Title: Taking the Battle Upstream: Towards a Benchmarking Role for NATO
Abstract: Abstract : One of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization s (NATO) goals is to ensure that its member states collectively have the capabilities required to apply decisive force whenever the alliance s political leaders decide to achieve certain effects around the world. Yet the history of NATO s influence on actual defense capabilities is a checkered one at best. Since the height of the Cold War, when NATO set itself a level of ambition of 100 divisions and then promptly proceeded to ignore it, all the way to more recent efforts such as the Defence Capabilities Initiative (1999), the Prague Capabilities Commitment (2002), the Istanbul Usability Targets (2004) and the Lisbon Capabilities Package (2010) the direct impact of NATO on national capability development has proved disappointing. If we think of the life cycle of defense capabilities from the moment they are conceived to the moment they are disposed of, NATO s effort throughout these years has focused predominantly on the employment stage. NATO s Defence Planning Process (NDPP) indicates what its analyses and foresight efforts (and increasingly its operational experiences as well) show is required to be effective in the employment stage and then translates these minimally required capabilities into national targets that are presented to and discussed with the NATO member states. But these collective NDPP inputs remain by and large peripheral to the much more dominant national defense planning processes through which the overwhelming majority of Alliance capabilities are born and grown. To put it in business terms: NATO asks for a product and essentially stays aloof from the way(s) in which its providers produce it. In river terms: NATO positions itself downstream where it has to work with the capabilities that the tributaries bring to it.
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-09-01
Language: en
Type: report
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 3
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