“The Empires of the Future are the Empires of the Mind.”
-Winston S. Churchill
Though the Cold War was defined as a battle of ideological supremacy between Communism and Liberty, NATO served as the defensive phalanx: a titanic lumbering bulwark against the threat of extermination so the free world could carry on the struggle of wills. That phalanx must now break ranks; no longer holding back waves of mobile ICBM’s or tank columns at the Fulda Gap, NATO must leap proactively into the fray against the dynamic and increasingly entangled fears that threaten future prosperity from society’s frontiers. From Afghanistan to AMISOM, this new proactive mission requires a less centralized, actively learning model to succeed.
NATO will find viability and strength in operational, technological, and political flexibility created by a loose defense system rooted in unique parallel force development, honed through inter-military competition, and united with information sharing. Shifting from a large foe that threatens our physical existence to smaller inter-connected foes that need be rolled back for stability, NATO must embrace the fluid advantages at the expense of contextually less useful Smart Defense: centralization and doctrinal economies of scale. Variety and learning are the keystones to NATO’s victory arch: building an adaptive organization for fighting new foes such as transnational criminals, terrorists, and WMD proliferators, as named by NATO’s New Strategic Concept. NATO’s future lies not with centralized doctrinal efficiencies, but a system that empowers individual alliance members and creates opportunities for technical and conceptual improvement.
Old NATO: The Fixed Fortification
“Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man.”
-General George S. Patton
Fixed fortifications have long been buried in the rubble of the Maginot Lines of WWII and Desert Storm. However, fixed fortifications are not merely bunkers and fixed artillery, but also the ideas and technology that stand behind a force’s execution. NATO will become unviable if it seeks its future in such inflexible values as uniform ease and economies of scale.
Like NATO, the Delian League of Athens was an alliance fielding a forward-deployable military powerhouse. Although strategically flexible, its tactics and technology were monochrome. Syracuse exploited those uniform tactics and technology to crush Athens in its traditional realm of dominance: the sea. The Delian cities, like other powers of the time, had built a fleet of ships with reinforced flanks. This was in accordance with the tradition of triremes meeting abreast or at angles; as such, meeting with the prow was seen as poor helmsmanship. During the Sicilian campaign, no Athenian defense planner had considered the sudden tactical tailspin at sea. An onslaught of prow-armored Syracusian vessels sailed out to meet the Athenian fleet; the surprise must have been immense as the Athenian captains, thinking the Syracusan maneuver a mistake, found themselves standing at the till of a destroyed lumber. Once the battering-ships had crushed into their Athenian prey, “greater damage was done by the Syracusans who went about in small boats, ran in upon the oars of the Athenian galleys, and sailed against their sides, and discharged from thence their darts upon the sailors.” The Athenians were defeated by their own myopic mastery of a single way of fighting, by the fixed fortification of their doctrine and technology.
NATO’s irregular frontier foes are far more dispersed and flexible than the conventional militaries of the Greek cities; ADM Stavridis recently noted the increasing connectivity of these forces, a virtuous loop of support and learning for the non-virtuous. Uniformity only enhances the weaknesses against these destabilizing foes. NATO must avoid two important weaknesses the Delian League discovered in their naval confrontation with Syracuse; centralized doctrine and singular technology create multiple single points of failure easily exploited by a mentally agile opponent. The ability of the JNA and militias to avoid the single-minded NATO air campaign in Yugoslavia is one example of monochrome modern doctrine being frustrated. While uniform technology does not absolutely necessitate uniform doctrine as with the Delians, it does create uniform weaknesses. The armored sides of Delian ships could be compared with the Link 16 data-sharing system or the F-35, alliance-wide systems without competing parallel equivalents that can be analyzed and exploited. In the particular case of unitary combat data sharing systems, a single exploit could take down a multi-national force that should be inoculated by parallel but different systems.
Not So Smart Defense:
The argument that worries of doctrinal or technical weakness could be defeated with Smart Defense, member state military specialization creating excellence by focus, are wrong; Smart Defense creates stove-piping of ideas and political liability. NATO militaries could not drill and train together in a constant way that would ensure overly specialized militaries would regularly integrate the lessons of working within a larger force. Specialization can push the fencing of singular schools of doctrine with few peers to learn from. For some, such as the Baltic members specializing in demining, the military budget, force size, and global reach are small enough to justify punching above weight in specialization; this is especially because regular peacekeeping missions offer a constant stream of real-life experience. No such opportunities exist for the nation assigned “air superiority,” for example. Specialized militaries create myopic militaries; it took the attack at Pearl Harbor to force the formerly battleship-heavy US Navy to fully embrace the era of carriers. Doctrinal change should not cost so much blood and energy.
