In the ancient world, the best navy sailed from Athens, the best infantry marched from Sparta, and the renowned Scythian archers joined whichever city-state could afford their services. No Greek city-state could take on King Xerxes and the Persian Empire alone. Defeating that existential threat required the cooperation of one-time enemies in favor of a common cause: survival. Each polity had to carry its share of the burden if Greece were to survive.
Two millennia later, a collection of states, including former enemies, again banded together for defense against a common threat to their way of life, and on 4 April 1949, they signed a pact creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Emerging at the end of World War II, NATO was ostensibly created to be a bulwark against the nascent threat of the Soviet Union, recognizing that no nation could stand alone against that country’s vast resources. However, the organization’s purpose was actually threefold: to deter Soviet expansion, to prevent the Nazi phoenix from rising from the ashes, and to foster political integration and cooperation in the European community.
By the goals set down in its 1949 charter, NATO has been a resounding success. The Soviet Union collapsed with the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev on Christmas Day in 1991, the Maastricht Treaty creating the European Union went into effect in 1993, and Germany has emerged as one of the leading countries in the European economy and a staunch proponent of peace.
‘An Organization Without a Purpose’
But NATO today seems to be an organization without a purpose. In 2010, the alliance adopted a new strategic concept in which it committed itself to dealing with all stages of an international crisis, including post-conflict reconstruction. But with the world economy still in recession, defense budgets continue to be a favorite target of politicians, who see noninterventionism as a new ideal for which to strive. Should NATO, its founding purpose fulfilled, now be scrapped and replaced by an entirely new organization? Or should the alliance reconsider how to achieve its mission amid economic uncertainty and regional turmoil?
The second option leverages the collective experience and bonds of the past six decades and forces the allies to contemplate seriously what the future of warfare holds for the alliance, and how its members intend to fight. NATO should call a new convention that seeks to answer these questions and to assign individual member nations responsibilities for developing the technologies, doctrine, and concepts that will be required in the future. Just as there have been calls for increased interagency cooperation within the United States government, so should there be close collaboration among NATO’s members.
A Three-Point Framework
The framework of a proposed convention should call for three main elements: first, the creation of new mechanisms for information-sharing and development; second, the establishment of common weapon systems and standing forces; and third, the restructuring of the alliance to reflect the need for true interagency and intergovernmental cooperation, all of which must be underpinned by a vigorous discussion of what each country believes the future security environment, maritime or otherwise, to be.
Few nations have the fiscal and political resources to pursue simultaneously every defense technology they wish to acquire, so information-sharing among the allied nations will be essential to further the ability of NATO members to fight collectively. Academia continues to produce innovative technologies, ideas, and materials that push the frontier of science forward.
However, many of these ideas lack direct applicability to military endeavors and must therefore be discovered, funded, tested, and implemented by someone within the military-industrial complex. The small-scale defense grant programs and military educational institutions in the United States do further defense-related research, but the sheer number of projects that need solving precludes the United States from solving them all, and does not always consider the expanded set of research problems in NATO.
The liberalization of defense research and information-sharing will be vital to the future success of the NATO alliance. At present, most member nations have exchange programs with other allied nations to send service members to war colleges and on operational assignments. NATO should not only expand these programs to promote interoperability and collaboration among alliance partners within the present framework, but it should also expand them to include scientific research.
‘The Special Relationship’
Before NATO was formed, the long-heralded “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain during World War II showed how information- and technology-sharing altered the course of the war. Britain lacked the shipbuilding resources to field sonar in sufficient quantities, and the United States had a surplus of destroyers. Through the 1940 Destroyers-for-Bases program, the United States transferred 50 mothballed destroyers to Great Britain, which outfitted them with first-generation sonar systems and used them against German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. At the same time, the British gave the United States additional sonar sets, along with radar, and the Americans took them and expanded the program. Partly because of this, within a few years the Battle of the Atlantic was essentially won, and U.S. submarines were using radar to find Japanese targets in the Pacific.
In a more recent example, the United States and Great Britain have collaborated on the development and deployment of submarine-launched nuclear ballistic missiles and the Trident missile system, and they are now developing the next-generation replacement—including a common missile compartment for future Ohio- and Vanguard-class submarines. The scope of the cooperation in both theaters helped keep the peace for the next half century, and it still serves as a model for collaboration in the future.
Sharing the Burden
To execute this, the convention should identify the broad technological and philosophical areas that need research and assign one member nation to become the new center of excellence within each area. For example, in the maritime areas, Italy, one of the world’s leading producers of naval mines, could become the center for mine-warfare research. Or one of the Scandinavian countries could be designated the alliance’s “expert” on littoral warfare. Additional areas include antisubmarine warfare, commerce protection, counter piracy, and maritime domain awareness, to name a few.
Each designated nation would then be responsible for the development of its assigned warfare competency across the board—from doctrine, organization, leadership, and training to matériel, personnel, facilities, and interoperability. Researchers, both civilian and military, from other allied nations could then be assigned to these research institutes to ensure interoperability and promote information-sharing, on either a permanent or visiting basis. The fruits of their labors would be shared across the alliance, for member nations to develop and use as they see fit. Countries that wish to conduct research not under way in the lead nation for that area can continue to do so as their financial and political situations permit.
NATO must take steps to field new, joint combat systems that reduce the total cost of ownership across the alliance while improving combat readiness. The lead nation for a particular warfare area would develop the new technology into effective combat systems for the alliance. To reduce further the total cost of ownership across the alliance, each member nation could be responsible for at least one aspect of the coalition force, just as the Greek alliance relied on the heavy, shock infantry of Sparta or the navy of Athens to defeat larger threats. If the lead nation faced production or supply problems, other nations could be called on to assist in both prototyping and production.
