North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Allied Command Transformation
January 15, 2014
NATO Defence Leaders Meet, Plan for Future Security Challenges
Senior Chief Mass Communication Specialist Hendrick L. Dickson
Members of the NATO Defence and Planning team and other NATO leaders met at the NATO School in Oberammergau, Germany, January 14-16 at the annual NATO Defence Planning Symposium (DPS).
The DPS is an informal gathering designed to stimulate discussion on defence planning and capability development topics which included “Deriving Requirements to Meet Common Challenges”, “Setting Targets and Sharing their Fulfilment”, “Transforming the Alliance for the Long Haul”, and “Meeting the Future Political Challenges”.
The theme for this year’s symposium was “Meeting Future Defence and Security Challenges Together,” and the event was chaired by Assistant NATO Secretary General for Defence Policy and Planning, International Staff, Heinrich Brauss.
Brauss said the symposium provides an opportunity for key members of NATO’s Defence and Planning team to discuss and fine-tune recommendations on how to make the NATO Defence Planning Process (NDPP) as simple and adaptable as possible. He encouraged attendees to “seek to identify opportunities for multinational cooperation in pursuit of fulfilling NATO requirements, promote broader understanding of the principles of fair burden sharing…”
NATO Supreme Allied Commander Transformation (SACT) French Air Force General Jean-Paul Paloméros, keynote speaker on the second day, stressed the importance of planning for the future with a vision on the long-term effectiveness of the Alliance.
“From a military perspective, preparing the future starts with a clear, yet challenging, aim which is to anticipate the future strategic context for the Alliance out to the next 30 years,” said Paloméros. “This is challenging as we could always be blinded by the pace and effect of short-term issues while underestimating the scale and nature of long-term and enduring mutation.
“Hopefully for our Alliance and for future generations we will succeed in our quest for defence reinvestment, but we cannot afford to wait for better days,” he continued. “We must shape the future – now; we must tackle the problems of today – now; we must find new paths to answer the current and future challenges, and we must better prioritize our efforts.”
SACT also addressed economic concerns of many Allies by touting many NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT) initiatives such as; the Connected Forces Initiative, Smart Defence and the Framework Nations Concepts, as effective solutions – with cooperation from the Alliance – that will alleviate defence cost-cutting concerns.
“For sure when the economy underperforms, defence budgets are primary targets for cuts, even if anybody serious would recognize that defence is a long term investment and that major budget reductions produce their effects in the long run,” said General Paloméros. “This is why in planning for the decade to come we have to take realistic financial assumptions and a permanent cost to value assessment approach.
“Furthermore, we have to make clear that there is no magic recipe to keep a suitable capability inventory against enduring fiscal pressure,” he continued. “Therefore, initiatives such as Smart Defence, pooling and sharing, or the Framework Nations Concept, must be seen as ways to anticipate, to mitigate budget constraints’ long term impact and certainly not as a pretext for further cuts…I am convinced that issues of fair burden sharing and reasonable challenge could be addressed by leveraging new technologies and through a strong NATO/EU partnership.”
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