The final nail in specialization’s coffin is, while small nations may be the exception, larger nations with world-wide interests would see specialization as a liability as a de-facto hamstringing of their ability to operate independently. No large nation’s populace wishes to be reliant on another to deploy militarily if necessary. As stated before, the threats faced by NATO are no longer existential, leading to missions with varying degrees of urgency to different alliance members. Each member state taking on a “role” creates a dangerous Euro-like scenario creating reliance with differing degree of will, without the currency-based MAD concept keeping nations on the membership roll. Even in historical situations where the “specialization” appeared to work, such as the Napoleonic Wars with the Whale of the UK versus the Elephant of France, the idea was false. The Iberian campaign proved that Britannic specialization was a myth. NATO nations should remain generalists, giving each nation the ability to deploy independently or choose the scale of their commitment to each conflict. NATO requires a new idea; an alliance based on flexibility, learning, and enabling measures funneled from the center to members.
From Stretching to Yoga: The New Flexible Response
In the early 1960’s, the Kennedy administration shifted American policy from a nuclear-centered Massive Retaliation to conventional-based Flexible Response; the recognition of conventional exchange’s greater likelihood and the need for a scaled answer to that threat encouraged the shoring up those lower reaches of escalation. In that vein, massive joint conventional exercises, industrial economies of scale, and singular doctrine made sense.
In “NATO 2020: Assured Security; Dynamic Engagement”, it is recognized that the threat of conventional breakout is low conventional threat low. NATO needs a new flexible response, one that recognizes the increased likelihood of threats on the lower irregular/civil rungs and the lower need for grand-scale conventional response. These threats adapt well to large predictable forces and can find ways to exploit uniform technologies. Adapting involves a system not designed for large-scale deployment, but designed to empower alliance members politically and militarily while creating opportunities for technical and conceptual improvement.
Federalism: Learning by Examples
“I prefer clarity to agreement.”
-Dennis Prager
The new Flexible Response does not center on the magnitude of response, but the variability and variety of ways that magnitude is employed. To build that flexibility, one looks to the Federal model’s learning strengths. Federalism, an umbrella system containing a series of sovereign parallel systems, is not merely a method of governance; in the United States, the federalist system was also conceived as a massive series of policy laboratories. Under the umbrella of the national authority, each state has parallel systems all functioning differently that often compete. For NATO, Building parallel systems allows for different priorities and experiences to encourage learning, wargaming providing the ultimate arena for systemic-level competition of both technology and tactics.
The focus of NATO’s attempts to improve should be harnessing the points of divergence, rather than convergence: juggle potential best practices and new concepts. Some examples are subtle, such as the specialist officer paths of the UK as compared to the generalist careers of US line officers. More public learning would be the F-22 and Eurofighter. The F-22’s thrust vectoring and stealth create a stern opponent for the lighter and smaller Eurofighter. Both systems incredibly capable, their often public friendly competition of capabilities contrasts well against the stagnant F-35 program, with multiple buy-ins and worrisome sacrifices (such as single-engine carrier versions) that have simultaneously left no room for a generational competitor. There are instances where excellence is already achieved in a single system, such as NATO ordnance standards and the Global Hawk High Altitude Long Endurance drone program, but the constant availability of parallel systems in either development or production is an important learning tool for force-wide procurement.
To truly learn from alternative systems, those systems cannot merely be contrasted by observation; they must compete. NATO training concentrates primarily on exercises, emphasizing drills in compatibility and cooperation; competition through robust wargaming is the way to glean best practices and grow forces ready for modern brushfire conflicts. The F-22 and Eurofighter already compete in regular jousts, the Luftwaffe taking to the skies against the 525th in Alaska and the Red Flag games at Nellis Air Force Base. Although its results were woefully abused by conventional leadership, the best recent example of an “eye-opening” wargame experience was the Millenium Challenge in 2002; General Riper crushed a high-end US naval task force using cheap and unconventional means. Rather than large joint exercises, NATO should seek a wargaming model in which two unconstrained opponents can compete. With a solid game overseer and forces given real independence, varying combinations could be put in conflict. A British naval task force could hunt a Polish special forces unit, French air units could be assigned to attack limited targets in a civil war between communities played by US and Italian army units; the combinations are as endless as are the learning possibilities.
