the Agency should be able to coordinate efforts to fill gaps identified by the European Capabilities Action Plan (ECAP). In order to have a real impact, however, the Agency must be properly funded.

Second, the principle of permanent structured cooperation for defence is now formally recognised in the EU Constitution. The criteria governing this cooperation are stringent, at least on paper. Among other things, member states must have an adequate level of defence expenditure; take concrete measures to enhance the availability, interoperability, flexibility and deployability of their armed forces; and commit resources to address shortfalls identified by the ECAP mechanism. The real novelty lies in the encouragement to coordinate the identification of military needs, to specialise national defence and to pool capabilities. Given the weakness of defence budgets and the chronic under-investment in research and technology, collective procurement and multinational forces are obvious solutions. If implemented, permanent structured cooperation could offer a precious framework in which to change the dynamics of European defence.

Lastly, the European Union endorsed the Battle-Group concept last November. This initiative is a direct result of the experience of Operation Artemis in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2003. The Battle-Group concept is based on a “quick-in, quick-out” capability to restore order, especially in Africa, which would be carried out “explicitly but not exclusively” under a UN Security Council mandate. In the second stage, African or other peacekeepers would be expected to take over.

This strategy of providing a quick fix and then devolving longer-term responsibility for peace-building to others is, however, difficult to put into practice. It is not obvious why Battle Groups would be the adequate force package for such operations. Entry force will not be that quick, especially given the European Union’s strategic-lift shortfalls. Exit may be delayed by many months, and the African Union is unlikely to be able to come up with sufficient peacekeepers afterwards. Today in Congo, the UN mission has about 16,000 members, making it the largest of the organisation’s peacekeeping operations. Moreover, the political consensus in Europe for the continent to play a greater role in Africa is limited as revealed all too clearly by the indifference towards

events in Darfur. Despite this, Battle Groups of 1,500 troops, including support and service-support elements, represent a more flexible force package capable of higher-intensity operations. Deployable within five days, they will be fully manned, equipped and trained, and have adequate strategic-lift assets. Member states have committed to deliver 13 such Battle Groups by 2007, nine of which will be multinational, including a contingent from non-EU Norway. This new target of nearly 20,000 men – a third of the headline goal – appears more achievable, but its real efficiency will depend on the transformation of European forces.

Force transformation

European force transformation only started very recently and in the usual uncoordinated manner. The term itself is notoriously vague. Indeed, this is the case even in the United States where embracing the revolution in military affairs has both produced positive results and revealed serious shortcomings. The strengths and weaknesses of

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to build light, highly mobile and technologically advanced US Armed Forces have been evident in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both instances, the war-fighting capabilities deployed were impressive, but the post-conflict stabilisation forces were crucially lacking. The assumption that transformation would help reduce the overall size of the armed forces that was one of the driving factors behind the process has turned out to be wrong and led to a reassessment of the

US transformation project.

In Europe, US difficulties were quickly seized upon to cast doubt on the need for transformation and to emphasise the actual requirements of peacekeeping. The bulk of the latest EU initiatives in ESDP, including new civilian commitments and the gendarmerie initiative, are focused on the post-stabilisation phase. Yet if one looks at the missions where European peacekeepers are currently deployed, most of them were made possible by the use of hard power. There would have been no peace to keep in the Balkans without NATO intervention.

In Europe, transformation means essentially two things. The first is the end of conscription and the strategic culture of territorial defence. In the wake of the failure to act decisively in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the need for expeditionary forces has been recognised, yet military structures in Europe have not undergone sufficient change. Conscription remains in place in many countries; heavy infantry units are still far too numerous; obsolete equipment is over-abundant; and strategic lift is still lacking. Putting this right demands political will and strategic clarity. For now, however, in a majority of European countries, both are lacking.

Transformation is about

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The second aspect of transformation is the actual process by which modern war-fighting techniques are introduced into European forces. At present, in any hostile environment, the risk of casualties and the range of acceptable collateral damage remain too high. EU members must speed the modernisation of their capabilities to be able to fight according to criteria demanded by modern democracies. Even if the current focus of possible EU military actions lies in the post-conflict phase or in preventive deployment in failing states, the lack of adequate capabilities severely restricts the room for manoeuvre in the event of any degeneration. Effective C4ISR capabilities, i.e. command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, sur-veillance, and reconnaissance, are an absolute must in such an event. Currently in Europe, only a handful of countries, notably France and the United Kingdom, have started to introduce network-enabled capabilities in their arsenal. The chief obstacle in this effort is not the availa-bility of European technology, but the level of the defence budget. Transformation is about spending better and more efficiently, but it requires greater expenditure in the short term. This is, nevertheless, in the longer-term interest of European force structures, since they currently suffer from a surplus of redundant capabilities. Yet any increase in defence budget is a political non-starter in most countries.

Defence spending consequences

There are several consequences of this state of affairs. First, medium-sized European countries will probably have to specialise if they want to modernise their forces. This, in turn, must be decided in a coherent manner in a top-down framework rather than the classic bottom-up approach embodied in the ECAP. Yet this is a step that European countries are still reluctant to take. Second, cooperation with NATO remains crucial. Since Europe is likely to focus on network-enabled operations rather than the full spectrum of network-centric warfare, it becomes critical for Europe to be able to plug in to US interoperable C4ISR capabilities. If not, the ability to work with Washington will be lost. In that respect, the NATO Response Force and the EU-NATO Working Capability Group are key components of transatlantic cooperation. Lastly, because Europeans have only one pool of forces, efforts in both the ESDP and the NATO frameworks, the Battle Groups and NATO Response Force respectively, must be congruent.

In practice, this is the case. There are, however, two caveats. The first is political. Since the NATO Response Force is essentially made of European troops, Europeans are understandably keen to have a large say in deciding on how it is used. NATO cannot become the cleaning lady for military operations decided only by Washington. But the conditions surrounding decision-making have changed radically in recent years. Since NATO has moved beyond the Euro-Atlantic area, agreement about the basic

structure of world order, in particular the use of force, is a necessary precondition for effective Alliance decision-making. Given the increased significance of global issues on the transatlantic relationship, there is an urgent need to assess the extent of the common ground and the nature of differences in a greater number of areas than was once the case. As the question of lifting the arms embargo on China demonstrates, Europe and the United States cannot agree on everything, everywhere, because the factors involved are no longer limited to a specific problem like the Soviet threat. While it is unrealistic to expect complete agreement, it is also unrealistic to refuse common action because of one disagreement on a specific issue. The latter cannot become an obstacle for the former. In this framework, consensus is far more difficult to achieve. Moreover, it is especially demanding since both the Battle Groups and the NATO Response Force are supposed to be deployable at 5 to 30-days’ notice. Current efforts for rapid deployment may be jeopardised by still inadequate and protracted decision-making processes.

The second difficulty is more operational. One of the desired results of transformation is both an increase in the size of headquarters and a reduction in the size of the forces on the ground. The new NATO structure with an Allied Command for Operations at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Mons, Belgium, and an Allied Command for Transformation in Norfolk, Virginia, in the United States, means in effect that SHAPE is at the nexus of both NATO and EU operational planning. If the row over an autonomous EU military headquarters has been settled for now, the long-term question remains: should the large European countries rely indefinitely on the Berlin-Plus framework even after agreeing a broadened framework for ESDP operations and increasingly transforming their military capacity? Conversely, for autonomous EU operations: should small and medium-sized European countries rely on national, that is French, German or UK headquarters, to carry out these missions? Since Europe has only one pool of forces, the more Europe transforms its capabilities, the sooner the question of an EU headquarters will resurface.

Europe has developed a comprehensive approach to security, from police missions to crisis management. Deepening the integration through the ratification process might once again distract the European Union from its geopolitical responsibilities. Fulfilling the less demanding aspects of peacekeeping operations, like the current mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, must not be allowed to slow the necessary transformation of European forces. On both grounds, the credibility of the European Union as a strategic actor is at stake.

For more on the International Institute for Strategic Studies, see www.iiss.org

Analysis


T he North Atlantic Alliance today faces a paradox perhaps best illustrated by the following three observations. First, a quick visit to NATO Head-

quarters reveals an Alliance that today is engaged in more missions and activities than ever before. It is not an exaggeration to say that NATO today is busier than at any time since its founding over half a century ago and in many key areas on the verge of being over-stretched.

Second, there is no shortage of new problems where people would like to see NATO become involved or enlarge its current missions – an expanded role in Afghanistan, more responsibility in Iraq, stepped-up outreach in the wider Black Sea region or playing a supporting role in establishing Middle Eastern peace. There is a queue of countries seeking closer strategic ties and eventual membership in the Alliance, including several Balkan countries, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine. One even sees the stirrings of a debate in Israel about exploring closer Euro-Atlantic ties. Obviously, there is still a demand for NATO, and it exerts a considerable magnetic attraction in Europe and beyond.

Third, NATO is seen as less central by some key actors in key capitals on both sides of the Atlantic. Whether it be US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s downgrading of the Alliance to a “toolbox” or German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s comments suggesting the Alliance was no longer the place to debate the grand strategic issues of the day, such remarks would have been unthinkable a decade ago when the US Secretary of Defense and German Chancellor would have been NATO’s greatest advocates and defenders.

The reason for this paradox is actually fairly simple. After the collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union, NATO had to reinvent itself politically for the initial challenges of the post-Cold War era. Indeed, the Alliance’s post-Cold War reinvention is one of the main reasons why Europe as a whole is more peaceful and secure today than at any time in recent

history. In the wake of 9/11, however, the Alliance faced the need to reinvent itself a second time to face the challenges of the post-post-Cold War era that are centred beyond Europe, especially in the broader Middle East. Whereas NATO successfully reinvented itself to meet the challenges of the first, it has not – at least not yet – made the leap required for success in the second.

What were those challenges of the 1990s that the Alliance successfully managed? They were primarily to stop the ethnic wars in the Balkans, anchor the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe to the West and establish a new and cooperative relationship with the Alliance’s former adversary, Russia. To be sure, the Alliance was initially slow in moving to halt ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. And the evolution of both NATO enlargement and NATO-Russia relations were not without their own trials and tribulations and an occasional near-death experience. Nevertheless, in the space of a decade NATO successfully transformed itself from a North American-Western European alliance focused exclusively on territorial defence into a pan-European institution with new members stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea and missions centred increasingly on what used to be called “out of area”. It was no small accomplishment.

New strategic challenge

While such changes seemed enormous at the time, today one can see that they were inadequate to keep pace with world politics at the dawn of the 21st century. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were a second geopolitical earthquake that would force the Alliance to rethink the political parameters that had guided NATO’s previous strategic remake. The Alliance was confronted strategically with the need for yet another great leap forward – one that would take it beyond the official confines of the Euro-Atlantic area and into regions such as the broader Middle East. The collapse of the Twin Towers in Manhattan shattered our old definition of Article 5 threats. Osama bin Laden also demonstrated that the divide separating the Euro-Atlantic and the Middle Eastern security spaces was crumbling. And Americans and Europeans started to wake up to the realisation that the greatest threats to the Euro-Atlantic community no longer emanated from Europe but beyond.

Analysis

Reinventing NATO (yet again) politicallyRonald D. Asmus examines the remake that NATO requires to meet the challenges of the post-post Cold War era that are centred beyond Europe.

Ronald D. Asmus is executive director of the German Marshall Fund of the United States’ Transatlantic Center in Brussels and author of “Opening NATO’s Door” (Columbia University Press, 2002), a diplomatic history of NATO enlargement.


Analysis

In the late 1990s, NATO had begun to debate whether it should extend its strategic scope beyond the borders of Europe and into the Middle East in connection with discussions on its new Strategic Concept. But that process stalled. In spite of Washington’s urging, a majority of European Allies at the time preferred to limit NATO’s future role to managing security in and around Europe’s periphery and not cross the line on potential future roles in the Middle East. Yet that view turned out to be anachronistic and would crumble under the weight of real world events – just like the conventional wisdom in the early 1990s that NATO could not and should not adopt missions beyond territorial defence had shown itself inadequate for a new era. US Senator Richard G. Lugar captured the Alliance dilemma at the time with the phrase that NATO would “go out of area or out of business”. The point was simple but profound: if NATO hoped to remain the West’s central alliance, it had to rethink and address the central strategic issues and challenges of the day, irrespective of where they came from.

Today, it is easy to forget just how badly divided the Alliance was at the time over Bosnia and Herzegovina. One should also note that it was Franco-US reconciliation that was the key to resolving the crisis. That in turn proved to be a catalyst for a new sense of strategic purpose that set the stage for NATO’s political and strategic remake that unfolded over the rest of the decade. It was a classic example of leaders using a historical crisis to overcome inertia and internal resistance and launch a strategic breakthrough of needed reforms that revived an alliance.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for 9/11. NATO did of course invoke Article 5 for the first time in response to the terrorist attacks on the United States. Historians will judge whether the United States – the undisputed leader of the Alliance – made a historic mistake in turning away from and not involving the Alliance more deeply in the initial phase of operations in Afghanistan. Even had such a role initially been limited, it would have had enormous and positive political consequences in terms of putting the Alliance on a different trajectory and consolidating a shared commitment to addressing the challenges presented by the new security environment. For someone who had worked hard during the previous years to encourage the Alliance to move beyond Europe, it certainly seemed like a golden opportunity to sweep aside past opposition and pull NATO once and for all into a new era.

The Bush Administration did, of course, subsequently correct its course. And today Afghanistan is among NATO’s most important missions. But historical momentum was lost, and the subsequent rift over the necessity and justness of the war in Iraq left the Alliance badly divided and made past disputes, such as the one over Bosnia and Herzegovina, pale in comparison. Rather than becoming the harbinger of a second broader political remake of the Alliance and the kind of breakthrough that would open the door to wider reform, 9/11 has left the Alliance with the paradox described at the beginning of this article: busier than ever, still courted in some circles but also feeling somewhat sidelined.

Another reinvention

What is the way out of this situation? In the mid-1990s the question was often asked: if NATO did not exist, would we reinvent it? And if we would still create it, what would we do differently? At the time, it was pretty easy to answer such questions. It was obvious that Europe and North America still wanted a strategic alliance; that such an alliance had to embrace all of Europe and not just half of it; that it would reflect a new balance between Europe and North America; that it would be oriented towards new as opposed to old threats; and that we would try to build partnerships with key countries on Europe’s periphery like Russia. In a nutshell, that answer contained all the core elements of the kind of reforms that NATO needed – enlargement, a European Security and Defence Policy, new missions and partnership outreach – and which were implemented.

Surveying the horizon: NATO is able both to wage war and to build peace and both capabilities may be required in the years to come

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Posing the same question today can be an equally helpful exercise in terms of sketching out the kind of remake or reinvention the Alliance requires today. I, for one, still believe unequivocally that the United States wants and needs a strategic alliance to address the key threats confronting both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, I would argue that NATO today faces two different but increasingly connected agendas that must be at the heart of its second reinvention.

