Transformation of NATO
Transformation of NATO
January 26, 2012
Ambassador Daalder speaking to students at GWU
(Watch Video here)
Thanks Dean Brown for that very kind introduction. I often wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to be a German, because in German they would call me Herr Professor Doktor Botschafter Daalder, which I always think is just the right way to put it, but you can call me Ivo, which is fine or you can get me at my Twitter handler, which is @USAmbNATO. Just so you know, I’m in the 21st century too. That’s because we were seven years old in 1988, perhaps.
What I wanted to talk to you—and it’s great to be back actually in a classroom, though I must say when I taught at the University of Maryland, we didn’t have classrooms like this. It was a little different. So modern 21st century statecraft is now coming-- intelligence is not only coming to statecraft, but also to education, which is great. I want to talk about the transformation of NATO.
And in part, because this NATO, the NATO that I represent, where I represent the United States at, is really not your father’s NATO and frankly, it’s not even my father’s NATO. It’s a very different organization than the one that when I was in graduate school I was studying. What I have started to call NATO today is NATO 3.0.
NATO 1.0 is the NATO we used to know and love. It’s the organization born in 1949 with the singular purpose of preventing the Russians from undermining, let alone or attacking, Western Europe; so Western Europe could be rebuilt after a decade, in fact a few decades of devastating war. That’s what NATO was about—it was about preventing, deterring an attack and thereby enabling Europe to come back from the ashes that its own self-inflicted wounds of WWII in particular had inflicted. And it did so with extraordinary success. It won the Cold War without firing a shot. That’s what you do when you’re a smart strategist.
And that, at the end of the Cold War in 1989, when the wall came down, led to a new NATO, a NATO 2.0.
That was a NATO that was focused not on preventing or deterring war, nor on rising up Western Europe, but it was a NATO that was focused on stabilizing and transforming Central and Eastern Europe. What it was trying to do for Eastern Europe what the United States and NATO had done for Western Europe in the preceding four-plus decades.
It did so through direct assistance, it did so through a series of partnership efforts, and it did so, most importantly, by offering the prospect of membership not only in the NATO club, but in the Western club. And we moved from 16 members in 1989 to 28 members today and of those, 12 new members, all but one (Albania) has also become a member of the European Union. And it was that joint strategy that NATO and the European Union embarked upon after the collapse of the Cold War that allowed Central and Eastern Europe to come into their own, to be countries that could define and determine their own destinies in a part of the world where that possibility had not existed.
And that was the NATO for the first 20 or so years after the Cold War. But now we’re in a new NATO, what I call, as I said, NATO 3.0.
That NATO was born at the Lisbon Summit in November 2010, when NATO was recognized for what it had become- an operational alliance. An alliance that wasn’t just about deterring threats or even protecting territory of its member states, wasn’t just about stabilizing regions in Europe through the prospect of enlargement and engagement, but was fundamentally about operations.
Last year we had six active operations on three continents around the world. From Afghanistan to the Gulf of Aden to the skies over North Africa, as well as in Europe and in Iraq, NATO was engaged in an operational sense.
It had also become, and is increasingly becoming, a hub to which non-member states are attracted to work with NATO in operational settings, as far away as Afghanistan and indeed as close as today in the Balkans.
Lisbon—that Summit at which NATO 3.0 was born—was a transformative Summit. It was a Summit that laid the basis for transforming NATO from a 20th century institution into a 21st century institution. An alliance that deals with the real threats that exist today—threats like cyber-attacks, proliferation of missiles, terrorism—while also maintaining the capacity to deal with the threats that may return but that are less prominent; such as the threat of armed attack against a member nation state.
All of this was captured in a very short and very clear (and for NATO, and indeed for bureaucracies) generally speaking a very concise and readable document- the New Strategic Concept, which leaders in NATO adopted on November 20, 2010. And I would summarize that concept, and therefore the new NATO, by the four Cs- what I call the four Cs of NATO.
The four Cs of the community values, collective defense, cooperative security and common structures.
At the foundation of NATO is that first C. It’s a community of values. What makes NATO different from any alliance in history is that it is formed by countries that are not just like-minded, but share a community of values. It IS a community of values. To be a part of NATO is to be a country that is fully and completely committed to democracy, to human rights, to the rule of law.