The independence of these games is critical. The embarrassing re-start of the Millenium Challenge wherein the “defeat” was erased by exercise control and the enemy was restricted to defeatable tactics shows a way in which compromised game controllers can effect results for bureaucratic rather than training purposes. Adding a division to the NATO Defense College dedicated to wargame development and control, run by veterans of both national and NATO conflicts to help manage wargames between forces would create an excellent mustard seed for a greater educational synthesis. Eventually, NATO might field independent red-team advisors to aid commanders during wargames. The Allied Command Transformation (ACT) in particular could use these new wargames as case studies for their efforts to find best practices for joint operations. Learned excellence and expanded perspective not only improve a deployable NATO force and its knowledge to impart trainee forces (in AMISOM, for example), but create a force more capable in independent national tasking which may pull political pressure of combined NATO deployments.
Embracing the federal concept as an opportunity to develop independent capabilities to be released into the unfriendly wilds of wargaming will shift NATO’s primary focus from the large conventional deployments of the past to the variety and adaptive skills required for training developing security forces and supporting brush-fire conflicts. A fencer regularly drilled may have excellent muscle-memory, but the best combatants are the ones that constantly spar against multiple styles of opponents.
Empowering Independence
The ability to deploy independently with NATO advantages is the final stage of the new Flexible Response. It is in NATO’s interest to help instill the forehanded adaptability that negates the need for its activation. The theme continues from the learning advantage, which stays with a force whether or not it is under NATO mandate; it stays with every member nation in any conflict. Extending this advantage, NATO should look to create steady-state force multipliers that strengthen the operations of alliance members when deployed independent of the alliance mandate. Intelligence sharing is the last piece of the empowerment puzzle.
The NATO Special Forces Headquarters (NSHQ) leads the way in intelligence sharing; it suggests a future path for how NATO may empower individual nations to deploy with the fore-handedness necessary to achieve relative superiority over complicated problems. NSHQ has developed a special school for analysts and collectors as a way to boost the abilities of personnel provided by member states. It has also established its own in-house fusion and analysis capability for intelligence provided by member states. A particular success of this NATO intelligence effort is a biometric database collected in Afghanistan. NATO should push for further intelligence sharing, ingesting content from the independent global deployment of member states’ forces. The existent NATO Intelligence Fusion Center (NIFC) could evolve into an ONI-like institution imbued with the ease and accessibility of the US’s intellipedia, but for all member states’ forces. US forces deployed independently to Uganda could send intelligence to the NIFC where it would be fused and analyzed with information collected independently by the French in Mali; the results would be pertinent to both independent deployments and the NATO support element in AMISOM. Boosting intelligence sharing creates a virtuous circle of effective operations and further collections. Knowing is half the battle; with greater success to independent deployments through intelligence, the need to potentially deploy the larger NATO-branded contingent lessens, further diminishing possible political strain on an alliance not totally dedicated to some missions.
The New NATO: Already Here
Beyond the marbled halls of Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Mons, Belgium, beyond the PAO-friendly exercise photos of international hand-shaking, the NATO that could be emerges in Africa: the rough-and-ready forces forward deployed to proactively stomp out the threats that go bump in the night. NATO is already deployed to Somalia, conducting security assistance with AMISOM and patrolling the coasts to suppress piracy: preventing a cancer of instability ashore from growing on sustenance from the sea. Member states have deployed independently to the region: France intervening in Mali to prevent the opening of a new power vacuum for destabilizing factions and the US to Uganda for security assistance for stabilizing a vast region of pocketed control. Meanwhile, team NATO deployed en masse in Libya, combating mixed conventional and irregular threat that well represents the likely threats to global stability on the horizon. The new learning model that would support greater capability in these areas is seen in the lively competition between the Raptor and Typhoon communities as chest-thumping belies a real process of tactical and operational learning. Embracing the new Flexible Response starting at its lower rungs and built upon the foundations of robust and regular red-teaming of practice and platorms, NATO will brush off the dust to reveal a new, sharper model for rolling back, not just containing, global fear and instability.