The first is to continue the strategy of promoting and extending democracy and stability deeper into Eurasia and especially into the broader Black Sea region. More specifically, this means helping to consolidate the victory of the Orange and Rose Revolutions and anchor a democratic Ukraine along with Georgia and the southern Caucasus in the West. Such an anchoring is also, one of the best and most effective ways Europe and the United States can promote democratic development in Russia, which must be our ultimate objective. The second, related to the first, is the need to project stability into the broader Black Sea region – not only as part of the effort to build a Europe whole and free but also with an eye towards the broader Middle East. Together, this will constitute the third great wave of Euro-Atlantic outreach and integration. Just like NATO enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe helped eliminate the age-old sources of geopolitical conflict and rivalry on the continent, anchoring Ukraine and the wider Black Sea region to the West would again redraw the map of Europe for the better.

These agendas would also better position NATO to become a more important actor in the broader Middle East, the part of the world from which the most dangerous threats to our societies are likely to emanate in the years and decades to come. One should never forget that NATO is able both to wage war and to build peace – and both capabilities may well be required in the years to come as we confront the threats posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism. Indeed, if there is one area where NATO planners need to think creatively about how the Alliance can help develop new frameworks and partnerships and roles and missions that can contribute to security, this is it.

Way ahead

The onset of the second Bush Administration and its new commitment to repair relations between the two sides of the Atlantic may provide a second chance to complete the post-9/11 reinvention that NATO requires. In assessing what needs to be done, several considerations will be key.

First, this is primarily a political challenge. The precondition for NATO’s second reinvention is Europe and the United States reaching closure on a new sense of strategic purpose and

unity to face the very different challenges of a new century. NATO is about war and peace, and there are no questions that are more political than these. Member states will simply not make the tough decisions on how to build or restructure their armed forces and create new capabilities unless and until we have a new and agreed unity of purpose.

Second, the problems we face are not always or necessarily military ones. The strategies required must be political, economic and military. NATO will therefore only be one part of the answer and one instrument and framework among several. The role of the European Union and of EU-US cooperation will grow and at times be equally or even more important because the issues we need to address are so different. But the role that NATO can play will be unique and critical – and no other institution can provide it. NATO is an instrument to build peace as well as to wage war. We need to think about how to use both of these capabilities. It may very well be its peace-building activities and components that are as critical as its war-waging capabilities in this part of the world.

Third, a core part of a future NATO reinvention must be an internal rebalancing between North America and an increasingly integrated Europe. We need a functioning EU-NATO relationship as well as a new EU-US relationship that is increasingly strategic in character. As much as some Americans are loath to admit it, one reason why some Europeans today are so reluctant to turn to NATO is their belief that its structures are too weighted in favour of the United States and do not sufficiently reflect the growing importance of the European Union and progress made in European integration. It is noteworthy that the one key component of reform that we came close to achieving in the 1990s was France’s full-fledged reintegration in NATO. Today, the Alliance still pays a price for that missed opportunity and failure. A second political reinvention of the Alliance today will have to successfully conclude that work.

NATO today needs a second political reinvention – one that would rebalance the Alliance and extend its engagement deeper into the Euro-Atlantic community and well beyond into the broader Middle East. It is a strategic remake as ambitious as the one undertaken and accomplished in the 1990s. Many will deem it too ambitious. Sceptics and critics will say it is mission impossible. Similar voices could be heard in the early and mid-1990s. Today we are much better off because our leaders ignored them and faced the need to modernise the Alliance for a new era. Indeed, if there is one lesson that can be drawn from the 1990s, it is that we were not ambitious enough at the time.

For more information on the German Marshall Fund of the United States, see www.gmfus.org

Analysis


S ince Jaap de Hoop Scheffer took the reins at NATO he has taken forward and developed the transformational reforms initiated by his predecessor, Lord George

Robertson. He has kept the NATO Response Force on course for full operational capability by 2006, while continuing the unglamorous and often frustrating work of

cajoling Alliance members to honour the defence investment pledges made at the Alliance’s Prague Summit in 2002. He has bolstered NATO’s presence in Afghanistan, and has urged Allies to view the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) there as a vital transformational catalyst to be embraced, rather than a tiresome operational burden to be endured. And he has made a strident case for NATO’s latest “out-of-area” operation in Iraq.

Taking the transformation agenda forwardMark Joyce examines how NATO has been transforming since Jaap de Hoop Scheffer succeeded Lord Robertson as Secretary General.

Mark Joyce is head of the Transatlantic Programme at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

Analysis

Rallying cry: NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has called for the Alliance actively to shape the international security environment in line with shared strategic interests and values

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Analysis

As one would expect after a year and a quarter in office, De Hoop Scheffer has moved considerably beyond mere stewardship of his predecessor’s legacy. Indeed, his short tenure has seen the transformation project shift into a second phase, in which ongoing capability reforms have been coupled with an attempt by NATO to position itself as a key conduit for broader transformational currents.

From the very beginning, NATO’s transformation was conceived as a two-dimensional process, reflecting the organisation’s dual roles as both a defensive military alliance and a proactive political organisation. Until recent months, however, NATO’s political work has consistently been overshadowed by its military reforms.

Some of the reasons for this are clear. The milestones of military transformation, such as the launch of the NATO Response Force or the opening of a new Transformation Command in Norfolk, Virginia, in the United States are easier to quantify, assess and appraise than are the products of Alliance political programmes. While the expanding NATO membership provides one possible yardstick by which to measure political success, the impact of outreach programmes in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, the Middle East and North Africa is almost impossible to gauge. There have undoubtedly been periods, too, when the relatively low profile of NATO’s political work has been helpful to Alliance diplomats seeking to dampen perceptions of triumphalism or hostility among certain neighbouring states.

Since becoming Secretary General, De Hoop Scheffer has re-stated the importance of framing NATO’s military transformation within a broader, proactive political agenda. On top of established partnerships in the “near abroad” of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the Secretary General has argued for a more dynamic contribution to security in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the enhancement of partnerships with global powers such as China, Japan and India. He has also encouraged a thorough review of NATO’s relationships with the European Union and the United Nations against the background of the Alliance’s new proactive posture. In language that would have been inconceivable for a NATO Secretary General only a few years ago, De Hoop Scheffer has called for the Alliance actively to shape the international security environment in line with shared strategic interests and values.

A more political Alliance

This renewed call for an assertive, transformational Alliance political strategy is in part a response to external developments. Despite the enduring sense of crisis engendered by policy disagreements over Iraq, there have for some time been signs of a convergence in broad American and European strategic priorities. The European Union’s security White Paper, A Secure Europe in a

Better World, released in December 2003, argued for an activist European approach to the threats of terrorism, WMD proliferation, regional conflicts and failing states, in language that was for the most part hardly distinguishable from the Bush administration’s National Security Doctrine of 2002, a document on which so much transatlantic anguish has been blamed. The subsequent months have seen France, Germany and the United Kingdom renew their faltering negotiations with Iran, while pursuing a wider European process of re-engagement with China. Although these initiatives have at one level been the source of fresh transatlantic tensions, they have also provided evidence of a growing European desire to head-off strategic crises through early, “pre-emptive” engagement. Europeans may balk at such grandiose terminology as “forward strategy of freedom”, but their international political strategy is, nevertheless, becoming unmistakably transformational.

This trend was evident during the European visits of US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and President George W. Bush in February. A year earlier, calls from the Bush administration for a transatlantic crusade to advance the causes of freedom and democracy might have been greeted with open derision in European capitals. This time, the re-ception was warmer than it has been at any time since the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Clearly, the carefully choreo-graphed atmospherics of a set-piece presidential visit must be treated with a healthy dose of scepticism. There are encouraging signs, however, that both the Bush administration and its European critics have suspended their more polarising tendencies, seeking instead to emphasise the common ground between their respective transformational visions.

At NATO, the outlines of a transformational political strategy have long been implicit in the Alliance’s military reforms. The shift from a static, defensive posture towards more agile, deployable and expeditionary forces has always indicated a future in which the Alliance would move beyond its borders to confront threats at their source. The ISAF mission in Afghanistan has exposed NATO forces to some of the new challenges they are likely to face in the future, and has acted as a catalyst to their ongoing capability reforms. Even this mission, however, was initially justified through a creative interpretation of NATO’s traditional, defensive strategic rationale. ISAF was, essentially, a belated fulfilment of NATO’s activation of Article 5 on 12 September 2001, and the mission was portrayed as a means of preventing the re-emergence of a terrorist base from which the Euro-Atlantic homeland had been struck on 9/11 and might be struck again. In the two years since NATO took responsibility for ISAF, the tone of transatlantic strategic discourse has changed markedly, and Europeans have begun to articulate their own version of pre-emptive, transformational international engagement. NATO, as a result, has been given an opportunity to position itself as a key conduit through which to channel this common strategic activism.


A separate set of external trends has given fresh impetus to NATO’s ongoing military transformation. For all the progress achieved under Lord Robertson, there is no doubt that much of NATO’s European membership remained dubious both about the term “transformation” and the principles perceived to underpin it. For sceptics, transformation became synonymous with a capital-intensive, network-centric, highly expensive and essentially US model of military reform, to which it was unrealistic and undesirable for them to aspire. Many also detected a more sinister subtext, viewing transformation as a thinly disguised attempt to open European markets to US defence exports.

In a NATO context, perhaps the most damaging criticism of transformation has been that it seeks to institutionalise an unflattering and politically unacceptable division of military labour. Afghanistan and Kosovo, according to this view, established an operational pattern in which the United States did the “killing and the breaking”, before European forces moved in to conduct peacekeeping, stabilisation and reconstruction tasks. Little wonder Europeans are reluctant to invest in transformation, it is argued, if such investment merely equips them to wash the dishes after an American party.

Impact of Iraq

Experiences in Iraq have shattered the simplistic dichotomy between combat and post-combat activities, and with it the view that stabilisation, reconstruction and peacekeeping activities are for wimps. Terrorists and insurgents using asymmetric methods have turned the post-conflict “phase” into a far more intensive and costly experience than the relatively short phase of conventional combat that preceded it. Indeed, the very notion of warfare as a linear progression from high-intensity combat to lower-intensity post-combat phases has been undermined. Coalition forces have been forced to adapt to an amorphous situation in which the level of intensity and, indeed, the nature and objectives of the adversaries have been constantly shifting.

These experiences have had a powerful impact on the architects of US force transformation, prompting a general realisation that overwhelming dominance in conventional warfare is being undermined by inadequacies in combating unconventional threats. This realisation has not yet reached a sufficient level of urgency to force a fundamental overhaul of Department of Defense spending priorities. However, there are signs that “irregular warfare” has shifted from a secondary concern into a central priority of US defence planning. The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review examines in a more systematic manner than ever before the utility and shortcomings of current and planned defence platforms for conducting operations against unconventional threats.

Joint Forces Command, one of the key intellectual drivers of US force transformation, is meanwhile engaged in a more fundamental review of operational concepts and doctrine against the background of irregular threats. This review is likely to further undermine the assumption that network-centric transformation will facilitate the achievement of military “effects” with progressively smaller demands on military manpower. It will almost certainly also call for a more creative approach to the way in which the US military interacts with civil agencies and, crucially, with allies.

This shift in the focus of US force transformation creates more propitious conditions for a meaningful transatlantic exchange than have existed for a long time. Most obviously, the renewed emphasis on irregular warfare – a category that includes stabilisation, reconstruction and peace-support tasks – brings US force transformation much closer to a vision with which Europeans are comfortable and to which they can realistically contribute. The more specific concern with improving interaction and interoperability with allies creates a clear opportunity for NATO to enhance its reputation in US eyes.

Alliance military planners have recognised this, and have moved to position NATO as a key intellectual clearinghouse in the transatlantic discourse on force transformation. Allied Command Transformation is providing a conduit through which American and European ideas on, for example, civil-military interaction in a transformed operational environment can be exchanged and synthesised. The NATO Response Force, meanwhile, will soon

provide a transformed military asset on which to pin these new operational concepts.

In both its political and military endeavours, broader transformational currents have provided NATO with opportunities to accelerate the reforms it has been pursuing for several years. In neither case, however, is there cause or time for hubris. While the emergence in Europe of something resembling a transformational international strategy is encouraging, the Alliance must still persuade sceptics that it has a useful role to play alongside the European Union in advancing this strategy. On military transformation, shifting currents in the United States provide NATO with an opportunity to establish a greater sense of equity in transatlantic transformational discourse. An equitable discourse must, however, be matched by greater equity of effort. As Lord Robertson pointed out, NATO’s value as a strategic asset will ultimately depend on three things: capabilities, capabilities, capabilities.

For more on the Royal United Services Institute, see www.rusi.org

Analysis

The outline of a

transformational political

strategy have long been

implicit in the Alliance’s

military reforms


E ver since the first Gulf War, the United States has sought to transform NATO’s military forces into high-technology conventional forces with as many interoperable

elements as possible. At the same time, NATO has sought to develop additional out-of-area and power-projection capabilities – many again modelled on US capabilities. The NATO Response Force is the symbol of such intention. More broadly, both efforts have reflected the feeling that NATO must find a new, post-Cold War rationale based on new missions and new capabilities to match.

NATO has made some progress along these lines, but much of it is more cosmetic than real. Institution-building is not force transformation. Ministers may agree to force modernisation priorities and to creating power-projection capabilities, but most country defence plans and budgets reflect slow progress, a continuing lack of interoperability, and the inability to move and sustain more than a small fraction of national forces much beyond national boundaries. NATO Europe is spending more than US$220 billion on military forces, and has some 2.2 million active military and 2.6 million reservists. Virtually all defence analysts agree, however, that most of its procurement efforts are scarcely properly coordinated and interoperable, and are not coming close to providing US levels of technology and war-fighting capability. More generally, only a tiny fraction of NATO’s total manpower is deployable outside Alliance territory, and much of it is only really usable if Europe goes to war with itself.

At the same time, a de facto competition has emerged between the European Union and NATO over who should plan and control Europe’s defence capabilities, and particularly its rapid-reaction and power-projection capabilities. Various arrangements have papered over these differences, but the tensions in NATO created by the Iraq War have made the situation worse. French and US tensions run deep, in spite of President George W. Bush’s recent fence-mending visit to Europe, and figures as senior as German Chancellor Gerhard

Schröder have said that the NATO Alliance is “no longer the primary venue where transatlantic partners discuss and coordinate strategies”. The reality seems to be that NATO is now an alliance where member states will form ad hoc coalitions in reaction to given crises and contingencies far more often than they act in unison.