It doesn’t mean that if you don’t belong to NATO, you don’t share those values, but it does mean that you have to share those values in order to be a member of NATO. And it’s that that is at the foundation of the alliance. It’s not just interests that bind this alliance; it is values as well.
On the basis of those values, the members make two fundamental commitments to each other. One is the commitment of collective defense, and this is the core of what this alliance is about.
Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which was signed just down the road here in 1949 on April 4th makes clear that an attack against one is an attack against all, and it mandates that all members to act with military means to the best possible way to repel that attack.
That core, fundamental commitment of the allies remains as strong today as it was in the days at the height of the Cold War. It remains as strong today, not just with respect to the defense of territory of member states, but also when we start talking about dealing with new threats.
New threats like cyber, new threats like terrorism, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
It may come perhaps as a surprise that the first and only time that the alliance invoked Article 5 was on September 12, 2001. When it wasn’t Europe that was being attacked, but the United States. So in a notion of how strange history is, here is an alliance born and grown up for the single purpose of making sure the United States will be there when Europe gets attacked, and then invokes in this new world Europe’s defense of the United States when the United States got attacked.
And indeed, Europe not only came to the defense of the United States through that statement of invoking Article 5, but it actually deployed AWACS aircraft over the skies in the United States for about a five month period.
But collective defense, while the core is not the only raison d'être this community of values, cooperative security as well.
An increasing recognition that is true for our own national security strategies is as true for NATO’s security strategies, that security at home, security for NATO countries at home, not only depends but requires the security for others abroad. And what happens abroad is now as fundamental to one’s own national security as what happens at home.
And therefore NATO is in the business of trying to prevent crises before they emerge and become real threats. It is in the business of using tools like arms control and non-proliferation in order to prevent threats from becoming larger than they are and, very importantly, it’s in the business of striking partnerships with countries around the world that you need in order to address the security challenges that we have.
In Afghanistan, not only are 28 NATO nations on the ground, but so are 22 partner nations from as far away as El Salvador, Bahrain and Tonga to Australia, Austria and Ireland. These are countries that have decided that being in Afghanistan with NATO is fundamental to their security.
Similarly, much in the news these days we have an operation that NATO is leading in the Gulf of Aden with regards to pirates. We now have 19 other countries—Russia, China, Indonesia—cooperating with NATO and the European Union to deal with this age-old scourge that all of a sudden has become a menace to global commerce.
In Kosovo, where NATO in 1999 launched a major air campaign, which some of us thought was ugly, but at least it was a win—we’re still there. And we’re still as NATO, but we have eight European countries that are partnering with us and indeed some European countries don’t think that many of you would know that there are 222 Moroccan troops in Kosovo today to help NATO and the Kosovars maintain security and stability there.
So those are partnerships that we have in an operational setting, but we have partnerships in a non-operational settings too.
NATO is committed to working with Russia as a partner, no longer as an enemy but as a country that is as much the part of a possible solution to our security challenges as it once was part of the problem of our security challenges. We have partnerships with Ukraine, Georgia, with countries throughout the Mediterranean, into the Middle East and in much of Eastern and Central Europe—all designed to bring countries together so we can address security challenges together in order to make sure that whatever challenges there are, they don’t become military in character or require the need of the use of force.
And then finally—so having the community of values, collective defense and cooperative security, three of the four Cs—the fourth C is that of common structures. What makes NATO unique and has always made NATO unique as an alliance is the fact that it has a common command, an integrated command structure, it possesses common capabilities, and it has a common funding or a common cost structure that allows the alliance to operate as more than just the sum of its parts, as a unit with independent capabilities.
In terms of the command structure, we have deployed on a day to day basis, some ten thousand officers around Europe and the United States that are ready to act on a moment’s notice if so desired.
And as the case of Libya demonstrates how important that is. In Libya, it took about four weeks to plan a military operation and it took ten days to decide on whether to take on that military operation and it took three days to move from decision to implementation because you had a command structure ready and able to execute that operation from day one.
We also have, within NATO, capabilities. Particularly large kinds of capabilities that members of the alliance, with the exception of the United States—and one or two others, but mostly the United States, they don’t have the capacity to acquire. So we have AWACS airplanes that are NATO owned and NATO operated- 17 airplanes that provide early warning and surveillance across any operation where they are deployed.