Dissemination of research across the alliance as it becomes available would work in tandem with the need to rapidly prototype and test potential new combat capabilities, thus reducing the research-to-fielding lifecycle and improving combat capabilities. Frequent collaboration between NATO member nations on the development of new combat systems would be the key to success, and would likely result in highly versatile platforms that readily accommodate a wide range of payloads, each of which can be truly interoperable or country-specific.
Strengthening the Commitment
Such a shift in traditional military thinking would require a strong commitment from each member nation to come to the defense of another since each nation would have the option to not field a traditionally complete military. While it’s a revolutionary thought, some nations that face few truly existential threats now would likely opt to significantly reduce their standing forces in favor of highly specialized, smaller forces knowing that the NATO alliance would be their first line of defense in any large-scale conflict. The relationship among the member nations has now reached a level of maturity that makes this revolution in allied military affairs possible.
Other nations, such as the United States, would likely maintain large standing militaries while still supporting the NATO alliance, primarily due to their global national interests requiring it; nothing in the NATO charter, current or proposed, prevents a nation from acting in its own self-interest. The NATO rapid-reaction force, presently headquartered in Germany, could then become an organization with permanently assigned equipment, jointly developed by NATO members, with rotating personnel from the various countries to man it. Interoperability of combat systems and maintenance procedures, developed as a result of a lead country’s effort in a designated category, would ensure that the member nations are able to function as a coalition while expanding the supply chain, adding to the robustness of future operations.
The trend toward small wars, which arguably can be traced back to the end of the Vietnam War, and the increased focus in successive conflicts on humanitarian, peacekeeping, or nation-building operations, means that NATO must change its organizational structure to remain both potent and relevant in the 21st century. The inability of various inter- and intra-government agencies to cooperate toward a common objective represents one of the largest threats to future NATO success. The orders by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. official directing the post-invasion rebuilding of Iraq following the coalition’s invasion there—first to purge the civilian government of Ba’ath Party adherents and then to disband the Iraqi Army—marked a low-point in civil-military cooperation. While the Iraq conflict wasn’t strictly a NATO operation, the Bremer policy underscores the necessity for planning across agencies before hostilities begin.
Broadening the Reach
Future operations will require an integrated approach that coherently utilizes all elements of national power, not just military power. NATO should undertake a fundamental reorganization to reflect this new method of interagency and intergovernmental operations. The NATO equivalent of the United States’ combatant commands should be restructured to include personnel from the Department of State, Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. Agency for International Development, their foreign counterparts, and permanent liaisons to major non-governmental organizations that routinely participate in the aftermath of combat operations, such as the International Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders, and the relevant elements of the United Nations, such as the World Food Program, the High Commissioner for Refugees, or the U.N. Development Program. Ensuring that each agency’s capabilities are represented in the planning process should prevent another unmitigated disaster, such as occurred Iraq in the 2004–06 period, and show the rest of the world that NATO has a vested interest in peace and security beyond its traditional Euro-Atlantic area of operations.
In a nod to the realities of globalization, NATO could reach out and establish partnerships with multinational corporations to help the alliance better predict and plan for the effects of a proposed operation. For example, the advent of just-in-time maritime shipping allows little slack in schedules before the economic effects become both real and significant. The Maersk Line and the K Line, the global maritime shipping container companies, employ dozens of analysts whose jobs are to analyze the first-, second-, and third-order economic effects of a port closure or strait blockage to ensure that the companies have well- thought-out continuity of operations plans. NATO can leverage this expertise, allowing it to better plan for or react in a manner that ensures the continuity of the sea lines of communication and thus the global economy.
Expanding the Structure
If NATO decides that the alliance must be ready to act globally, not within its traditional realm, then its organizational structure should be expanded to reflect the global priorities. Areas of responsibility defined by the U.S. Unified Command Plan would be an easy and logical start to this process, and the U.S. combatant commands already have much of the infrastructure that would be needed for such an expansion.
The alliance’s first international foray into Afghanistan indicates that NATO foresees a global role in the future, and the convention should address that reality to ensure that the organization is well-aligned for future operations. Other countries outside the Euro-Atlantic region should be inducted into the alliance commensurate with the expansion of NATO into a global actor. Membership could be by invitation only, given the financial, political, and military burdens recommended here. NATO should not seek to supplant the authority of the United Nations in its global expansion, but rather simply to be an alliance of countries that share a common vision for the future when it comes to peace, security, and the global economy. Initial candidates for this expansion might include already strong allies such as Australia, South Korea, and Japan.
Through liberal information-sharing across the entire sphere of responsibilities in each assigned category, the fielding of new, joint combat systems, and a fundamental organizational restructuring, NATO can emerge as a revitalized force ready to respond to the challenges in a revolutionary fashion. Harmonious cooperation within and across governments to exercise all elements of national power will usher in a new era of international-security policies and relations.
The unprecedented level of cooperation proposed here would make Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill beam with pride. The League of Nations failed. The United Nations has yet to prove itself capable of concerted action to address a crisis across the range of military operations. A revamped NATO alliance would be the third generation in collective security efforts, and one with the most promise of future success. Forged over more than 60 years and tempered by history, NATO would stand poised as the protector of peace through the surety and supremacy of military power and collective action of peaceful nations in a new, globalized world.
2013 Global Defense Burden Essay Contest Winners
First Prize:
“Modernize NATO for the 21st Century” – Lieutenant Ryan Hilger, U.S. Navy
Second Prize:
“NATO Learning Alliance” – Lieutenant Matthew Hipple, U.S. Navy
Third Prize:
“The Three Key Phases of Technology Sharing Partnerships” – Lieutenant Commander Tom Spahn, U.S. Navy Reserve