Before one starts mourning the death of NATO, or seeing its force-transformation efforts as a failure, however, it is necessary to consider several factors. First, it is not a bad thing – or an abdication of Europe’s security needs – if European integration and stability is Europe’s primary focus. Century after century of past conflict is a lesson in just how important it is that Europe completes this process of change. Two world wars have shown that it is also as vital to the strategic interest of Canada and the United States as to Europe. NATO does not need a new unifying mission outside Europe to replace the Cold War; it needs to remember that the purpose of a transatlantic alliance is transatlantic security, and this is an area where the West is having outstanding success.

Second, there is nothing all that new about the fact the United States focuses on security missions outside of Europe, or the fact that transatlantic cooperation is based on à la carte force mixes and coalitions of the willing, rather than reliance on formal arrangements with NATO. NATO has shown its relevance in Afghanistan and the Balkans, but virtually all of the out-of-area operations that have involved both American and European forces over the past half-century have been ad hoc mixes of forces from the United States and a few European states. Moreover, a study carried out after the Gulf War by the Center for Naval Analysis found that the United States had used power-projection forces outside the NATO area more than 240 times between the founding of NATO and the end of the Cold War, and the list of contingencies involved was one where more than three-quarters of the US actions did not involve any European role.

A NATO in which Europe focuses on Europe, and the United States focuses on the rest of the world with contingency-driven support from individual European states may in fact be the only way in which the West can act in most out-of-area contingencies. NATO does not create common interests and perceptions. In many cases, Alliance-wide consensus is a recipe for paralysis, and Alliance-wide force transformation of

Anthony H. Cordesman analyses the rationale behind force transformation on both sides of the Atlantic and the results to date.

Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, is a former member of the NATO International Staff, and is the author most recently of “The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons” (Praeger Publishers, Westport, CT, 2003).

Rethinking NATO’s force transformation

Military matters


Air power: Attack helicopters have proved easy to adapt to a wide range of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency missions

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any kind will never happen at more than token levels because many – if not most – European states have no clear motive to become involved and pay the cost.

The fact that NATO is most useful as a common security forum that ensures suitable dialogue and cooperation, where cooperation is seen as both necessary and affordable, is still success by any rational standard. The “specialisation” of Europe and the United States also reflects the reality that two of the most important security priorities for the United States are outside of Europe: the security of Korea and stability in the Taiwan Straits. Both are military arenas where Europe can at most play a token role. Even in the Gulf and Central Asia, the United Kingdom is now the only European power with any real-world prospect of deploying and sustaining serious out-of-area deployments.

Third, the mission priorities for force transformation are changing in any case. Even the “rich” have budget problems, and cost containment is proving to be as serious an issue for the United States as for Europe, in spite of the massive US advantage in total military spending. The United States has found that it cannot afford many of the programmes it once

thought it could include in its revolution in military affairs. The US Air Force has an unaffordable mix of combat aircraft procurements. The US Marine Corps is mortgaged to the Osprey, the programme to develop a more deployable aircraft, and faces serious cost constraints in many other areas of force modernisation. The US Army has had to let procurement of its new family of future combat-system vehicles slip by at least a decade. And the US Navy has what virtually every expert inside and outside the Navy accepts as a massive gap between its shipbuilding requirement and what it can actually afford.

The United States faces the same reality as every other member of NATO. Budgets cannot be shaped to meet the priorities of force transformation; force transformation must be shaped to fit budgets. In the absence of some peer conventional threat, the primary criteria for force transformation are now affordability.

Fourth, it is all too clear that mission requirements are changing as well. There are still important conventional threats in Asia and the Middle East, but the United States has recognised in the terms of reference for its new Quadrennial Defense Review that such “traditional threats” are only part of the problem. It is moving away from a focus on high-technology conventional

Military matters


forces to a “four-way matrix” in which irregular, disruptive, and catastrophic threats have equal priority. The lessons of 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq – and the prospect of proliferation by Iran and terrorist groups – have forced the United States to give equal priority to asymmetric warfare, counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism and homeland defence. They have also forced the United States to rethink the need for inter-agency cooperation, creating civil components that can perform national security tasks, and assigning the military roles in nation-building, peace-making and stability operations.

Dealing with irregular, disruptive, and catastrophic threats are all mission areas where technology can play a critical role, but where new high-cost weapons platforms, extremely expensive space-based programmes, and very high performance munitions have far less priority. The Iraq War has demonstrated, for example, that the quality of Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (IS&R) was of greater importance than having the most advanced aircraft. It showed that precision warfare could be fought largely with affordable laser and GPS-guided bombs.

It also demonstrated that existing major weapons platforms not only retain their value, but can also be adapted to new missions. Systems like the M-1A1 heavy tank and Bradley armoured fighting vehicle not only helped smash Iraq’s conventional forces, but have since been critical in urban warfare and in dealing with insurgency. Attack helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles have proved easy to adapt to a wide range of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency missions. Existing combat aircraft can deal with the air threat in developing countries, and relatively simple precision-strike weapons not only enable them to “stand off” from land-based air defences, but strike at urban terrorist and insurgent targets. Older systems like the A-10 Warthog have proved so useful that they may well get a major upgrading.

More importantly, the Afghan and Iraq conflicts have shown the importance of human skills, area expertise, civil-military units and a host of “human-centric” capabilities that depend on men and women in uniform, not things. Counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, peace-making and nation-building are all people and skill intensive, and areas where existing European forces can play a critical role in those contingencies where states perceive a common need. Special forces, military police, linguists, civil-military action teams, human intelligence experts, combat engineers, service support units and transport helicopters are just a few examples of the “transformational” skills that are needed, rather than high-technology systems.

Defence and response to terrorist attacks on national soil also involve new mixes of regular military, paramilitary, law-enforcement and emergency-response forces. Here, civilian capabilities can be at least as important as military ones, and the priority for increased resources requires “transformation” in a far broader sense of the term. Counter-

terrorist experts, information-technology security experts, critical infrastructure protection, specialised medical facilities, and emergency responders like firefighters are as important to national security as regular military forces. These are areas where Europe often has the same or more capability than the United States, and where there may well be a much more common set of transatlantic priorities and needs than in out-of-area operations and power projection. If terrorism leads to the combination of irregular and catastrophic threats, as many experts fear, the need for transatlantic cooperation may become even greater. This could mean transforming and increasing many of NATO’s nascent efforts in areas like counter-terrorism and giving it a much larger role in some aspects of homeland defence.

In short, much of the criticism of NATO’s force transformation efforts may be based on the wrong strategic assumptions and the wrong priorities. Transatlantic differences will remain. Europe and the United States are not going to agree on a common set of NATO out-of-area missions in many – if not most – cases. European forces are not going to be transformed to have the level of conventional technology or power- projection capability as the United States or that their ministers have officially agreed to.

Such differences, however, are scarcely anything new, and the unifying and cohesive impact of the Cold War is largely a matter of bad history and false nostalgia. NATO experienced successive “transatlantic crises” over such issues as the phase-out of US Point Four military aid; the US refusal to support colonial out-of-area operations; efforts to convert to theatre nuclear options and then to restore conventional options; De Gaulle’s partial withdrawal from the Alliance; the US role in Vietnam; the deployment of Pershing II and Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles; and planning for Mutually Balanced Force Reductions and the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty. NATO has never lived up to a single major force plan in any unified way, even one as vital in its day as a cohesive deployment of land-based air defences for the Central Region.

If one judges the Alliance by real world standards, it is scarcely a perfect success, but it is anything but a failure. Moreover, it has far more affordable opportunities for the kind of force transformation that member states really need than many military analysts who focus solely on traditional threats seem to realise. NATO should rethink many of its present force-transformation priorities from the ground up, but it remains a considerable success. As for the future, what NATO really needs is little less hubris from the United States, a little less bickering from Europe, and a lot more strategic realism about what NATO can and should do.

For more on the Center for Strategic and International Studies, see www.csis.org

Military matters


C risis-response operations have become a key element of NATO’s contribution to international peace and security, and the success of these

operations is widely seen as a yardstick by which to measure the Alliance’s continued relevance. NATO’s military capability is, of course, only one part of its raison d’être; its political role is arguably even more important. As the focal point of a wide and expanding range of partnerships, NATO contributes in many non-military ways to peace and stability. But in all of these functions its particular value is closely related to its ability to translate political consultations and agreements into collective military action. As a result, the Alliance is continually seeking to improve its ability to conduct both current and likely future operations.

In an important sense, many of the changes the Alliance has embraced over the past decade and a half have been deliberate efforts to enhance its operational effectiveness. One sometimes encounters criticism of NATO’s capacity to adapt, to develop the procedures and capabilities required to deal with contemporary challenges. But this criticism often seems to be an uninformed reflex, for NATO efforts to adapt have had a substantial degree of success. Any comparison of Allied forces of today with those of 10 or 15 years ago will show this. Every Ally has been or is going through a review of its defence programmes and structures to ensure its forces are suited to today’s demands, and every defence White Paper repeats the need for deployability, sustainability and usability in line with the Alliance’s Strategic Concept, the document that describes the strategic environment and the ways in which NATO addresses the threats and challenges it is facing, and more detailed guidance documents. Collectively, the Alliance has overhauled its strategy and concepts, its command and force structures, and its internal organisation and procedures.

The need for further change

The quest for greater operational effectiveness, however, is never-ending. This is in part because the demands posed by operations change, in at least two senses. First, the requirements of particular operational theatres, especially

in terms of the needed capabilities, evolve over time. This has, for example, been the case in the former Yugoslavia. Second, new operations are launched creating demands that are usually additional to and sometimes different from those of previous operations. The demands of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, the Kosovo Force, Operation Active Endeavour and the NATO Training Mission in Iraq are very different from one another, and must all be met simultaneously. But the need for further change also arises from the fact that NATO has yet to make sufficient progress in improving the various elements of operational effectiveness or in linking them into a coherent whole.

A particular problem has arisen in matching capabilities to commitments. There is often a gap between political commitments to launch operations and provision of the forces the operations require. In many cases, this is not the result of a discrepancy between the ends that we seek and the means that we have available. Whereas Allies struggled to provide just a handful of helicopters for ISAF, the same nations were prepared rapidly to make a hundred or so available in the immediate aftermath of the Asian Tsunami.

Three kinds of problems appear to account for this persistent discrepancy between political decisions about operations and reliable fulfilment of statements of requirements. These are problems of political will, of resources, and of capabilities. Allied leaders have been aware of these problems, and of their interrelationship, for some time. Two years ago, then Secretary General Lord George Robertson expressed his concerns about the willingness and ability of NATO countries to meet militarily the commitments they had taken on politically, whether under Alliance or other auspices. The causes for this state of affairs, he said, were complex but could be brought together under the heading of what he termed “usability”. He argued that unless Allied governments made a considerably larger fraction of their forces usable for the commitments they had accepted and were prepared to employ them in the numbers and in the ways required to achieve operational success, there was a risk of crises in the international forums in which the Alliance had made the relevant political commitments.

The gap between commitments and the availability of forces has been on the NATO agenda for several years, and a number of efforts are under way, as part of the more general pursuit

Military matters

Matching capabilities to commitments Steve Sturm examines how NATO is seeking to improve its force-generation and defence-planning processes to meet the ever-increasing demands of crisis-response operations.

Steve Sturm is director of the Defence Policy and Capabilities Directorate in NATO’s Defence Policy and Planning Division.


Military matters

of enhanced operational effectiveness, to close it. A seminar held under the auspices of Allied Command Transformation in April 2004, in Norfolk, Virginia, in which Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and NATO Ambassadors participated, was especially important in identifying the sources of the discrepancy and what needed to be done to overcome it. As a consequence, the various strands of work in this area, including improving the process by which forces are “generated” for operations and increasing the usability of Alliance forces, are sometimes referred to as the “Norfolk Agenda”. There is also a further initiative with the closely related aim of enhancing the effectiveness and coherence of NATO’s various defence-planning activities, namely the development of Comprehensive Political Guidance.

Force generation

The Alliance must provide forces for multiple and long-lasting operations. The traditional arrangements by which forces are repeatedly “generated” for particular operations – that is, formally offered by nations for specific periods of time on the basis of lists of requirements developed by the NATO Military Authorities – have appeared less and less satisfactory – too narrow, short-term and reactive, and poorly linked to the force-planning process. The Allies have therefore agreed to a number of measures to remedy these deficiencies.

One important initiative in this regard has been the inauguration of annual global force-generation conferences to provide a more comprehensive and longer-term view of NATO’s operational needs and of the Allies’ overall efforts to meet them. It should be easier for Allies to provide forces with 12 months warning than, say, with 12 days, especially when they can see that other Allies are also bearing significant operational burdens and are assured that there are plans in hand to replace their contingents after an appropriate period of time. The first such annual conference was held at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in November 2004, and we are now learning the lessons from this experience to improve future conferences. Moreover, we are examining how the potential contributions of Partners and other non-NATO nations can be better taken into account in generating forces for NATO-led operations that involve them.

Usability

As indicated earlier, concern about the usability of Alliance forces stretches back a number of years. The emphasis on making forces more deployable and sustainable was one of the themes of the Prague Capabilities Commitment and of the earlier Defence Capabilities Initiative. This reflected a recognition that some Allies’ forces remained excessively configured for territorial defence and were not suitable for the

Long and winding road: The gap between commitments and the availability of forces has been on the NATO agenda for several years

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Military matters

kind of crisis-response operations beyond Alliance territory that NATO is currently conducting and likely to conduct in the future. At the Istanbul Summit last June, NATO defence ministers agreed to intensify national efforts to make their forces more usable. Specifically, they agreed that 40 per cent of each nation’s overall land force strength should be structured, prepared and equipped for deployed operations under NATO or other auspices, and that 8 per cent of the overall land force strength would either be engaged in or earmarked for sustained operations at any one time. They also agreed on the need for national usability targets to supplement these high-level political targets. And they tasked the North Atlantic Council to develop input and output indicators – such as personnel strengths, deployable personnel, capabilities for sustained deployment on operations, expenditures for operations and expenditures for equipment – in order to provide a broader picture of the extent to which the Allies are succeeding in transforming their forces and a benchmark against which each Ally can evaluate its performance.

This work is now under way. Nations have provided data on their performance against the 40 per cent and 8 per cent usability targets. Broadly speaking, the information indicates that while a number of Allies already meet or even exceed the targets set in Istanbul, others do not – in part because the Allies are at different stages in the process of restructuring their forces. A number of Allies, including some who already meet or exceed the targets, have also provided information on their plans to improve the usability of their forces in the future. It is important, however, to bear in mind that significant changes in this field cannot be brought about overnight. The success of this exercise is not yet assured. While it has usefully drawn the attention of some capitals to problems in the usability of their forces and has, as a related benefit, sparked plans for future improvements, the data provided so far are not adequately comparable. As a result, it is extremely difficult to derive an overall sense of the usability of the Allies’ forces or indeed, in some cases, to judge accurately the usability of a particular Ally’s forces. More work will therefore be necessary to make the national figures as comparable as is practical, given the different ways in which Allies organise their forces. Work in this area has to date concentrated on land forces, since the challenges of deploying and sustaining them are greater than for air and maritime forces. But the setting of targets for air and maritime forces also needs to be considered. And further attention will be given to refining and perhaps enlarging the initial package of input and output measures.

