NATO Ministers discuss reform
During their working dinner on 10 June, NATO Defence Ministers discussed reform and resources. As the financial crisis has put enormous pressure on defence budgets in all NATO countries, and to ensure that the money is spent on what really matters, on what is really needed now and in the future, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen presented options to the Defence Ministers for making NATO’s structures – NATO HQ, the Command Structure and NATO Agencies – leaner, more effective and less costly.
The Secretary General highlighted a number of recent reform measures already decided:
- “We have just completed a review of our military budgets, which will lead to savings and deferrals amounting to 1.5 billion Euros.
- We have agreed a range of measures to set clear spending priorities, improve auditing, and make sure we have clear visibility of the costs of everything we do.
- And we will cut the number of committees in this building by three quarters, to less than one hundred. So we will all spend less time in meetings, which I consider a significant contribution to efficiency”.
Ministers tasked work to develop generic proposals on a streamlined Command Structure, as well as Agency Reform, which will be presented to Defence Ministers in October 2010, with an eye to the Lisbon Summit in November 2010.