We are about to acquire major unmanned vehicles for intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, which we proved again in Libya how important that was, so we’re going to have NATO owned and operated global surveillance capabilities with data downlinked to NATO owned and operated data centers which can then be used for operations and in deed to survey areas that are out there.
We are deploying a NATO missile defense system. It has a core, NATO-funded, NATO-built, NATO-owned, NATO-controlled command and control system in which national countries can put their interceptors and radars. And all of a sudden one radar, which is pretty useless if its only one radar, plugged into a system linked to four or five other radars linked up to six or seven different interceptor sites becomes a major contribution and NATO enables through its common capabilities that kind of bringing together of capabilities that nations on their own could not possess.
There is a strategic airlift wing of NATO, in which 12 countries including two non-NATO members, Finland and Sweden, have procured time—hours—on C-17s. Together, they have added up the cost of what they would buy and they’ve bought C-17 airplanes and they get six hours, or six months a year on one of those planes if you pay a lot. Or you get three months a year if you pay a little less, or you get two months a year and that’s how those planes are used to resupply troops in Afghanistan or in the case of Sweden, to supply humanitarian assistance to Haiti when there is an earthquake attack.
Sweden can’t afford to buy C-17s. It owns half a C-17 right now, which is kind of strange but NATO allows you to have that because somebody else owns the other half. And it works. It’s a remarkable way in which you use little money together to have common capabilities.
So that’s the new NATO that was built in Lisbon. That’s the alliance for the 21st century based on a community of values committed to collective defense and cooperative security, and embraced with common structures.
Lisbon provided the framework, the foundation and the challenge that we face as we, in the next four months, move to the next NATO Summit, which will be held in Chicago, only the third time a Summit meeting of leaders will be held in the United States and the first time it will be held outside of Washington.
We’re going to look to Chicago to implement the ideas that were put forward when the leaders last met in Lisbon. The value of the ideas was proven last year when, on March 31st, the United States and its 27 allies and five partner countries, including four Arab partner countries, started Operation Unify Protector and started to enforce the arms embargo against Libya to patrol the skies and to ensure that no airplanes were taking off, and most importantly to protect civilians from attack and the threat of attack from Gaddafi’s forces.
And in seven months, through an extraordinary air campaign that historians will look back to as an effort that is unparalleled in its accuracy-- though not perfect still an extraordinary effort-- that enabled not directly but indirectly by providing time and space, the people of Libya to take matters into their own hands and topple a dictator of remarkable brutality who has now, as the vernacular has it, been brought to justice.
NATO was absolutely critical to that effort and it did so in an enabling way, just as the United States and we can talk about this in the Q and A, enabled NATO to act, NATO enabled the people of Libya to take matters into their own hands. So the utility of this 21st century kind of alliance, based on common values, on helping people to defend themselves, helping to cooperate with other countries, based on the common capabilities that existed, was demonstrated in 2011.
And the focus for us in Chicago is to make sure that in 2013, ‘14, ’15, ‘16, ‘17, up to 2020, we maintain that capability. So that’s what we’re going to focus on in Chicago and in order to do that, we will need to do two things.
First, we need to make sure that our other major operation in which in the 21st century we’re engaged in, the operation in Afghanistan, is continuing to move to the path in which in Lisbon we had set out to success in which it is the Afghans who are able and capable of determining their own security in a way that does not pose a threat to the security of the United States or the NATO members.
And then secondly we need to build that the actual capabilities and the partnerships that are necessary to make that 21st century NATO a reality. We need to that in a way that makes clear that even though we are living in a fiscal austerity, we still are able to maintain the capacity to act when such action is called upon.
So first a word about Afghanistan and then a word on the new NATO and how we can maintain that.
In Lisbon,importantly NATO countries concluded, the ISAF countries, the now 50 countries plus Afghanistan, concluded that the surge that United States had led, in 2010, together with its allies, that that surge had created the conditions inside Afghanistan, to slowly but surely transfer responsibility for security from the international community to the Afghans over a four-year process so that it would begin in 2011 to transition, as we call it, responsibility from ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, to the Afghans. And we will end that process by the end by the end of 2014. That’s what we decided to do in Lisbon.