Comprehensive Political Guidance

At the Istanbul Summit, Allied leaders directed the North Atlantic Council to prepare for their consideration Comprehensive Political Guidance in support of the Strategic

Concept for all Alliance capabilities issues, planning disciplines and intelligence. This initiative is intended to increase the political weight behind national commitments to improve capabilities and, at the same time, to help harmonise the various “disciplines” involved in designing, developing and fielding capabilities.

In the light of the discussions held so far in NATO Headquarters on the aim, scope and character of the Comprehensive Political Guidance, it seems clear that it will be a short political document providing guidance for the further transformation of the Alliance. Specifically, it will provide guidance for the development of future Alliance military forces and other capabilities as well as for the production of intelligence relevant to defining future requirements for capabilities. It will stand between the Strategic Concept, on the one hand, and documents that provide guidance for specific planning fields, such as Ministerial Guidance for Force Planning, on the other. While remaining consistent with the Strategic Concept, the Comprehensive Political Guidance will take into account the changes in the security environment that have taken place since 1999.

The document will govern all planning activities or disciplines involved in the development of capabilities. These include the traditional defence-planning disciplines – force; armaments; consultation, command and control (C3); logistics; resources; nuclear; and civil-emergency planning. But it will also influence other capability-related activities like air-defence planning and standardisation. It will also help to inform national planning activities, especially in order to promote interoperability. The intention is to promote greater coherence between these various national and collective planning activities. For these purposes, it should indicate what the Alliance wishes to be able to achieve, particularly in operational terms, in the new security environment. And it will define a management mechanism to encourage, on a continuing and systematic basis, the consistency of the various planning activities.

The North Atlantic Council has directed that the Comprehensive Political Guidance and a proposal for the management mechanism be submitted to it as soon as possible, and no later than the end of this year.

These initiatives – on the force-generation process, on usability and on the Comprehensive Political Guidance – are important tools in guaranteeing the Alliance’s operational effectiveness. Moreover, there are others of similar significance in the Norfolk Agenda, such as the efforts to improve intelligence sharing and to update NATO’s approach to common funding. But all of these measures will only be productive if they are applied purposefully. That requires political will – the determination of all Allies to see that NATO’s operations succeed and to play an equitable role in bringing that about.


F ew aspects of NATO’s evolution in recent years better illustrate the link between the Alliance’s expanding operational roles and its political and military

transformation than NATO’s engagement in Afghanistan. Indeed, the fact that NATO is leading the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) so far away from the Alliance’s traditional European centre of gravity is indicative of how far and how rapidly NATO’s agenda has evolved in the wake of the terrorist attacks against the United States of 11 September 2001.

NATO’s leadership of ISAF has paved the way for important changes and improvements in the way the Alliance employs its command and force structures, as well as how it plans, conducts and supports expeditionary operations in remote and austere theatres. However, the impact of NATO’s engagement in Afghanistan on the Alliance’s transformation predates NATO’s assumption of the ISAF command in August 2003. It extends back to the Alliance’s immediate response to 9/11, as well as to the spring and summer of 2002, when the key political and military decisions that would propel the Alliance’s operations beyond the Euro-Atlantic area were made.

The implications for NATO of 9/11 were both immediate and enduring. Within a day of the tragic events in Washington and New York, the North Atlantic Council invoked Article 5, the collective-defence clause of the Washington Treaty, for the first time in its history. And within weeks of the terrorist attacks, NATO launched both Operation Eagle Assist and Operation Active Endeavour, deploying Alliance Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft to the United States and deterring terrorist activity in the Mediterranean respectively. Several Allies also committed forces on an individual basis to the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom to remove the Taliban regime and oust al Qaida from Afghanistan. The experience of deploying land, air and maritime forces for extended periods at a considerable distance from their home bases has contributed to enhancing Allied expeditionary capabilities, both operationally and logistically. It has also had an indirect, but genuinely beneficial impact on Allies’ ability to sustain ISAF operations in Afghanistan, underscoring synergies between the two operations, which are not always readily apparent.

The more fundamental transformational impact of 9/11 has been the review of the political and military paradigms underpinning NATO’s post-Cold War strategy that led the Alliance to agree to conduct military operations without geographic limitations. At their May 2002 meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, NATO foreign ministers decided that: “To carry out the full range of its missions, NATO must be able to field forces that can move quickly to wherever they are needed, sustain operations over distance and time, and achieve their objectives.” Soon after, the Allies agreed that NATO, with its unrivalled experience and expertise in the planning and conduct of multinational operations, could provide planning support to non-NATO coalition operations involving the participation of individual Allies, on a case-by-case basis. This decision paved the way for Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Mons, Belgium, to assist for the first time a non-NATO operation with coordination of troop contributions, the generation of forces and the provision of intelligence and communications and information systems.

The impact of these unprecedented steps was almost immediate. As soon as Germany and the Netherlands declared their readiness to assume command of ISAF from Turkey in February 2003, they turned to NATO with a request that SHAPE provide planning support to ISAF III as a UN-mandated, non-NATO operation. NATO agreed to this request in October 2002 and SHAPE hosted an ISAF force-generation conference in November 2002, the first such conference for a non-NATO operation. When Canada indicated that it was prepared to provide the bulk of the forces of ISAF IV from August 2003, but that it did not have a suitable national headquarters to form the core of the ISAF headquarters, it also turned to NATO and, together with Germany and the Netherlands, invited the Alliance to take command of ISAF. The Allies agreed for NATO to take on this role in April 2003.

In this way, within a year of agreeing that NATO forces should be prepared to operate beyond the Euro-Atlantic area, the Alliance had decided, first, to support ISAF as a non-NATO operation involving Allies and several Partner nations and, second, to take command of ISAF itself. By bringing the decades-long debate on NATO’s “out-of-area” role to an end, the Alliance’s engagement in Afghanistan, through ISAF, has been one of the most important milestones in NATO’s post-Cold War history.

Afghanistan’s transformational challenge Diego A. Ruiz Palmer examines the impact of NATO’s engagement in Afghanistan on the Alliance’s wider transformation.

Diego A. Ruiz Palmer is head of the Planning Section in NATO’s Operations Division.

Operations


ISAF impact

Beyond the decision to take command of ISAF, NATO’s engagement in Afghanistan has also had a lasting impact on the employment of the Alliance’s new command and force structures, the generation of forces and the planning, conduct and sustainability of multinational operations in a distant theatre.

With regard to command and control arrangements, ISAF has been NATO’s first operation which has tested, from the start, the concept of a three-tiered – strategic, operational and in-theatre – headquarters embedded in the Alliance’s new Command Structure. Accordingly, ISAF’s Kabul headquarters reports to SHAPE, as ISAF’s strategic headquarters, through Allied Joint Force Command (JFC) Brunssum, in the Netherlands, which is the operational-level headquarters. This arrangement allows the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR) to provide strategic guidance to ISAF without getting involved in operational-level management, which is left to the Joint Force Command. ISAF is JFC Brunssum’s first “real-world” operation and, therefore, a pivotal milestone in its development as an operational-level headquarters.

ISAF has also been an opportunity to refine the so-called “reach-back” concept. This concept enables a number of planning functions to be executed more effectively and efficiently, on behalf of ISAF, at SHAPE and at the Joint Force Command headquarters. This has been achieved by relying on the large planning capabilities that exist in Mons and Brunssum and by limiting the number of headquarters personnel that has to be deployed to Afghanistan, with commensurate reductions in manpower, transportation and support costs.

In addition, ISAF is the first NATO-led operation for which the Graduated-Readiness Force (GRF) land headquarters, a key element of the Alliance’s new Force Structure, are providing the core of the in-theatre headquarters on a rotational basis. Once all GRFs are operational, there will be seven high-readiness and three lower-readiness corps- level multinational land headquarters, as well as five high-readiness multinational maritime headquarters. Following ISAF IV and V, where the core of ISAF headquarters was provided in succession by two headquarters of NATO’s

Command Structure – Joint Command Centre, headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and JFC Brunssum – GRFs have taken on that role. Following the Eurocorps (ISAF VI from August 2004 to February 2005), the Turkish-led NATO Rapid Deployable Corps took command of the ISAF VII rotation in February and the Italian-led NATO Rapid Deployable Corps will assume command of ISAF in August.

While clearly there are some disadvantages associated with the deployment to and redeployment from Afghanistan of a corps-size headquarters every six months, including the disruption that such rotation brings to mission continuity and the substantial training and transportation costs involved, there are also important advantages. Firstly, the commitment of various multinational formations composed of staff personnel and forces from different member nations helps ensure that all Allies are involved in ISAF with “boots on the ground”,

thereby spreading the burden. This helps overcome a major weakness of ISAF prior to NATO assuming command of it, where the burden associated with its leadership fell primarily on the lead nation.

Secondly, because the GRF corps committed to ISAF also provide the land component command of the

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New operational horizon: Small-unit multinational formations are deployed over vast expanses of land in Afghanistan far from their support bases


Operations

NRF, the ISAF and NRF missions combine to have a transformational impact on these formations. On the one hand, the NRF mission helps ensure that the GRF corps deploying to ISAF meet the highest operational readiness and effectiveness standards. On the other hand, the ISAF mission contributes concretely to the enhancement of GRF deployability to distant theatres and, hence, to the deployability of the NRF as a whole. From a transformational perspective, therefore, ISAF and the NRF are complementary. Moreover, in this important endeavour, NATO’s two strategic commands – Allied Command for Operations and Allied Command for Transformation – have both played important roles. Allied Command Operations has developed the operational template for ISAF and the NRF. Allied Command Transformation has provided the supporting mission rehearsal training to ISAF and NRF staffs.

ISAF has also brought other transformational “firsts”. The Implementation Force and Stabilisation Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Kosovo Force in Kosovo all began as large-scale operations involving forces numbering in the tens of thousands. ISAF, by contrast, was launched with fewer than 5,000 personnel and has been steadily increasing as the mission’s area of responsibility has grown beyond Kabul.

Given Afghanistan’s remoteness by comparison with the Balkans, the gradual increase in ISAF’s size has posed particular and unprecedented logistical challenges. In this way, because of the almost exclusive reliance on airlift to rotate and supply forces in Afghanistan, NATO has developed considerably its strategic transportation planning skills, which, in turn, will have a beneficial impact on the NRF’s own expeditionary planning. Moreover, ISAF’s development of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) to provide security assistance outside Kabul has been a catalyst for adapting NATO’s operational planning. Through the PRT concept, the Alliance is now catering for the conduct of tactical operations by small-unit multinational formations, deployed over vast expanses of land in an austere environment, far from their support bases. These conditions have also provided a real-world opportunity to investigate the application of NATO’s Network-Enabled Capability concept, which aims at leveraging the Alliance’s various operational capabilities through a network-centric approach.

Overcoming operational shortfalls

ISAF has, of course, also exposed well-publicised shortfalls in the availability and usability of Alliance forces, notably key operational enablers such as transport helicopters, for expeditionary operations, as well as shortcomings in NATO’s force-generation processes. Although these limitations are not unique to ISAF, they have assumed greater salience in this instance, both because of the high political profile of NATO’s engagement in Afghanistan and the particular logistical and budgetary challenges associated with deploying

Alliance forces to so distant a theatre. In response, NATO has launched a number of initiatives.

Firstly, NATO has revised its force-generation procedures to ensure a more satisfactory match between the requirements of individual operations and the availability of forces. The Alliance is doing this by expanding the scope of the force-generation process to include all NATO operations, as well as extending its time horizon. It has also made its operational planning, consultation and decision-making processes more responsive to the requirements associated with the timely initiation and effective execution of new and demanding operations. Secondly, the Alliance has focused its capability and force-planning mechanisms, in the context of the Prague Capabilities Commitment of 2002, on enhancing the usability and deployability of forces through agreement on both quantitative and qualitative targets. Lastly, the Alliance has launched a review of the eligibility of operations for expanded common funding among all Allies.

While these remedies will not produce instant solutions, they have already had a salutary impact on the Alliance’s ability to resource ISAF properly, as the mission expands beyond Kabul and northern Afghanistan to the western and southern parts of the country. In this way, the force-generation process to fill the requirements associated with mission expansion to the western provinces of Afghanistan was completed relatively smoothly, with major contributions offered by Italy, Lithuania, Spain and the United States. And a longer-lasting impact is expected as the transformation of Alliance forces moves ahead.

It has frequently been said that transformation is a process, not an end-state. Just as often, ISAF has been described as the Alliance’s new operational horizon. However, the full scope of the relationship between NATO’s political and military transformation and the Alliance’s engagement in Afghanistan has not always been apparent. Nevertheless, the mutual influence and salutary effect between the two since 2002 is unmistakable and growing. This, in turn, contributes to making European and North American forces more capable, compatible and complementary.

The political priority of ISAF and the requirements of this militarily challenging operation have put the pivotal decisions taken at NATO’s 2002 Prague Summit to the test, while giving the Alliance’s political and military transformation a new impetus. As NATO expands its strategic outlook to the broader Middle East through its Mediterranean Dialogue and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, as ISAF extends its footprint across an ever larger area of Afghanistan, and as the NRF moves towards its full operational capability, the symbiotic relationship in NATO’s future between operations and transformation will become ever clearer. In this perspective, the Alliance’s operational engagement in Afghanistan has been truly a transformational event.


Transforming attitudes Jeffrey Schwerzel considers the importance of cultural and religious factors in peace-support operations and argues for systematic, NATO-wide cultural-awareness training.

Operations

“I ’ve already served in Bosnia and Kosovo,” the young officer said to me. “Surely Afghanistan’s just the same?” He was attending the ISAF IV Mission

Rehearsal Exercise at Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum, then called AFNORTH, and expressing a common sentiment among soldiers preparing to deploy in Afghanistan. I was the cultural adviser to the exercise trying to give the mission’s officer corps a flavour of the country they were being sent to, its culture and some idea of what they should expect from Afghans and how they should relate to them.

While clearly there are some similarities between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, on the one hand, and Afghanistan, on the other, there are at least as many differences. The notion, therefore, that experiences from the Balkans are automatically transferable to Afghanistan, or even that in important ways all predominantly Muslim countries are governed by the same rules is naïve at best and potentially dangerous at worst. Despite this, not everyone present recognised the potential impact of cultural and religious issues on the task ahead. Indeed, some officers were adamant that such factors would not have any impact.

