Moving from being ‘Operationally Engaged’ to being ‘Operationally Prepared’

By Nigel Chamberlain, NATO Watch

Carnegie Europe organised a one-day conference ‘Defence Matters’ in Brussels on 26 November. Chairman of NATO’s Military Committee General Bartels participated in discussions on ‘how and why defence matters to the citizens of NATO allied and partner nations’. He said that “the key question”:
 
Is not the cost of security but the cost of no security. Security Costs mean different things to different Nations. The dynamic of uncertainty we see today, is what we will face in the future. To effectively meet the challenges that uncertainty brings, we need to be able to anticipate, understand, prevent and eventually defend ourselves.
 
Post the 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan, NATO will shift from being ‘Operationally Engaged’ to being ‘Operationally Prepared’. Bartels said that NATO will need to maintain ‘a wide scope of capabilities’ based on three pillars:
 
  • collective defence;
  • cooperative security; and
  • crisis response operations.
‘Partners’ have become “an integral part” of NATO’s way of operating and maintaining interoperability, through the Connected Forces Initiative, which “is the essential foundation on which we must build our future military cooperation”, he concluded.
 
'Defence matters’ was also the theme of Secretary General Rasmussen’s speech at the 2013 annual session of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Dubrovnik, Croatia on 11 October. He explained that NATO has been working with prominent research institutes from eight Alliance member countries over the previous six months.
 
He said the institutes’ goal was “to get a broad picture of how our publics look at defence, and the value they place upon it. The big question was: how much does our defence really matter? … In a nutshell, defence does still matter. But we all need to do a much better job at explaining why”. However, the research was not made available at that time.
 
The Carnegie Europe conference was called to discuss the conclusions of the ‘Defence Matters’ project and to provide recommendations on how to stimulate the debate across NATO Member States. All eight reports, from institutes in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, the UK and the US, have now been published on the Carnegie Europe website. Atlantic-Community.org summarises the collective findings thus:
 
While the political cultures and national views on defence vary significantly across the Alliance, there are also commonalities: Elites and publics express respect for the armed forces and support for NATO and defence in general, but are increasingly skeptical of far-away military operations. Strategic debate about contemporary security risks and NATO's role are insufficient or limited to small strategic communities.
 
NATO Watch posted an edited version of the General Secretary’s speech at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Croatia and the Assembly’s policy recommendations adopted at its concluding plenary session on 14 October. We then reviewed each of the eight reports and posted summaries and a short comment in NATO Watch Briefing Paper No.39.
 
Defence Matters, by the Hague Center for Strategic Studies (the Netherlands)
Defense Matters, by Institut français des relations internationales (France)
Defence Matters: Recommendations regarding Germany, by Jörg Wolf, Atlantic Initiative (Germany)
Defence Matters in Canada, by Paul H. Chapin and col. (ret) Brian S. MacDonald, Atlantic Council of Canada (Canada)
Defence perceptions in the United Kingdom: Notes and suggestions for NATO ‘Defence Matters’, by Alexander Nicoll, International Institute for Strategic Studies (United Kingdom)
NATO Matters: Ensuring the Value of the Alliance for the United States, by Jacob Stokes and Nora Bensahel, Center for a New American Security (United States)
The Italian Debate on Defence Matters, by Alessandro Marrone and Paola Tessari, Istituto Affari Internazionali (Italy)