Smart Defence: The political angle
Why do we need Smart Defence?
We do need Smart Defence.
We do need to prioritize.
We do need to find ways for nations
who can't afford
a full spectrum military,
to specialize in a sensible way
with NATO being the coordinator,
so that we end up
with all the capabilities we need,
with less redundancy
and with more effectiveness
and more solidarity in the end.
28 nations agreeing on defence
priorities and specialisations?
It is going to be very difficult.
There have been success stories
in multinational cooperation
and in getting the nations
to do a sensible division of labour
when they can't all
do the same things.
More often than not,
each nation wants to hedge its bets
and be self-reliant and in an Alliance
with a shrinking resource base
we really do need to do things
in a conceptually different way.
I don't underestimate the difficulties.
If we're going to share the work, that
runs up against domestic pressures
from parliaments who want
to keep the business at home.
It raises questions of trust.
If we pool our resources
and purchase some capability,
will it be available to one nation if
another disagrees with the mission?
And, of course,
just the bureaucratic inertia.
People have been doing things
the old-fashioned way for decades.
So, just changing the way you do
business is always hard in any...
in militaries,
in civilian bureaucracies.
How does Smart Defence fit
with national sovereignty?
Sovereignty is going
to be a sensitive issue
because NATO is
not like the European Union:
An institution in which countries
pull their sovereignty.
But I think that,
if Smart Defence is going to work,
nations will need to voluntarily agree
to coordinate more than before.
They'll need to present
their plans for defence restructuring,
for budget cuts, before they make
irrevocable decisions
and listen to their allies
and the NATO professionals
if they recommend
a different approach.
Instead of continuing
to invest in tanks,
cut the tank force
and invest more in fighter jets,
or in surveillance drones,
or in mine countermeasure ships.
NATO needs a lot of capabilities
and nations need to think about
what's best for the Alliance
and not just for their country.
Where do partners fit in
to Smart Defence?
One of the exciting parts
of the Alliance in the last 20 years
has been the increasing
involvement of partners
in our operations,
in our political consultations
and I think that the success
of Smart Defence will be enhanced,
if we can find ways for partners
to literally plug in, to plug and play,
as part of these new
multinational initiatives.
There will be a limit to how far
the partners' involvement can go,
namely when it comes
to collective defence,
only allies have that responsibility
under Article 5
of the Washington Treaty.
And I think
we can't depend on non-allies.
That would be asking
too much of them,
but it'd also be asking too much
of allies who may feel vulnerable
to expect that the partners
would be part of the Article 5 mission.
But many of the missions that NATO
is likely to be called upon to perform,
in the future will be out of area
missions relating to threats
of terrorism, proliferation,
regional stability in Central Asia
and the post 2014
Afghanistan situation.
These are areas
where bringing the partners in
can add capability and political
legitimacy to what NATO does.
So I'm very hopeful
that the doors will be wide open
to involvement of partners
in Smart Defence.
Is Smart Defence
more bottom-up or top-down?
I think that if it's going to work,
it probably has to be
more top-down than bottom-up.
The execution of the programmes
will be carried out
by the headquarters
here in Brussels,
with our defence planning process
which sometimes gets a bad name,
because it is a cumbersome process,
but it is the means by which allies
sit around the table,
critique one another's defence plans,
try to come up
with a rational division of labour,
set ambitious goals for countries
and try to hold them to account.
We want to use that process.
But without the top-down
pressure from political leaders,
heads of state and government,
defence ministers,
there's a danger that the momentum
that is building, could dissipate.
So, we're thinking
of how can we connect capitals
on a continuing basis
to the work here in Brussels
so it doesn't become another NATO
committee whose work takes place,
but the results are ignored in capitals
and business as usual continues.
If that's what this all leads to,
it would be a big disappointment.
Is Smart Defence
a make-or-break project for NATO?
NATO's future will never hinge
on any one program or initiative
and NATO, of course, is too important
to fail for all of its member states
and for its partners
who now increasingly see NATO
as a guarantor
of their security and stability.
But NATO's credibility
does ultimately depend
on credible military capabilities
or a political military Alliance.
But without the military capabilities
underpinning the organisation,
our political leverage
would be far less.
It is vitally important, I wouldn't go
as far as saying it’s make-or-break,
but it really is now a very
critical challenge for the Alliance
that it must meet
by the end of this decade,
to deliver the capabilities
to fulfil the strategy
that we all dutifully adopted
at the Lisbon Summit two years ago.