Perhaps such attitudes should not come as a surprise, given the nature of NATO’s new peace-support operations and the speed with which the Alliance has been transforming in recent years. The shift of focus from preparing for war-fighting in Europe to peace-support missions, including humanitarian, peacekeeping and peace-making tasks, in places as far away as Afghanistan and Iraq, could hardly be greater. The demands are very different and, to operate effectively in a peace-support situation, soldiers and officers require additional skills and specialist knowledge.

The new operations are so-called “three-block” missions. A soldier serving in Afghanistan or Iraq may have to perform police-like tasks as part of a peacekeeping patrol. He or she may then become involved in humanitarian activities. And later, he or she may be engaged in a lethal exchange of fire, all in the course of the same day.

Soldiers need to be equally proficient in all these tasks. Moreover, they themselves are expected to operate in multinational formations.

Culture’s double impact

Cultural and religious issues influence peace-support operations in two ways. Firstly, the soldiers in multinational formations themselves come from a variety of cultural backgrounds and must manage their differences to work together effectively. Secondly, soldiers must tailor their operating styles to local circumstances to maintain good relations with the local population.

Successful cooperation among soldiers from NATO countries is often taken for granted since these individuals are assumed to share the same basic values and may even have some prior experience of training together. However, academic research suggests that cultural and religious differences can and do lead to strained relations and decreased mission effectiveness. Indeed, recent research examining cooperation between Dutch and German troops in Afghanistan by Sjo Soeters and René Moelker of the Royal Netherlands Military Academy in Breda indicated that, despite minimal perceived cultural differences, the working relationship proved problematic at times. This was in contrast to smooth Dutch-German cooperation both at the German/Netherlands Corps’ joint headquarters in Münster, Germany, and on deployment in Kosovo. Suffice it to say that cultural interoperability in multinational formations is not straightforward.

Despite this, culture is rarely a major consideration in a commander’s pre-deployment preparations. There is, after all, no obvious example of mission failure as a result of cultural differences. However, diverging expectations, attitudes and ways of thinking can lead to tension and friction among soldiers of different nationalities. Moreover, lack of trust or, worse still, the loss of trust between peacekeepers from different countries may limit a commanding officer’s options and cause him to hesitate to order actions, even though he judges them appropriate. General Klaus Reinhardt, the second KFOR commander, considered himself as much a diplomat in Kosovo as a military commander. Moreover, bridging and overcoming differences within his own team took up a great deal of his time.

Jeffrey Schwerzel is a cultural anthropologist working at the Free University of Amsterdam where he is preparing a doctoral thesis. He has been involved as a cultural adviser in the preparation of NATO forces for their missions to Afghanistan.


In addition to technical and tactical issues involving different rules of engagement and national caveats, more fundamental notions of how peacekeeping should be carried out may lead to friction among allies. What is considered appropriate behaviour for troops from one “peacekeeping culture” might not be for others. Even something as seemingly mundane as the wearing of armour and dark sunglasses is interpreted in different ways by soldiers from different countries. Some feel that such attire unnecessarily intimidates the local population, thereby generating an air of hostility that, in turn, increases the risks faced by all peacekeepers.

A breakdown in relations with the local population can, of course, be fatal to any operation. Peacekeepers are, after all, dependent to a large extent on the goodwill and cooperation of the local population for their own safety and

their ability to perform their duties. As a result, avoiding offence is paramount. But without expertise in local cultures and religions, it is impossible to draw up effective guidelines concerning issues such as patrolling during festivities, entering places of worship, setting up roadblocks and searching women. Moreover, for fear of causing offence, commanders may unnecessarily limit their options and avoid the course of action that makes most sense from a purely military point of view.

At the mission rehearsal exercises for Afghanistan, a common view expressed by officers was that Afghanistan was an extremely backward country, both technically and culturally. Some who had already visited Afghanistan on reconnaissance trips compared it to “going back in time a couple of hundred years”. While these views are understandable given the limited time the officers had to

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It’s good to talk: Peacekeepers are dependent to a large extent on the goodwill and cooperation of the local population


Operations

learn about Afghanistan, lack of insight into local life and empathy with the population may contribute to avoidable errors of judgement. Indeed, peace-support operations have seen the emergence of the strategic corporal, who, by making a mistake while on patrol or elsewhere, risks undermining the entire mission.

In an extreme case in Somalia, lack of knowledge of local culture and customs on the part of Canadian peacekeepers, in combination with a range of other factors, contributed to a number of incidents of abuse. This culminated in the torturing to death of Shidane Arone, a 16-year-old boy, in 1993. When this incident came to light, a parliamentary enquiry was launched, which commissioned wide-ranging studies of both the events themselves and the circumstances in which the peacekeepers were operating, including a socio-cultural inquiry by Donna Winslow, now of the Free University of Amsterdam. In its wake, the Canadian Airborne Regiment was disbanded and a wide-ranging reform process set in train, with the result that cultural awareness has moved much higher up the agenda.

In other instances of excessive behaviour by peacekeepers in Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and, most notoriously, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the troops involved had received little or no cultural-awareness training. This obvious shortfall, therefore, almost certainly contributed to the development of prejudice towards the local population and eventually to their dehumanisation. Moreover, the consequences of what may be isolated instances of abuse are magnified when brought under the glare of international media, a trend that will only increase in the future.

Cultural interoperability

The importance of interoperability has long been recognised at NATO. Indeed, the Alliance has launched a variety of programmes and set up offices, committees and working groups to deal with standardisation. To date, however, this has been an exclusively technical exercise, and has not included cultural interoperability, whether the cooperation of forces on a cultural level or cultural awareness of local circumstances.

To be sure, the importance of culture and religion in peace-support operations is increasingly recognised, though generally at a national rather than an Alliance level. Troop-contributing nations are responsible for preparing their soldiers for missions and many have already incorporated cultural-awareness training into the deployment preparations for their contingents. Moreover, Mission Rehearsal Exercises organised by NATO Headquarters to

prepare soldiers for deployment are also now frequently incorporating some cultural-awareness training into the programme. But these are all ad hoc initiatives.

Considerations of culture do not currently form a standard part of NATO’s planning, training, and operational procedures. There is no Alliance doctrine that makes such training obligatory, nor any doctrine that deals with any cultural or religious issues in the context of operations. Specific policies towards local cultural and religious matters are left to the commander’s discretion with the result that different commanders can interpret in different ways what “respect for local culture” entails. Since what is good for Turkish troops may not be for Norwegians, a measure of freedom of interpretation is appropriate. However, the absence of central guidance may be symptomatic of wider shortfalls.

In addition to running operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, NATO is currently intensifying its Mediterranean Dialogue with seven countries in the wider Mediterranean region

and seeking to forge stronger cooperative relations with the broader Middle East through its Istanbul Cooperation Initiative. Yet, at present, NATO Headquarters in Brussels has no Arabists, Farsi speakers, Islamic experts or anthropologists. To take forward and make a success of so ambitious a political agenda, it will surely be necessary to recruit specialists with linguistic, cultural and area expertise.

Cultural-awareness training should become a standard and integral part of preparations for all NATO peace-support operations. Indeed, all relevant policy-makers should be given courses on cultural and religious affairs as they affect their work, in the same way that they are given computer courses. To achieve this, NATO needs to establish minimum training standards for all troops participating in NATO-led operations in exactly the same way that it determines minimum levels of technical interoperability. And NATO should certify the training. This is work that could be undertaken by the Alliance’s various educational facilities as well as CIMIC Groups North and South.

In the coming years and decades, NATO will remain engaged in peace-support operations and likely take on new missions in places of which it has, at the moment, little knowledge or expertise. Since it will be involved in crisis management and peace-building for the long haul, cultural preparations for such operations should form an important element of the Alliance’s transformation. Indeed, a transformation of attitudes must underpin the entire transformation process.

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Nick Witney: Europe’s capabilities’ conscience

Interviews

NATO Review: What is the European Defence Agency and why has it been created?

Nick Witney: It is an agency of the Council of the European Union set up with the mission of “supporting the member states in their effort to improve European defence capabilities in the field of crisis management and to sustain the European Security and Defence Policy as it stands now and will evolve in the future”. So we need to look to today’s needs, and to anticipate the requirements that will be needed in 20 to 30 years time.

Specifically, the Agency has been given four main functions. These relate to defence capabilities development; armaments cooperation; the European defence technological and industrial base and defence equipment market; and promoting collaboration in research and technology. This is a pretty broad range of responsibilities, even though we have no responsibility for anything operational and our views are not sought on matters of defence policy and strategy.

Every EU member state is participating in the Agency apart from Denmark because Denmark has opted out of ESDP. The funding mechanism is based on a gross national income key. That said, at the moment the sums involved are not particularly large. The budget for this year is €20 million. This is enough to pay the staff, to get us installed in new offices and will leave us with €3 million of pump-priming money to spend on feasibility studies.

The European Defence Agency is the third agency to come under the Council. The first two are the Satellite

Centre in Torrejón and the Institute for Security Studies in Paris, both of which came to the Council from the Western European Union.

NR: How is the Agency different from other European armaments groups such as OCCAR and WEAG?

NW: Several things are unique about our set-up. The Agency is small, but also has wide responsibilities and is intended to be very much the possession of its member states. It is run by a Steering Board that is chaired by Javier Solana (the head of the Agency, and therefore my boss) and made up of the individual defence ministers. It will meet in several formats. Sometimes, the national armament directors will be present. Sometimes, the research and technology directors will be present. Sometimes, the individuals responsible for capability development will be present. When up and running, we should be meeting on average every six weeks.

Almost all our staff come from the member states, for which we will act as a focal point for their joint activities. We will orchestrate a series of conversations, seminars, working groups, and other more or less formalised structures to make this the place where the member states come together to cooperate on a spectrum of activities. The breadth of the activities is the strength of the set-up because it will enable us to generate synergies.

The WEAG ceases operating at the end of June and we will take over its functions. I hope that because we are able to address them in a more holistic way we will be able to generate additional synergies out of the different

Nick Witney is the first chief executive of the European Defence Agency, the body created by the EU

Council of Ministers in July 2004 to improve European defence capabilities. He came to the Agency from

the UK Ministry of Defence, where he held a number of senior positions, including most recently the post

of director-general for international security policy. Earlier in his career, Witney spent a year’s sabbatical

at RAND in California and also worked as a diplomat in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, serving in

both the Middle East and Washington DC.


Interviews

agendas. OCCAR is an inter-governmental agency, but not one belonging to Europe. It belongs solely to its six shareholders and is strictly a procurement agency that exists to run programmes. In this way, they have recently taken over management of the A400M Airlifter programme. OCCAR’s job in this instance is to manage the contractor to make sure that aircraft are delivered at the required time and cost. Our activities will start and remain upstream of OCCAR’s. We will be seeking to forge consensus on capability priorities, and then generate the proposals, present the ideas and then again build the consensus to do more together. Maybe in future we shall do some management ourselves. At present, however, I see our role as complementary to OCCAR’s. We should hopefully generate the cooperative programmes that OCCAR might then manage. While no one would be obliged to turn to OCCAR for such management, OCCAR does this work well and would probably be interested in taking it on.

NR: How many people work for the Agency and how is it structured?

NW: At present, there are about 30 of us, but once we finish initial recruitment this summer we will be 77 in total. We are divided into four main directorates, each corresponding to one of the four main functions of capability development; R&T; armaments; and industry and market. That said, individuals working in the R&T directorate will not spend their time exclusively within an R&T stovepipe. They will spend most of their time working in integrated project teams. Whenever we start to address a particular issue, we will identify a leader who will then form an integrated team drawing on staff from all four directorates. With every subject we touch – and we have four flagship projects for this year – we find the only way to address it is holistically, thus requiring expertise in all four disciplines.

NR: What are your immediate priorities?

NW: Our immediate priority, which is a precondition for everything else, is to get up and running, recruit staff and move into new offices. We must also explain ourselves. There is a fantastic amount of interest in the Agency, but the concept is not yet well understood. We must get to know our shareholders, that is the 24 member states, individually. Aside from that, we have a work programme for the year that specifies four flagship programmes. These are the European defence equipment market; a command, control and communication study; armoured fighting vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

We’ve effectively been pushed into examining the European defence equipment market because the

Commission issued a Green Paper on this issue last September. However, I’m prepared to say that we’ve had our first success in this area. We had a Steering Board meeting two weeks ago at which all countries agreed to launch a process aimed at achieving agreement by the end of the year on getting more competition into defence equipment procurement. We will, therefore, be spending this year exploring and discussing the issue to develop what will probably initially be a voluntary, non-binding, inter-governmental code of conduct, which we hope all 24 countries will subscribe to. Military procurement is largely exempt from the rules governing the European internal market. If, by the end of the year we can present a convincing plan for opening up tendering processes, it

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will be a huge stride forward. It will also help Europe get a better return on its defence investment.

Command, control and communication (C3) is always a problem for deployed operations. We are now working on a joint C3 study together with the EU Military Staff. This is due in May and should give us three or four targets to work on. In time, further areas may be identified as a result of the EU operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Otherwise, satellite communication is another area where Europeans could do more if we analysed the problem, which is essentially one of capacity, together and developed collective solutions.

Looking two or three years ahead, priority targets will be determined by a more scientific analysis of the capabilities needed to support ESDP aims. But to begin with, we chose UAVs and armoured fighting vehicles, which were interesting from a pan-European perspective. Various countries recognise that UAVs are something new and important and are, therefore, investing in their own research programmes. Unless countries work together, however, the end product will not be as good as it could be in terms of interoperability and practical use. The cost will also likely be higher. Our aim would be to paint a picture showing precisely what is happening across Europe. We will then present this analysis to our Steering Board and see whether the member states are happy with the situation. If they are not happy with it, we’ll present some proposals as to how to make it more coherent. Likewise with armoured vehicles.

NR: Is there any link between your work and the security-related research that will be financed by the Research Directorate-General of the Commission?

NW: There are proposals for a big programme of R&T expenditure on security research. Formally, we have to make a clear distinction between security research and defence research. Defence ministers are responsible for defence research and money earmarked for it comes out of defence budgets. Security research may be Commission funded. Despite the formal distinction, in the real world a lot of the technologies being developed and the companies involved in the research will be the same. The trick will be to preserve the formal distinction and yet see to it that the most relevant research is undertaken. We will have to be aware what the Commission is doing to make sure that we don’t end up effectively paying twice for the same research. And we will have to share the results of research. There might even be scope for the Commission to fund certain projects of relevance to the Agency.

NR: What are the main capabilities that Europe is lacking and how will the Agency help provide them?