We also decided in Lisbon that in order to succeed the Afghan forces needed to surge themselves. First the US and NATO surged, and that surge is coming down, then the Afghans needed to surge, so they’re building an army and a police force of about 350,000 people so that they can manage the transition process in the next three years.
So in Chicago we’re going to take stock and say ‘How are we doing?’. And this is not Chicago yet, we’re still four months away, but if I had to predict about what we’re going to say, we’re going to say that the course we decided on in Lisbon is the correct course—it is working.
Today, right now as we speak, 50 percent of Afghans live in areas in which Afghan national security forces have the lead responsibility for security. That includes Kabul, where despite once in a while hearing about spectacular attacks, every time those attacks fail in their true intent because Afghan police and Afghan commandos and Afghan army units are able to thwart the attacks that succeed. They also thwart many attacks that don’t succeed or never take place.
In Kabul, in Jalalabad, in Maza-i-Sharif, in Herat City, today the Afghans are providing for security with support by the international community, but they are in the lead.
We think that by the middle of 2013 all of Afghanistan will be in a place where the Afghans are in the lead, and that we can then spend the second half of 2013 and all of 2014 of completing the job of not only having the Afghans in the lead, but the Afghans by the end of, 2014 responsible for security in their own country.
And at that point, the transition process will have been completed, the Afghans are in charge for their own security, and our role will be to support that effort for an enduring period; and that will be a second major outcome of our meeting in Chicago.
First, is the transition period ending successfully. Second is to say we will remain there. We will commit ourselves to remain there as long as you want beyond 2014.
We will do so first by making sure that there is an army and police force that is both sufficient for the task in terms of its strength and sustainable over the long run and we understand that the international community will be responsible in large part for making it sustainable. This is the fourth poorest country in the world, it is not going to be able to maintain a sufficient force to ensure security in Afghanistan on a national budge tthat is about 1 billion dollars per year.
The cost of sustaining the force will be larger and it will have to be borne by the international community. Let me add that the international community is larger than Uncle Sam, so it’s not that Uncle Sam is going to be supporting, but that it is something that the international community would have to do itself. In addition to having Afghan forces, in order to make sure that this enduring partnership works, there will be supportive military forces by other countries including the United States and other NATO countries to support that through increased training activities of the Afghan forces.
So Afghanistan is a work in progress, but at least its progress that’s moving forward. We can talk more about in the Q and A, but the important thing is that we recognize that succeeding in Afghanistan is essential to a 21st century alliance. We have 50 countries that are engaged in that effort and we are determined to make sure even as we wind down our own involvement we do so in a way that maintains the success that has been achieved up to this point.
The second major element that we’re going to talk about in Afghanistan is how to maintain the progress that we made in Lisbon while facing severe economic challenges. Everyone is cutting defense spending , and that includes the United States. You will hear the Secretary of Defense at two o’clock today announcing where we are going to make our cuts in the first instance. At the same time I think everyone realizes, and if you need to be reminded it’s not just the Libya operation, but just what happened last night or the night before last in terms of the rescue operation in Somalia, that having capable military forces is critical to security. To have capable military forces means you have to invest, they don’t come for free and they certainly don’t come as well equipped or as well trained as American forces are, for free.
So we need to find out how do we square this circle of dwindling resources with the need to maintain the capability to act, to deal with the new threats that are out there while also maintaining the capacity to deal with threats that have been there for a very long time.
The way in NATO that we are going to do that is to do two things: first we’re going to emphasize those key capabilities that are must have and must retain; capabilities that without which we would not be able to deal with the threats that are out there.
Missile defense, which deployment is now preceding a pace with the US system coming online this year. But by the time we get to Chicago, NATO taking command and control of the interim capability that we’re deploying. To have the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets that allow individual countries to operate their aircraft and their armies, but to provide that common basis so we’re building not only AWACS aircraft which we have, but a system of unmanned vehicles that will provide 21st century first class intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. So we’re looking at capabilities that are critical, that we must buy because we must have.
We also must improve our training capabilities. Particularly as our forces come down in Afghanistan, it is important that we find new ways to work together, not in operations like Afghanistan, but work together in an operational training sense and we’re going to improve that as well.
The second way- so the first is capabilities- the second way is we need to emphasize how we can do more together. Not that we do more individually, because that’s not going to happen. But how we can do more together. And that’s the notion of what the Secretary General at NATO calls SMART defense, and I’ve mentioned some of this.
