5: Forces & Capabilities Other Information:
Chapter 5: Alliance Forces and Capabilities -- Background: NATO's 1999 Strategic Concept included a section on "Guidelines
for the Alliance's Forces" which established goals for transforming capabilities to meet the challenges of a new century.
The document called for a well-trained and equipped force and command structure able to provide collective defence, respond
rapidly to emergencies, and engage in complex joint operations beyond Allied territory. At the same summit in Washington,
leaders approved a separate Defence Capabilities Initiative (DCI) to address five broad NATO force needs: 1) Mobility and
Deployability, 2) Sustainability and Logistics, 3) Effective Engagement, 4) Survivability, and 5) Interoperable Communications.
Although necessary and timely, the DCI also proved to be too broad in focus. Over the next decade, subsequent capabilities
initiatives and summit declarations provided additional guidance to NATO members and defence planners. Guidance in the past
decade. At its 2002 summit in Prague, Allies began to adapt to the changed security situation generated by the 9/11 attacks
and to the prospect of helping to restore stability to Afghanistan. The Alliance approved a plan to augment the DCI by developing
improved capabilities in eight defence categories, established Allied Command Transformation (ACT) to steer the development
of those capabilities, and created a NATO Response Force (NRF) to "move [forces] quickly to wherever needed." At the Riga
summit in 2006, Alliance leaders adopted the Comprehensive Political Guidance (CPG), which set out the framework and priorities
for all Alliance capability issues, planning disciplines, and intelligence for the foreseeable future. Among its requirements
was that NATO members develop national land forces that were at least 40 percent deployable and 8 percent deployable on a
sustainable basis. (These targets were later raised to 50 percent and 10 percent.) In 2009, at the Strasbourg-Kehl summit,
NATO agreed to a "Declaration of Alliance Security," which emphasised implementation of the CPG and envisioned a multinational
headquarters for special operations forces. Military transformation: a work in progress. The results of these initiatives
and summit directives have been mixed. Due in the main to limited resources, NATO's military forces have moved only slowly
to pursue agreed guidelines. Thus, a significant distance still separates potential missions and available capabilities. Much
of the progress that has taken place towards military transformation has been driven by operational requirements in Kosovo
and Afghanistan. ISAF operations in particular have underlined the need for forces that are deployable and sustainable, for
common approaches to counter-insurgency operations, and for interoperable command, control, communications, computers, intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities. The primary limiting factor hindering military transformation has been
the lack of European defence spending and investment. Today, only six of twenty-six European Allies spend 2 percent or more
of GDP on these purposes; only about a dozen have met goals for making military forces deployable and sustainable. The Alliance
benchmark of 20 percent of military spending allocated to investment has been achieved by less than half of NATO nations (though
the trend is slowly improving). The gap is especially large between U.S. capabilities and the rest of NATO, an imbalance that
if left unchecked could undermine Alliance cohesion. Contributing to the problem is the fact that, in the past twenty years,
European defence spending has been consumed disproportionately by personnel and operational costs. As a result, European national
forces generally do not have nearly enough transformed forces.
Objective(s):
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