NW: I don’t think there’s ever been so difficult a time for defence planners. This is because they are dealing with the double whammy of moving from territorial defence to deployed operations, and, at the same time, trying to take on board the implications of the technological revolution, which is taking us out of the industrial age of warfare into the information age. In Europe, we have too much heavy metal. Meanwhile, we lack all those qualities that end in I-L-I-T-Y: sustainability, deployability, mobility and interoperability. A lot of these are associated with new systems of observation and communication where the technology is surging forward in the civilian domain. That’s the sort of shift we need to encourage governments to make. But because we are a small Agency with a modest budget, we have to function fundamentally as a conscience and a catalyst.

We are in a position where we can provide uniquely cogent analysis of the entire European scene. Hopefully, this will enable us to keep returning to our shareholders, the participating member states, to explain the situation and ask whether they are happy with it. In the event that they are not happy, we will present proposals for how to improve things. At the end of the day, it will be down to 24 defence ministers to agree to adjust some elements in their national plans and to spend money differently to take the European dimension on board. I think it can and will happen because there’s a lot of political support for the Agency at present.

NR: How is an Agency staffed primarily by people seconded by capitals going to convince those same capitals to change their approach to military procurement?

NW: Actually, it’s precisely because we are staffed by people from capitals that we can have an impact. Irrespective of how knowledgeable or inventive we were, we would cut no ice in capitals if we were simply to announce what we thought was best and then present it on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. We are at the beginning of a long journey, which we, that is the Agency and all 24 member states, will have to travel on together. We at the Agency have been put in the position of an agenda-setter, but we will only be successful, if we can bring the countries along and ensure they remain involved. They have ownership of whatever we come up with.

NR: Does the Agency’s creation presage a Europeanisation of the foreign and security policies of EU member states?

NW: It works the other way around. We already have a European Security and Defence Policy and a European Security Strategy, which clearly sets out the point and purpose of ESDP. The Agency exists to enable Europe to do those things that are set out in the Security


Strategy. But the Security Strategy points out that if Europe is to take its share of the global security burden, it requires the tools for the job. At present, however, it doesn’t have them and can only do part of the job. The Agency’s role is to try to backfill the means, the capabilities, the tools and the infrastructure, or, to put it another way, close the gap between what Europe can do today and what it would like to be able to do.

NR: How will the Agency coordinate its work with NATO to avoid duplication?

NW: These are still early days. There are, however, already some established mechanisms. There is, for example, the NATO-EU Capability Group and I will be attending my first meeting of that body in April. We also envisage occasionally inviting the NATO Secretary General and the relevant Assistant Secretaries General to attend our Steering Board meetings. Moreover, though this has not yet been decided, the Agency may be invited to occupy the chair of the Conference of National Armaments Directors that WEAG has occupied to date. These are, of course, all formal links. I think in practice the best links, to make sure we don’t trip over each other, are informal. I’ve already run through our work programme for this year with John Colston [NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Defence Policy and Planning] and Marshall Billingslea [NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Defence Investment] to have their observations and ensure we are not falling over each other in the early months.

NR: Is any cooperation envisaged with European NATO nations that are not participating in the Agency?

NW: Some cooperation is envisaged. Countries like Norway and Turkey will benefit from administrative arrangements setting out the nature of their association with the Agency that give them a good idea of what is happening within the Agency. In this way, if, say, half a dozen member states were thinking of coming together on a particular project, they would be able to ask to join, if they so wished. The Danish case is different and no such administrative arrangement is envisaged. This is because Denmark is an EU state that chooses not to participate.

NR: What impact will the Agency have on transatlantic defence industrial cooperation? Will US companies find themselves shut out of European markets?

NW: There are important transatlantic issues here. However, the power of initiative is largely on the US side. It is essentially the United States that restricts the flow of technology across the Atlantic and limits European access to the US market in contrast to the fairly open market access that Americans enjoy in Europe. The United States spends an awful lot more on defence than Europe and is, therefore, addressing these issues from a position of strength. If Europeans don’t like this imbalance on technology exchange and market access, then the most sensible thing they can do is invest in a stronger defence technological industrial base in Europe so that these issues are dealt with on rather more equal terms across the Atlantic. The way to do this is by overcoming fragmentation and fostering greater consolidation, thereby generating more effective output for the not inconsiderable sums of money that are spent on defence in Europe. But this is a longer-term project. Concerning US access to European markets, we at the Agency will not be changing anything. This is an issue where there are fundamentally different views among the 24 shareholders. I suspect, therefore, that my Steering Board will agree to disagree in this area.

NR: What impact will the Agency have on Europe’s defence industry? Do you anticipate further consolidation?

NW: I certainly hope so. I’m convinced that there needs to be more consolidation in Europe’s defence industry. Indeed, this has been widely accepted since the 1990s, and a fair amount of progress has already been made in recent years, especially in certain sectors, such as aerospace. In other areas, the land and maritime sectors for example,

consolidation has not yet taken place. I believe that it is both an operational and an economic imperative that we come together more on this. That said, as with so many of these issues, the Agency can only contribute to the process with advice and analysis.

NR: How should the Agency’s success be measured?

NW: One element of our work programme for this year is to come back to our Steering Board by the end of the year with some sensible performance measures. These performance measures will incidentally measure the member states’ performance as much as that of the Agency. Performance measures I have in mind include a financial target for spending an increasing proportion of European defence R&T funds on a collaborative basis and possibly something based on criteria for “usability” of forces, which NATO has pioneered.

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Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope: DSACT Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope has been the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, Transformation since

July 2004. A 52-year-old submariner, who joined the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy in 1970, he served

on submarines as a junior officer. He has commanded conventional and nuclear-powered submarines, a

frigate and an aircraft carrier. In a varied career, he has also taught prospective submarine commanders

and had spells in the UK Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office and at NATO commands. Immediately prior

to joining Allied Command Transformation, Admiral Stanhope was Deputy Commander-in-Chief Fleet.

NATO Review: Military transformation is a complex concept. What do you understand by it?

Admiral Stanhope: My interpretation of transformation is leveraging modern technology and modern thinking to integrate all capabilities to be able to deliver military force in the most effective and rapid way. It’s about doing things as smartly as possible. To achieve this, we must utilise every available tool. This includes concept development, defence planning, research and technology development, experimentation, lessons learned and education. I would place innovative thinking at the top of the list to ensure that we can deliver new capabilities to the front line as quickly as possible.

We have examined transformation and believe that three goals are required to achieve it. These are: enhanced decision effectiveness; coherent effects across the battle space; and joint deployment and sustainability. If we can reach these goals, we will have achieved a transformed force. To get to these goals we have created five integrated project teams (IPTs) to cover what we term seven transformational objective areas. These are Effective Engagement, Joint Manoeuvre, Enhanced Civil-Military Cooperation, Information Superiority, Network-Enabled Capability (which in some respects underpins all of what we’re doing), Expeditionary Operations and Integrated Logistics. The IPTs cut across the vertical structure of our organisation to make it a truly matrix-managed business.

NR: To what extent is it possible to transform NATO militaries in the absence of greater defence spending?

AS: This is a key challenge. The need, first of all, is to find headroom to invest in transformation. That means giving up what is no longer militarily viable in the modern battle space. By giving up what is no longer relevant, nations will hopefully find the headroom to reinvest in the capabilities that are necessary to drive transformation of their forces forward. National governments have hard choices to make to free up resources to address the many shortfalls in Alliance capabilities. Nations might also look at supporting the Alliance by specialising in niche capabilities, which is an area that we’re trying to develop and encourage.

NR: In which areas is the technology gap between the United States and the European Allies and Canada particularly worrisome?

AS: Integrating the technologies that are necessary to achieve transformation is certainly a challenge. Moreover, it’s here that the United States has a transformational advantage because it finds it easier to bring together the numerous technologies that it possesses to achieve better effects. By ‘bundling’ all technologies that already exist in the United States, the country is able to raise its capability bar to a substantial height. That said, within the European Union and Canada, most of the same technologies exist and it should be possible to aspire to overcoming the same challenges and reaching the same height that the Americans are driving at. Technology transfer between nations as well as technology transfer across the Atlantic present significant political challenges. But we are pushing to simplify the process. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the resource issue, since there is more money made available in the United States than in other countries for defence.


NR: Allied Command Transformation is just over one-and-a-half years old. What has it achieved to date?

AS: Allied Command Transformation has been extremely busy taking forward numerous initiatives on many fronts and in new ways. For example, the review and revision of defence planning that we are now grappling with, involves looking forward ten years and beyond. We’re looking at long-term capability requirements for NATO, rather than the shorter focus that the Alliance has had in the past. We’ve already delivered a NATO Network-Enabled Capability paper, which provides the basis upon which we can articulate NATO’s network-enabled capability needs in the future. While it is only a foundation document at this stage, it pulls together the requirements that the Alliance as a whole has to address to achieve a network-enabled capability. What is important here is the ability to use current systems and plug into a network without complete reinvestment. We see the NATO Network-Enabled Capability as critical to underpinning much future capability development. If you can invest in the network, it should be possible to do more with less.

We’re also doing a huge amount in experimentation terms. This includes, for example, experiments with NATO’s friendly-force tracker system in Afghanistan. Indeed, this tracking system, which significantly enhances situational awareness and helps substantially to reduce friendly-fire incidents, has gone beyond the experimental stage and has become an operational requirement. We’ve also been looking at logistics tracking. And we’ve looked at how we can present information to decision-makers more easily, with more coherence and greater integration.

In educational terms, the creation of the Joint Warfare Centre in Stavanger, Norway, has enormously enhanced our ability to train personnel at the operational level, which is a new venture for the Alliance. We’ve even created a mentors’ network to allow this educational process to draw on the expertise of experts in individual areas. We’ve enhanced the lessons-learned process and smartened the way NATO develops Capability Packages. It used to take two years or more to develop a Capability Package. We’ve refined and speeded up the process. We’re also examining all existing projects to determine whether they’re relevant to the NATO of 2005 and beyond as opposed to the NATO of 1990, irrespective of when they were agreed. And we’re working to bring on stream national Centres of Excellence.

We’ve also done a lot of concept work. Together with Allied Command Operations, we have written a paper called The Strategic Vision, addressing the challenge of transformation. And we’re in the process of writing a follow-on paper, The Concept of Allied Future Joint Operations. This flows from The Strategic Vision and looks at how the Allies can achieve more joint focus to their operations. We’ve forged links with industry to help leverage their capabilities to take forward transformation. We have become involved in training Iraqi officers at the operational level, which is not an area that anybody had thought about when Allied Command Transformation was created. And we have done a lot of work to take forward effects-based planning for future operations, where we seek a desired strategic outcome or “effect” through the application of the full range of military and non-military levers.

Allied Command Transformation is having an increasingly dynamic impact on NATO’s transformation. The pace and depth of progress is significant, and we are working hard towards building a NATO that is better prepared for the future. We’ve come a long way already, but I am very conscious that there is much more to do. And with Transformation in our title, the process will be perpetual.

NR: Assisting the military transformation of Partner countries is one of Allied Command Transformation’s tasks. How much progress has been made in this area?

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AS: A great deal has already been achieved, although more could be accomplished if the organisation was fully manned. We have yet to reach our initial operating capability, let alone our final one. As a result, our manning levels are not yet sufficiently high to do all the work that we would like to or are required to do. Moreover, working with Partners is an area where we are more severely affected by manning shortfalls. Nevertheless, we see our contribution in assisting the defence planning of Partner nations and taking forward tailored education programmes within those Partner nations as hugely important.

We are doing this in particular by using two closely linked instruments: the PfP Planning and Review Process (PARP) and the Cooperation Programme. In the PARP, we are assisting Partners in their defence planning in much the same way as we help member nations, namely identifying potential defence reforms both in the political and the military arena. We also look at the Partnership Goals in order to transform military structures and capabilities. In the Cooperation Programme, we are organising numerous events including courses, training programmes and seminars, to help Partners prepare to become full members of the Alliance.

NR: Allied Command Transformation includes both the Joint Warfare Centre in Stavanger, Norway, and the Joint Force Training Centre in Bydgoszcz, Poland. What are these centres offering above and beyond what the NATO School in Oberammergau, Germany, and the NATO Defense College in Rome, Italy, have traditionally offered?

AS: The connection between the two is limited in that the NATO School in Oberammergau and the NATO Defense College in Rome are very much concerned with education of large groups of individual students in a variety of disciplines. The Joint Warfare Centre in Stavanger, by contrast, focuses at the operational level and the instruction of teams. Traditionally, NATO has spent a lot of time exercising nations collectively within the Alliance to deliver capability, but it has not done much teaching. We’ve never drawn the operational level of command and control together, while it is being formed, to train it before sending it out on operations. That is the niche role that the Joint Warfare Centre fills. In this way, we’ve already trained the past three commanders for the ISAF missions in Afghanistan. They brought their respective headquarters to Stavanger and completed two weeks of intensive training to prepare them for the mission itself.

We’ve also had NATO Response Force (NRF) commanders and teams in Stavanger following a focused package of training to prepare them for the mission ahead. This is entirely new. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that the Joint Warfare Centre is one of the early jewels in the

crown of the output of Allied Command Transformation. The Joint Warfare Centre is also responsible for some experimentation work, such as confrontation and collaboration analysis. This is something we’re looking at to see how we can better prepare commanders and their staff to negotiate with the various protagonists in a particular conflict.

The Joint Forces Training Centre in Bydgoszcz, Poland, is still very much in its early days. Indeed, we have only recently completed negotiations with Poland about having a NATO headquarters on Polish soil. But the niche capability that this Centre will provide in the future will address the component level of training to prepare individual components from the three services for the step change into the joint operational arena.

NR: Allied Command Transformation’s Joint Analysis Lessons Learned Centre in Monsanto, Portugal, has been analysing the NATO-led operations in the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. What lessons have been learned to date, and how is the Centre able to help improve Alliance operating procedures?

AS: We want the Joint Analysis Lessons Learned Centre to be able to learn lessons in operational theatres and turn them around as quickly as possible. The Centre has to go beyond identifying issues, to learning lessons and acting upon them rapidly so that we can improve capabilities and procedures while operations are still ongoing. In the past, NATO organised exercises, looked at the lessons learned from those exercises, went away, analysed those lessons, wrote interesting reports and produced a product some two years after the original exercise. That’s not what we need in the modern age. We need to be able to turn around lessons learned quickly in real live operations and simultaneously feed them into our training and educational facilities.

We have members of the Joint Analysis Lessons Learned Centre deployed in both Afghanistan and Iraq looking at the challenges that these deployments have created. Since NATO only began deploying out of area some two years ago, a lot of lessons are still to be learned. This includes areas such as force generation and strategic lift, to name but two.

NR: Allied Command Transformation is also training Iraqi security forces outside Iraq. How is this proceeding, and what problems have you encountered?