Buying half an airplane doesn’t make sense unless somebody else buys the other half. But if you can get two countries to buy one plane, and if you can get 12 countries to buy three planes, and if you can get 28 countries to buy nine planes, then all of a sudden you have capabilities.
But the only way to do that is to be able to do that when you work together.
NATO and the European Union together built a series of aerial refueling planes. Go back to Libya- this was a wonderful example of how not having critical capabilities can hurt you if it doesn’t work the right way. If the United States had decided for whatever reason that it wasn’t going to participate in the air campaign—let’s just say it decided to do that—there wouldn’t have been an air campaign.
Of the 43 capable tankers that refuel aircraft, 31 came from the United States. And if you don’t have tankers that refuel, you can take off from your base in Sicily or in Sardinia, you can get to Libya, you can circle there for about five minutes, and then you gotta go back to get refueled.
Well if you circle for five minutes, you’re not able to find a target, let alone hit it. So aerial refueling, which is a pretty simple technology (it’s been around for a long time) turns out to be an Achilles heel in an air campaign. So let’s buy the capability to do aerial refueling so you don’t have to rely on Uncle Sam to be able to fill that gap. Because Uncle Sam may be doing something else somewhere in another part of the world.
So that’s a good example of how you work together.
Air policing. When the Baltic states became members of NATO in 2004, they said, “You guys gotta protect our skies—and by the way, we have no airplanes. So our choice is to spend all our defense money on buying airplanes or for somebody else to do it.”
So NATO said, “It makes no sense for you to buy F-16s to patrol your skies when we have hundreds of F-16s sitting around doing virtually nothing in the Netherlands and Germany and the United States.” So what NATO said is, “We’ll do your air policing and you invest your dollars in deployable forces.” And guess what? They did. So they’re now in Afghanistan.
The Estonians have the largest per capita contribution (until the Georgians will beat them out soon) but the largest per capita contribution of troops inside Helmand Province, which is no easy picnic. And, as a result, have the largest per capita number of casualties of all NATO countries that are participating in Afghanistan.
And that is a commitment that was made possible by the fact they didn’t have to buy F-16s.
And there are other ways in which we can, working together, create real capabilities for an alliance as such, that individual countries couldn’t do and certainly couldn’t do when defense budgets come down. So that is a very important part- that we find new ways to work together.
And the other final way in which NATO needs to make sure that it is part of that 21st century, is to not only to have its own capabilities, but to find partners with whom it can work together. And it’s that building on partnerships, building on those critical countries that provide real contributions and that look to NATO to provide real contributions to their own security that we hope and expect to recognize in Chicago.
We will look to partners like Japan, which doesn’t provide military capability but provides real financial resources. Australia, that has 1600 troops in Afghanistan today and tomorrow. Sweden, that has been a participant in almost every operation that we are a part of, including as the only non-Arab partner nation in Operation Unify Protector in Libya.
Countries like Switzerland that have funded large parts of our partnership activities in Eastern Europe. A country like the UAE that was on the front lines in Libya and was in the front lines in Afghanistan. Morocco, as I mentined in Kosovo, great political supporter of the operation in Libya and a strong advocate for the kinds of relationships- countries of North Africa- that we’d like to have with NATO which is just across, in the case of Morocco, just across the strait of Gibraltar, to be part of it.
Those kinds of relationships, with countries in Asia, in the Middle East, in Europe and beyond that NATO enesd to foster so it becomes not just a community of values focused on its own collective defense, but a community of values that works with countries across the globe to provide security, not only in Europe, but beyond Europe.
That’s the 21st century NATO that we started the chart in Lisbon. It’s the 21st century NATO that I think in Chicago we will give real meat on those bones.
Let me end by saying that the end of NATO has long been predicted. I’m sure that if I look through my own writings I probably predicted myself at some point, but I found, and it may be true as one of my good friends wrote, that if NATO didn’t exist it would be difficult to say that now we need it , but NATO does exist, and every day that I sit around that table it becomes very clear that the NATO that we are building is a NATO that not only exists, but needs to exist. That is what the true meaning of Chicago is supposed to be about. The celebration of an alliance that helps the security of its members, but also the security of the rest of the world. Thanks.