INTERNATIONAL
The irresistible pressures forcing change on NATO
Spring 2007
NATO’s traditional role as a defensive alliance and its present-day strength in sustained combat operations are no longer enough to satisfy transatlantic security needs, says Rob de Wijk. It’s time it focused more on winning the peace in far-flung places
NATO today faces a stark political choice: should it remain a collective defence alliance or be transformed into a worldwide security provider? New geopolitical realities as well as NATO’s recent military operations suggest that the pressure for change is becoming irresistible. If so, NATO leaders will have to re-write their 1999 political strategy “The Alliance Strategic Concept” and acknowledge openly that their toughest security task − winning the peace in often far-flung and unstable regions − is today just as important as fighting wars.
NATO’s official mission is still to safeguard freedom and security for its transatlantic member states, as defined in 1949 in the founding Washington Treaty. However, the principle of collective self-defence of NATO territory, which still underpins the alliance, has become outmoded since those early Cold War days. The security threats to western liberal democracies today are being shaped by complex forces around the globe.
First, the geopolitics of power are shifting as US hegemony gives way to a multi-polar world where the US and Europe compete with China, India and Russia as centres of military, political and economic power. A power struggle is looming between these centres − one that could profoundly change the international system as we know it.
Second, western security increasingly demands unrestricted access to resources, particularly energy supplies, as prerequisites for continued economic growth and socio-political stability. But the world’s largest oil reserves, together with trans-national pipelines and major shipping routes, all lie within a “zone of instability” that encircles the globe.
This zone of problem states and ungoverned territories now stretches from central America to the Sahel in Africa, across the Middle East, through central Asia to the archipelagos of south east Asia. Weapons of mass destruction are proliferating in this zone, along with their means of delivery; terrorism and organised crime, including piracy, are rife. Instability is compounded in some parts by competition for scarce drinking water and localised conflicts for regional domination.
In addition, anti-western sentiment is growing in many parts of the world, with both states and non-state actors trying to undermine liberal democratic systems. Together, these global concerns have huge implications for western security and will require NATO leaders to redefine the alliance’s underlying political and defence objectives, its geographic reach and the military mechanisms they are prepared to employ.
NATO’s underlying mission has been the defence of territory. Article 5 of the founding Washington Treaty specified that NATO members were committed to collective defence, with an attack on any one member of the alliance to be considered an attack on all of them. But the shift in emphasis from protecting territory to defending strategic interests requires NATO to do more than fight battles. Today, restoring peace is just as important as winning wars since on-going political instability in oil producing regions, for example, threatens energy security just as much as open warfare.
So now NATO requires two sets of tools to do its job, one to win the war and another to win the peace. Western leaders should therefore adopt two basic new concepts to guide NATO actions: strategic coercion and stabilisation and reconstruction (S&R). Strategic coercion would replace the main military tasks of the alliance which are currently listed as deterrence, defence and crisis management. S&R would include missions to restore peace beyond NATO borders, currently known as “non-Article 5 crisis response operations”.
Coercion can be defined as the deliberate and targeted use - or threat to use - instruments of power in order to manipulate and influence the politico-strategic choices of an adversary, including militias and terrorist organisations as well as antagonistic governments. As liberal democracies no longer engage in traditional wars of conquest, most recent western offensive actions against other states can already be classified as coercion.
S&R is more complex. It includes peace-keeping, humanitarian aid, security sector reform (SSR) and demobilisation, de-mining and reconstruction (DDR). Since stabilisation is likely to be undertaken in hostile environments, it also includes counter insurgency and, potentially, covert operations by Special Forces. Front-line troops may also be involved in S&R tasks, such as winning the “hearts and minds” of local populations, ahead of civilian personnel arriving to begin, say, rebuilding war-damaged infrastructure.
Recent history shows that the building blocks of both concepts are already evident on the ground. For example, during the Balkans conflicts in the 1990s, NATO members came to understand that their own security interests were no longer exclusively linked to collective defence within traditional north Atlantic boundaries. When the break-up of the former Yugoslavia spawned multiple ethnic conflicts, there were fears that refugee disasters, escalating terrorism and criminal activity could destabilise the entire Balkan region. As NATO became increasingly enmeshed in these wars, “peace-keeping” operations – e.g. enforcing UN arms embargo and economic sanctions − were transformed in stages into coercive actions, accompanied in Bosnia and Herzegovina with a rudimentary S&R mission.
The 1999 NATO action in Kosovo can be considered as the first clear example of the new twin-track approach, with military intervention to quell ethnic conflict and prevent renewed violence followed by a stabilisation mission to restore peace and permit reconstruction. The Kosovo campaign was therefore both a logical step in the development of NATO strategic thinking and also the first practical demonstration that coercion and S&R could go hand-in-hand.
A Kosovo-style pattern of operations was meant to hold true in Afghanistan too. Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and the subsequent stabilisation mission were designed to deny Al Qaeda and the Taliban access to their bases, where they were training extremist supporters to attack western interests. Coercion and S&R were meant to be of equal importance.