AS: We in Allied Command Transformation are responsible for out-of-country training of Iraqi students. We have already organised and coordinated training programmes


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both at the Joint Warfare Centre in Stavanger in November and at the NATO School in Oberammergau in December. In this way, a total of some 22 senior students have already gone through our organisation. The course at Stavanger was focused on high-level training to get the key leaders, the generals, to understand how to run their operations in Western structures and according to Western norms. Between February and May, we hope to see more than 120 further students come through the Joint Warfare Centre and the NATO School. Meanwhile, others will be attending courses that individual nations, such as Italy, are organising.

The process is slower than we would have hoped in part because the Iraqi Ministry of Defence has understandably been focused on other issues. It is not easy to release so many high-level individuals in so short a time frame. Now that elections have taken place in Iraq, we hope to see more students made available. Language is also an issue. If you’re going to send somebody on a week’s course at the NATO School, then interpretation is appropriate. But if somebody is going to attend a longer course, such as the six-month staff-training programme at the NATO Defense College in Rome, then he or she must have the necessary language skills to get value from the course.

NR: Which national Centres of Excellence does Allied Command Transformation work with and how?

AS: We are responsible for the coordination of all future Centres of Excellence. In this way, we are currently in negotiations with a large number of nations who have put forward training centres in particular competency areas to be considered as Centres of Excellence. So far only one offer has reached the level of maturity at which it has formally been possible to recognise it as a Centre of Excellence via the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding. That is a Joint Air Power Competence Centre in Kalkar, Germany, which is delivering competencies across the joint air power arena. The next is likely to be a Combined Joint Operation from the Sea Centre of Excellence proposed by the United States.

We are currently in negotiations with many other potential Centres of Excellence. In Turkey, for example, we’re looking at a Defence against Terrorism Centre of Excellence as well as an Air Tactical Training Range. In Estonia, we’re looking at a Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. We’re looking at a potential Civil-Military Cooperation Centre of Excellence in CIMIC Group North, which is a multinationally funded organisation. We’re looking in the Czech Republic at a Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defence Centre of Excellence, and in Italy at a Centre of Excellence for policing operations. These are all examples of areas of competency that nations wish

to have linked to NATO for training purposes and which NATO can fully utilise. Clearly, we want to bring them on stream as quickly as possible but first have to negotiate the precise terms and conditions under which the Centres will be delivering their products.

NR: The development of the NATO Response Force is one of the most important projects Allied Command Transformation is currently working on. How do you assess progress to date?

AS: Progress in the military arena is very much on track but we face ongoing challenges, which are partly being addressed by Allied Command Operations and partly by Allied Command Transformation. Allied Command Operations is addressing those areas of capability and requirement that are going to be needed in the short term to deliver the NRF final operational capability next year. We, in Allied Command Transformation, are looking at the longer term to ensure that the level of capability that the NRF will be able to provide is steadily increasing.

In the case of near-term challenges, we’ve just completed an exercise in Stavanger, Allied Reach 2005, where we – both Commands – focused on the strategic issues that still have to be addressed. We’re looking at multinationality versus military efficiency. How low down can you have multinationality built in to the NRF without degrading its overall military capability. We’re looking at how current processes will enable advance planning to ensure that we meet the 5 to 20-day readiness profile that the NRF is set up to provide. We’re looking at integrated logistics: how we can remove ourselves from the old NATO structures of individual nations being responsible for their own logistic support, to integrate the whole logistic train to provide simpler and smarter support to the NRF. We’re also looking at intelligence sharing and knowledge management. These are difficult areas where we need to ensure that we are as transparent as we can be across the Alliance to deal effectively with any crisis or operation that the NRF may be involved in. We’re also looking at the command and control element, the transfer of authority between nations and NATO itself and, in particular, at how to minimise the impact of national caveats.

The issue of common funding for the NRF is a big one. While this is a matter for NATO Headquarters to address, and not the military commands, it is of significant concern to us because involvement in the NRF is expensive. Clearly, nations do not wish to feel that they are paying twice, both volunteering forces and paying for their support and exercising.

For more on Allied Command Transformation, see www.act.nato.int


I nternational terrorism presents the Euro-Atlantic community with a complex, persistent threat that calls for a comprehensive, multilateral strategic response that

includes NATO. However, the extent to which the Alliance will contribute to this effort is uncertain, with some Allies arguing for broad engagement while others prefer more modest roles.

The initial debate on appropriate roles and missions for NATO reflected two contending approaches to terrorism: the “war” approach and the “risk-management” approach. The war approach, espoused mainly by the United States, implies a massive mobilisation of resources in a unified effort, accepting limits on individual freedoms and sacrifices. For many Europeans, talk of war is inappropriate. You cannot “defeat” terrorism unless you deal with root causes; something they believe cannot be done by military means. From this perspective, terrorism is a dangerous, inescapable risk to be managed, unlike a war that can be won.

These two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but they do imply different priorities, strategies and trade-offs for collective action. For example, the war view tends to dictate a strategy that emphasises offensive and preventive measures, while the risk-management view tends to call for a strategy emphasising defensive measures. Nevertheless, elements of both strategies are needed for an effective counter-terrorism effort.

The debate about NATO’s role in fighting terrorism was further complicated because of differences over the Iraq War and alleged connections of the Saddam Hussein regime with al-Qaida terrorists. Moreover, transatlantic divergences on how to deal with terrorism also reflect the fact that many European countries have their own, very different experiences of terrorism as well as large and sometimes poorly assimilated domestic Muslim communities, different historic connections to the Middle East and North Africa, varying degrees of anti-US sentiment and different views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We should not, therefore, be surprised that it has been difficult to reach a consensus within NATO on how best to deal with terrorism.

Despite these differences, the Alliance agrees on the serious nature of the threat posed by international terrorism and has decided to undertake the challenge, thereby creating expectations that it will succeed. But achieving even modest degrees of success will oblige the Alliance to move beyond the initial debate that has characterised its deliberations to date.

Initial NATO responses

For the first time in its history, NATO invoked Article 5 within 24 hours of the terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001. By 4 October 2001, in response to requests by the United States, Allies agreed to take eight measures to expand the options for fighting terrorism. These initial measures included enhanced intelligence-sharing; blanket overflight rights and access to ports and airfields; assistance to states threatened as a result of their support for coalition efforts; as well as the deployment of NATO naval forces to the eastern Mediterranean and the dispatch of Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft to the United States to backfill US AWACS deployed to support operations in Afghanistan.

However, the United States, in the view of several Allies, made a major mistake by failing to make better use of NATO when it launched operations against al Qaida and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. This undermined confidence in the Alliance and made it more difficult for national leaders to provide additional assistance to the United States.

Subsequently, however, the United States recognised the value of NATO in complementing both national responses to terrorism and UN efforts to orchestrate the global effort. Within this context, NATO fills an important niche because of its unique capabilities to provide security. In this way, NATO was the logical framework within which to organise the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, which has become NATO’s first operation outside the Euro-Atlantic area. And NATO’s comprehensive, systematic approach to the problem is in part responsible for the fact that terrorism has now become a high priority item on the national security agendas of 53 countries directly affiliated with NATO. These are the 20 members

Expanding NATO’s counter-terrorism role C. Richard Nelson analyses NATO’s contribution to the fight against terrorism and suggests how it might be enhanced.

C. Richard Nelson is director of programme development at the Atlantic Council of the United States.

Combating terrorism


Combating terrorism

of the Partnership for Peace and the seven Mediterranean Dialogue countries as well as the 26 Allies.

Nature of the threat

Over the past three years, NATO has reached consensus on the serious nature of the threat and the fact that terrorism knows no boundaries. International terrorism is now understood to be a single problem with many manifestations, whereas in the past terrorism was viewed more as a series of discrete national phenomena with the result that differences between terrorist groups were highlighted. The older approach missed important linkages and consequently underestimated the value of broad cooperation among governments.

The international terrorist threat differs sharply from that posed by the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact for which NATO was designed. This new threat consists primarily of al Qaida and related groups that form a network of jihadists who share the ultimate goals of establishing a new order in the Middle East and the Gulf based on strict Islamic principles. They hope to eliminate the Western presence in the region along with Western support for local regimes.

This new type of terrorist network, distinguished from the more traditional nationalist terrorist groups, will be more difficult to defeat than the political and nationalist terrorist groups of the 1960s through the 1980s. Islamic extremists are more global in their reach, more lethal, more adaptable and have broad appeal. The threat is constantly changing in that as nations develop counter-measures to respond to threats, the terrorists themselves adapt their modes of operation.

NATO’s role

To better understand NATO’s potential and develop realistic expectations for the organisation, we should consider where NATO fits in the broad fight against terrorism from both structural and functional perspectives.

Structurally

Logically, NATO fits between the broadest-scope efforts orchestrated by the United Nations and the more specific national approaches to fighting terrorism. A combination of all three levels of effort – national, regional and global – is needed to treat both the symptoms and the disease. Taken together, they can provide the most effective response possible to the threat of terrorism.

Primary responsibility for fighting terrorism lies with the individual nation states because terrorism ultimately is a local phenomenon, and, for a variety of reasons, much of the cooperation between governments will necessarily

be bilateral, primarily between law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Nevertheless, NATO, the G8, that is the group of seven most industrialised countries and Russia, the European Union, the United Nations and other organisations play important coordinating and integrating roles in supporting the primary efforts undertaken by the states. The key is to coordinate these efforts and avoid any unnecessary duplication.

Functionally

NATO has made the fight against terrorism a high priority and consensus has been built around the nature of the problem and, in general, on appropriate responses. As a result of this and similar efforts by other institutions, it is no longer acceptable for any country to provide a permissive environment for terrorists, sometimes justified as “freedom fighters”, in return for terrorists not causing trouble within its territory.

NATO’s approach to fighting terrorism acknowledges that primary responsibility rests with member nations. The Alliance’s goals are to help states deter, defend, disrupt and protect against terrorist threats from abroad, “as and where needed”. The basic approach, outlined in NATO’s military concept for defence against terrorism and approved in November 2002, includes four components: anti-terrorism defensive measures to reduce the vulnerability of forces, individuals and property; consequence management, including reactive measures to mitigate effects; counter-terrorism offensive measures with NATO either in the lead or in supporting roles, including psychological and information operations; and military cooperation with members, Partners, and other countries, as well as coordination with international organisations such as the European Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the United Nations.

Although NATO’s political guidance notes that it is preferable to deter or prevent terrorist acts rather than deal with the consequences, there are no standing provisions for pre-emptive military operations by the Alliance. In this way, any direct action by the Alliance against terrorists or those who harbour them requires prior approval by all member nations. As a result, NATO is best suited for roles that involve coordinated action over a sustained period of time, such as preventive measures, consequence management, stability operations, surveillance of airspace and sea lanes, and enhancing national capabilities, particularly among weaker states.

NATO has a well-established network to facilitate cooperation. NATO’s Partnership Coordination Cell at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe, for example, has military representatives from 43 countries, giving it the broadest geographic reach of any international military


organisation in the world. The NATO-Russia Council and the NATO-Ukraine Commission are also important forums for cooperation on terrorism-related issues.

The Alliance plays a leading role in developing strategies, doctrine and training for fighting terrorism for those circumstances in which military forces may be needed. Of particular note is NATO’s programme of exercises that provides opportunities for developing and practising integrated civil-military operations to deal with a wide range of potential terrorist attacks. At the Istanbul Summit, Allied leaders unveiled details of an eight-point research and technology programme to combat terrorism, including countering the threat posed by home-made bombs and reducing the vulnerability to attack of aircraft and helicopters.

NATO also plays an important early-warning role. Operation Active Endeavour, for example, monitors shipping in the Mediterranean, and NATO has unique capabilities for aircraft and missile early warning.

The Alliance is noted for enhancing the interoperability of international forces and can bring this expertise to bear on those dimensions of the terrorist challenge for

which military and civil organisations must work closely together. Using English as a common language and using comprehensive NATO standard operating procedures, more than 50 countries are developing the capacity to work together.

To help deal with the consequences of a terrorist attack, the Alliance’s Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre provides unique capabilities. The Centre maintains a NATO-wide registry of capabilities that may be called upon for disaster relief. It has a force-generation process including communications, transport and logistics, as well as monitoring and relief units. These capabilities are exercised regularly, providing substantial experience with disaster relief. The Centre deals directly with a dedicated organisation in each of the 46 participating countries, and it does not need to wait for approval by the North Atlantic Council to act.

NATO’s support to Greece during the Olympic and Paralympic Games is an example of the kind of preventive role for which NATO is well-suited. In this case, NATO provided AWACS aircraft, maritime patrols and augmentation to Greece’s chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defence capabilities.

Combating terrorism

Storming ashore: The NATO Response Force should be assigned substantive counter-terrorism roles and missions

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Afghanistan provides a key test for NATO in meeting the challenges of terrorism and the new international security environment. ISAF is assuming increased responsibility for operations in Afghanistan. The first step of a “progressive process” is to increase the scope of ISAF beyond its original mandate to provide security around Kabul. This includes expanding the number of Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan and helping with the demobilisation of warlords’ forces and local militia.

At the Istanbul Summit, Allied leaders also agreed to improve intelligence-sharing through a Terrorist Threat Intelligence Unit at NATO Headquarters in Brussels. This Unit, which was created after the terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001, has now become permanent and will analyse general terrorist threats, as well as those more specifically aimed at NATO.

Realising NATO’s potential

Translating NATO’s potential for fighting terrorism into reality will require much additional work, particularly on the part of the political leadership. Even though leaders on both sides of the Atlantic agree that a successful global effort to combat terrorism requires a multifaceted approach that draws on the strengths and unique assets of many international organisations, NATO remains under-utilised. Among the initiatives that would make better use of NATO capabilities, the following merit priority attention:

NATO should appoint a new Assistant Secretary General responsible for coordinating NATO counter-terrorism efforts. This should be a full-time position, not an additional duty, with responsibilities for managing the entire spectrum of NATO activities in this area, including coordination with the European Union, the United Nations and other international organisations. Unnecessary duplication of efforts, particularly with the European Union, is a major concern, and it seems appropriate for NATO to have a senior official as a counter-part to Gijs de Vries, the European Union’s Counter-Terrorism Coordinator.

The NATO Response Force (NRF) should be assigned substantive counter-terrorism roles and missions. This would assist in developing a broader base of national capabilities than would otherwise exist within the Alliance. Such missions would require the NRF, in certain contingencies, to reduce reaction time to less than five days (particularly for the use of special forces and air strikes). This would also have implications for enhancing timely decision-making by the North Atlantic Council.

Creation of a NATO Stabilisation Force designed to complement the NRF should be considered in view of the challenges of the transition from combat operations to stability operations. Stabilisation missions have become a

core NATO competency and this should be reflected in the force structure of the Alliance. NATO forces in Afghanistan and the Balkans will continue to face numerous terrorist threats. The lessons of these two missions need to be incorporated in Alliance planning and applied to future NATO-led operations.

In implementing NATO’s military concept for defence against terrorism, the Alliance should place a high priority on Partnership-for-Peace countries because they are among the least prepared and enhancing their capabilities to thwart terrorism will also benefit the security of Alliance members. Under the military concept for defence against terrorism, traditional roles are reversed and NATO provides a supporting role to Allies and Partners, which bear primary responsibility for combating terrorism. This suggests that much of NATO’s efforts should be organised around the Partnership Action Plan against Terrorism.

NATO should establish a counter-terrorism research institute to stimulate research and analysis. This institute could bring together the best minds, building on the different experiences and expertise throughout NATO. They could play an important role in shaping and disseminating better understanding of the highly adaptive nature of the threat and facilitating the frequent adjustments needed in ways of thinking and acting to deal more effectively with the problem. The struggle against international terrorism will be prolonged. This requires a cadre of analysts who are able to understand the strengths, vulnerabilities, thinking and recruiting appeal of the terrorist organisations and thereby develop insightful assessments. It does not require the sharing of sensitive or operational intelligence.

NATO could play a useful role by encouraging the development of new technologies. Allied Command Transformation, for example, plays an important role in promoting cooperation among defence industries and could help ensure that any new anti-terrorism equipment is interoperable by specifying standards.

In sum, the highly adaptive nature of the international terrorist threat requires frequent adjustments in the ways nations and institutions think and act. NATO, during the Cold War, demonstrated such adaptability by continually developing strategies, albeit not without considerable disagreements. In this new geopolitical environment, the Alliance faces a similar challenge in building the consensus necessary to make it the most effective contributor possible in the fight against international terrorism.

This article, previously published online in NATO Review autumn 2004, is based on the Atlantic Council of the United States’ policy paper NATO’s Role in Confronting International Terrorism, which is available at www.acus.org


T he destructive capacity of terrorist groups is growing steadily as terrorists prove themselves adept at using modern technology for their own ends. In response,

NATO Allies are working together to develop new and improved technologies to combat this increasingly sophisticated threat.

The attacks against the United States of 11 September 2001 are a horrific example of how modern technology – commercial aircraft hijacked and turned into cruise missiles – could be used for terrorist purposes. Using the internet, terrorists have also developed sophisticated and versatile communication techniques. And they have demonstrated the expertise to fabricate explosive devices out of a wide range of objects – from mobile phones to doorbells – and materials – from military explosives to commercial dynamite to improvised fertiliser mixes. Moreover, they have the ability to fashion highly sophisticated chemical explosives into every-day items.

Of even greater concern is the interest of these groups in chemical and biological weapons, as well as in radiological (and presumably) nuclear devices. The leaders of terrorist organisations have been explicit in their desire to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction. This is clearly of serious concern and a threat to all nations.

At the Istanbul Summit, in addition to other decisions taken to enhance the Alliance’s capabilities against terrorism, NATO leaders formally endorsed a Programme of Work for Defence against Terrorism. This Programme was launched by NATO’s National Armaments Directors, who formally meet twice a year in a group known as the Conference of National Armaments Directors or CNAD, and is aimed at leveraging national expertise and research programmes to develop new and improved technologies to combat terrorism.

The Programme of Work for Defence against Terrorism is, in the first stages, focused on developing nine systems to help prevent specific forms of terrorist attack and to give militaries new, cutting-edge technologies to detect, disrupt and pursue terrorists.

Specifically, the initiative will lead to better ways for NATO militaries to prevent terrorist explosive devices – such as car bombs and roadside bombs – from functioning as intended, and to help find the bombs and the bomb-makers; improve the ability of bomb technicians to dis-pose of explosives, and to deal with the effects of a bomb attack; protect aircraft from shoulder-fired missiles; protect helicopters from rocket-propelled grenades; protect harbours and ships from explosive-packed speedboats and underwater divers; improve protection against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons; airdrop special operations forces and their equipment with precision; conduct intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition of terrorists; and counter mortar attacks.

To lead this effort, NATO has appointed a Counter-Terrorism Technology Coordinator to work for the Chairman of the CNAD and to oversee the work of a team of specialists from several NATO countries. The main groups of the CNAD – the Air Force, Navy and Army Armaments Groups; the NATO Research & Technology Organisation; and the NATO Industrial Advisory Group – are the driving force behind the programme.

Countering improvised explosive devices

Improvised explosive devices, or homemade bombs, are the current weapon of choice for terrorists and the greatest cause of casualties among Allied forces and civilian populations in terrorist attacks. These weapons are deployed and employed using a wide range of means and techniques, including car and truckbombs, roadside bombs and suicide bomber belts and jackets.

To address this threat, NATO is developing a detailed understanding of how terrorists construct and use these devices and the blast effects of each type. Once we know the variety of ways in which terrorists are able to manufacture these weapons, we will begin devising a variety of technologies to cause the bombs to malfunction as well as techniques to “sniff out” places where these bombs are manufactured and hidden. Spain has taken the lead within the CNAD in devising new techniques and capabilities in this area, and a major industrial effort has already begun.

Combating terrorism through technology Marshall Billingslea examines how NATO is developing technology to counter increasingly sophisticated terrorism.

Marshall Billingslea is NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Defence Investment and Chairman of both NATO’s CNAD and the NC3 Board. This article was previously published online in NATO Review autumn 2004.

Combating terrorism


Combating terrorism

Explosive ordnance disposal

Stockpiles of ordnance and unexploded munitions have frequently proved to be sources of weaponry for terrorist groups. In Iraq, for instance, the most frequent type of roadside bomb is the so-called “daisy chain” of artillery shells wired to one another by a single detonator cord. With US support, NATO is establishing a database documenting all kinds of unexploded ordnance found in key theatres of operation. This database will be a key enabler for bomb technicians who must decide how to dismantle terrorist bombs. In addition, under Norwegian and Slovak leadership, Allied bomb technicians will gather to discuss what new technologies, including robotics, new lightweight fibres and digital enablers, can improve protective gear and enhance dismantling capabilities and what standards should be established to help raise the Alliance’s collective level of expertise.

Protection of aircraft against shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles

Al Qaida and affiliated groups have acquired and used man-portable, surface-to-air missiles, so-called MANPADS, to carry out a number of attacks, both successful and unsuccessful, on military and civilian aircraft. These include the failed attacks in Kenya against El Al flights in 2002, as well as successful strikes on military and commercial aircraft in Iraq. NATO experts are now conducting a rigorous testing and analysis programme to determine how missile seekers acquire and track their targeted aircraft. With this knowledge, it will be possible to optimise defensive systems to confuse, defeat, and destroy incoming missiles.

It is also possible to provide further protection to aircraft using a variety of non-technological means. A number of procedural counter-measures can be employed by both military and civil aviation communities, such as flight simulator time for pilots to train them how to deal with sudden engine loss. Through a combination of technical and non-technical methods, therefore, NATO intends to provide additional

layers of protection for large, slow-moving aircraft against the shoulder-fired missile threat. A testing programme is ongoing, and more field trials are scheduled for 2005.

Protection of helicopters from rocket-propelled grenades

Attacks on helicopters by rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and small arms fire have caused many casualties in recent conflicts. In response, NATO has begun developing packages to address self-protection and threat detection for helicopters,

as well as means of countering these threats. NATO is now examining how technologies such as air bags and flak-resistant seats as well as RPG-resistant coatings and materials that were originally designed for armoured personnel carriers, can be built into existing and future rotary-wing aircraft. A partnership with industry has already been launched to refine these ideas.

Protection of harbours and ports

Since the efficient functioning of ports and harbours is fundamental to the global economy, it is essential that they be made as secure as possible. Terrorists have demonstrated the capacity to plan and execute sophisticated attacks against warships such as the USS Cole off Yemen in 2000, commercial vessels such as the French oil tanker Limburgh also off Yemen in 2002, and against port facilities such as the oil pipelines near Basra, Iraq. Further planned attacks have been successfully disrupted by NATO nations. Indeed, as a consequence of one foiled plot, NATO is now escorting merchant shipping

through the Straits of Gibraltar as part of Operation Active Endeavour, the Alliance’s mission to disrupt, deter and defend against terrorist activity in the Mediterranean.

Under Italian leadership and with the benefit of decades of expertise from NATO’s Underwater Research Centre in La Spezia, Italy, the Alliance is conducting a variety of sea trials using new, cutting-edge technologies. The NATO programme is, for example, looking into the feasibility of creating surface and subsurface sensor nets capable of detecting and disabling terrorists, and is creating a new mechanism for underwater

Into the fray: Precision airdrops are a critical military capability that is difficult to achieve

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mine clearance that will exponentially speed up what is currently a lengthy, manpower-intensive process. NATO is also exploring innovative technologies to disable incoming speedboat engines, and is developing new procedures to improve the defensive capacity of warships against surface attack. A variety of trials have been held in 2004 in Italy and the Netherlands and more are planned for 2005.

Detection, protection and defeat of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapons

The 1995 attack on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo sect in which sarin gas was used remains a deeply disturbing example of the ability of terrorist groups to develop and employ chemical, and possibly biological, nuclear and radiological weapons. Al-Qaida documents recovered in Afghanistan and other information obtained by NATO governments point to a rudimentary but evolving terrorist capability to use weapons of mass destruction in future attacks. Indeed, evidence has been found of a testing programme using cyanide compounds as well as the development of crude procedures for producing mustard gas, sarin, and VX nerve agents. Already, several small-scale toxin attacks in Europe by groups linked to al Qaida have been thwarted, and there has been concern over the desire of terrorists to conduct a radiological dispersal attack in North America.

In support of the NATO Multinational CBRN Defence Battalion, the Alliance’s armaments community is developing the capabilities to detect, protect against and manage the hazards caused by the release of CBRN agents. Allies have drafted documents setting out common doctrine, procedures and equipment standards for protection against these weapons and for decontamination after an attack. Moreover, the Alliance has developed a water-based decontaminator that is now being tested in NATO nations. Research is also being carried out to develop technologies for the remote detection of the presence of these deadly substances. And further work is planned on military capabilities to defeat such weapons when encountered in the field.

Precision airdrop technology for special operations forces

Terrorists frequently seek sanctuary in remote locations where they believe it will be harder for NATO militaries and security services to operate. The actions undertaken against al Qaida in Afghanistan have demonstrated that Allied special operations forces already have a long reach. That said, precision insertion of men, equipment, supplies and weapons in all weather conditions, at both extremely high and low altitudes, under a variety of circumstances, is a critical military capability that is difficult to achieve.

In a demanding environment such as Afghanistan, where transportation infrastructure is limited, the ability to insert special operations forces, and to keep them resupplied with

pinpoint-accuracy airdrops, can prove crucial. As a result, the Allies are working together to develop a range of technologies and systems to ensure that no place, no matter how remote, can be a safe haven for terrorists. The first such trial is scheduled for spring 2005, with the active participation of several NATO and non-NATO nations.

Intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition of terrorists

Anonymity and the ability to launch attacks at a time and place of their choosing are tactical advantages utilised by terrorists. NATO is working on reducing or eliminating those advantages. A variety of new sensors and detection systems are being examined, and new software, computer models and analytical tools are being considered for use – all with the goal of giving Allied governments the capacity to identify the terrorist no matter how hard he or she tries to blend in to society, to track him or her, and to take the necessary actions to remove the threat.

In addition to a variety of technological measures that are being explored, the NATO Research & Technology Organisation and the NATO Science Committee are jointly exploring crucial areas in the behavioural sciences, such as “human factors analysis” and the psychological aspects of terrorism. A recently concluded symposium involving global experts on suicide bombers identified a number of key recommendations that NATO is now examining with a view to implementing them rapidly.

Countering mortar attacks

Terrorist organisations have proven able to attack both civilian and military targets using rockets and mortars. As a result, NATO launched a Countering Improvised Mortars Programme and added it to the Programme of Work for Defence Against Terrorism in October 2004. This effort is aimed at providing NATO with equipment, such as locating radar and laser technologies, necessary to detect mortar-firing positions automatically and to be able to act with sufficient speed and accuracy to return fire effectively. The acquisition of such capabilities will enable NATO to provide effective protection to its own troops and other potential targets. The Netherlands will act as lead nation in this area.

This groundbreaking initiative and the entire Programme of Work for Defence against Terrorism is important for the protection of both NATO militaries and civilian populations and infrastructure. As we work to develop better ways of arming and equipping Allied forces to disrupt and destroy terrorist networks and to thwart planned terrorist attacks, NATO’s armaments community is playing an increasingly important role in the fight against terrorism. The Programme’s broad scope will also contribute to the stability and security of the international community and strengthen links with non-NATO bodies such as European Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the United Nations.

All enquiries and orders for print copies should be addressed to:Public Diplomacy Division – Distribution UnitNATO, 1110 Brussels, BelgiumTel: +32 2 707 5009Fax: +32 2 707 1252E-mail: [email protected]

Electronic versions of these publications are available on NATO’s web site at www.nato.int.The web site also publishes official statements, press releases and speeches, NATO Update, a weekly update on Alliance activities, NATO Review and other information on NATO structures, policies and activities, and offers several on-line services.

ALL PUBLICATIONS ARE AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH, MANY ARE AVAILABLE IN OTHER LANGUAGES

FOR AND AGAINST: Debating Euro-Atlantic security options Publication bringing together and reproducing the debates that appeared in the on-line edition of NATO Review in 2002 and 2003

NATO TransformedA comprehensive introduction to NATO describing how the Alliance works and

covering its ongoing transformation

NATO in the 21st CenturyIntroductory brochure on the Alliance, giving an overview of its history, policies and activities

NATO BriefingsSeries examining topical Alliance issues, including NATO’s role in Afghanistan,

crisis management, Operation Active Endeavour, improving capabilities, the NATO Response Force and NATO in the Balkans

Cooperation case studiesSeries illustrating NATO’s practical cooperation activities, including building the Virtual Silk Highway, disposing of anti-personnel mines in Albania, flood prevention in Ukraine, limiting the damage from earthquake-induced disasters, AWACS aircraft and tackling challenges of defence reform

Security through Partnership Publication examining NATO cooperation with Partner countries through the

Partnership for Peace and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council

Istanbul Summit Reader’s GuideAn overview of the decisions taken at the NATO Summit in Istanbul, Turkey, 28-29 June 2004, and related background information

SECURIT Y THROUGH PARTNERSHIP

NATOREVIEW

NATO Public Diplomacy Division1110 Brussels

BelgiumWeb site: www.nato.int

E-mail: [email protected]

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Examining NATO’s Transformation

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