However, while initial western intervention in Afghanistan – and Iraq - demonstrated that certain military objectives could be achieved quickly, it is still proving hugely difficult to stabilise either country after regime change. In Afghanistan, NATO failed to eliminate hostile forces, leaving the Taliban still active across swathes of the country. In Iraq, Muslim extremists and urban guerrillas loyal to deposed President Saddam Hussein have maintained insurgent campaigns against western coalition forces and the Iraqi people.
Nevertheless, the difficulties encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot negate the principle that winning the peace is just as important for NATO as winning wars. Indeed, without progress on peace and stabilisation, NATO missions around the world risk losing support back home and credibility in the field. This will remain a powerful incentive for NATO leaders to revise the Alliance Strategic Concept and raise the profile of S&R.
Meanwhile, re-writing the Alliance Strategic Concept requires more than just the adoption of strategic coercion and S&R. Recent military setbacks suggest greater attention needs to be paid to strategic planning, including measures to convince opponents that NATO will carry through its agreed strategy and escalate violence if necessary to achieve its military objectives. Poor strategy prolongs conflicts, with all its attendant political and military risks. For example, NATO planners predicted that the 1999 Operation Allied Force in Kosovo would last five days. Instead, it took 78 days, during which time support for the air campaign crumbled to such an extent in countries like Germany and Italy that NATO feared that the coalition might collapse altogether.
Of course, NATO members have many reasons to want military operations to succeed beyond the self-evident fact that failure damages NATO credibility at home and abroad. As well as the loss of lives and financial costs, failed NATO operations also jeopardise the stability of international relations as they are more likely to provoke hostile backlashes in third countries, especially in those states that disapproved of NATO coercion in the first place. This is especially true for military intervention based on moral and ethical grounds, which are particularly prone to cultural misunderstandings.
A new Alliance Strategic Concept will also have to deal with the increasing operational complexities of international crisis management, including integration of NATO procedures and practices with non-NATO partners. Although NATO’s 1999 political strategy document recognised the need to co-operate widely, S&R makes this even more important, given the military will be providing security for a wide range of civilian and non-governmental organisations dealing with governance, economic recovery, justice and humanitarian assistance.
During military action, multi-national coalitions pose particular problems of “interoperability”. This refers both to the technical requirement for different national forces to knit together their various communications, weapons systems, chains-of-command etc. and also their need to agree on military objectives, doctrines and the overall political aims of the mission. The effective integration of land, sea and air forces is an additional challenge in multi-national operations. If NATO is to become an effective worldwide security provider, it will need to improve interoperability within the alliance itself and create interoperable systems for coalitions with non-NATO forces.
Strategic coercion and S&R also have implications for transatlantic relations, given the US-Europe alliance is likely to remain the main axis for NATO despite on-going tension over the “legitimate” use of force. For example, Europe’s main war-fighting capacity would continue to require Special Forces and other early entry units, such as marines and air-manoeuvre brigades, in line with current NATO Response Forces. Most of the heavy armoured units should be transformed for S&R. However, the new Alliance Strategic Concept should be based on a joint political understanding that the EU will use these credible armed forces to back up its currently toothless Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).
NATO will also have to issue fresh guidelines to Europe over its armed forces contribution to NATO military capabilities. This is likely to focus on S&R as most EU countries lack both the political will and the capacity to deploy tanks and heavy artillery, reflecting their culture of risk aversion and an emphasis on soft power.
Meanwhile, NATO leaders will also have to decide how far transformation of NATO coercive forces will be based upon US concepts of modern warfare, such as maximising the use of information technology and military analytical techniques, which they have been testing on battlefields since the early 1990s.
US operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, demonstrated that the combination of innovative tactics and small networked “high-tech” forces for advanced expeditionary warfare allowed relatively small units to achieve their objectives with astounding speed, with low numbers of friendly casualties and modest collateral damage. However, recent experience has also shown that this style of warfare requires an enormous logistical effort and only the US could sustain armoured and mechanised forces during long-range manoeuvres.
New strategic guidelines should also spell out the consequences for NATO members who – after proper consultation - choose not to join a particular coalition force, both in terms of their financial commitments and involvement in decision-making. However, it should also be clear that secondary S&R operations are voluntary, with pledges to join common defence operations reserved for interventions of vital interest to members.
The next NATO summit must therefore seize the political initiative and write a whole new strategy for the alliance, based explicitly on the present geopolitical realities. This new status quo demands more emphasis on power projection to achieve limited military objectives, plus peace operations to create stability. A new Alliance Strategic Concept should set down clearly that NATO members have reached a political consensus on coercion and S&R, and spell out their common understanding of both concepts. It must define NATO’s particular role within the broader political processes of western foreign and economic policies, so that military strategy forms one part of a comprehensive approach. It should also provide guidance on concept and doctrine development, the nature of military capabilities required and interoperability guidelines for a new world security system.
NATO decision-makers should not have an exaggerated view of what can be achieved with the instruments of power. In one recent ground-breaking study, just 30% of all military interventions were judged to be successful. Nevertheless, military force will remain an instrument of foreign policy well into the 21st century. And NATO should meet the challenges of the new century by gathering together like-minded liberal democracies to take action anywhere in the world in defence of common values and interests.