NATO this month

JAMIE SHEA (NATO Spokesman): Ladies and gentlemen, hello from NATO Headquarters here in Brussels, Belgium.

First, let me introduce myself. My name is Jamie Shea and I am the NATO Spokesman. I am very pleased to be here with you today at what is going to be the first of a series of briefings whichI'll be giving each month on current issues within the NATO Alliance. And I would like to use the time to give you an update on what's going on in the Alliance, what we've just done, what we hope to do in the future as NATO continues its process of transformation to be better able to deal with the new security threats within Europe, but increasingly also beyond Europe.

Now, what I'd like to address today in this first briefing is the NATO Defence Ministers Meeting in Colorado Springs, the United States. This meeting took place last week, so we're just back and I think everybody here in the Alliance agrees that it was one of the more substantial ministerial meetings that we've had in recent times. It was an informal meeting. That means of course that it didn't take any decisions as such, but it did give ministers a very good opportunity to have a relaxed but wide-ranging, an intense exchange of views on the state of the Alliance and the priorities for the immediate weeks ahead.

This time around, there was a novelty which was that the Alliance organised a crisis management seminar for the defence ministers known as Dynamic Response 2007. And this took up the morning of the first day of the meeting. It was based on a fictitious scenario which allowed ministers to test how quickly they would be able to deploy the NATO Response Force to deal with an emerging crisis on the island of Corona, a fictitious island in the Red Sea.

Now, the NATO Response Force is one of the most important developments in NATO at the present time. This is a new concept of a Rapid Reaction Force of 20,000 soldiers with air and naval support assets which within five days minimum, 20 days maximum, can be deployed almost anywhere to deal with a crisis. And this is very fast by the standards of military deployments and NATO needs such a force if it really is able to respond to a developing crisis.

And now, we chose the exercise scenario in 2007 because at the end of 2006, the NATO Response Force should be fully operational and thereby ready for use.
Now, I won't go into all of the details of the exercise, but I would just like to state that what it showed is that one crisis can quickly lead to another crisis. In this case, what became, at the beginning, an emergency rescue evacuation turned into a full-scale terrorist threat with the danger that ballistic missiles could be fired from ships in the Mediterranean against Alliance territory. And therefore, ministers had to confront decision-making real time. And one of the lessons of this exercise is that, as we develop faster response forces, we also have to see how we can have faster decision-making in the Alliance so that the NATO Response Force can, in fact, be deployed within five days to 20 days.

I want to emphasise that nobody here is talking about changing constitutional procedures, which of course we must respect, but simply to see how it may be possible for nations to speed up decision-making in a way which suits NATO's key aim of timely crisis management.

So I think that the seminar was a useful learning exercise for everybody that participated. At the same time in Colorado Springs, the Secretary General of NATO, Lord George Robertson, who as you know is in the final months now of his term in office, launched a new initiative which is very close to his heart and that is called usability, which means very simply, how is it that we have, for example, in Europe over two million soldiers in our armed forces, but when it comes to operations like the Balkans, Bosnia, Kosovo, or more recently Afghanistan, we have a great deal of trouble finding more than 55,000 to be deployed, for at the moment, the figure of 55,000 is the number that NATO countries actually have deployed on NATO missions.

So in other words, how is it that we have so many soldiers but so few of them can actually be mobilised, equipped, trained and used in the kind of time frame that we need for modern crisis management? The Secretary General is very worried about this because, of course as you know, the number of missions that NATO is taking on is not decreasing but increasing.

We started with Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999, Afghanistan in August 2003. We're giving support at the moment to the Polish and the Spanish division which is deployed in Iraq, although that, of course, is not a NATO operation. And so, if this is to be the pattern of the future, we need to have a much higher percentage of our forces that are actually usable and rather than exist merely on paper.

And this is going to require on behalf of our governments, a lot of actions in the next few years. Looking for example... making more of the forces Rapid Reaction Forces, looking to lift any kind of legal restrictions on being able to send these forces on peacekeeping or peace support operations beyond national territory, looking of course at what we call enablers, those critical transport facilities, in-flight refuelling, logistics, communications, which are ever more important the further away that you go from national territory. So, I think this is a theme that you're going to hear me coming back to in subsequent briefings.

I think at the same time though, there was some degree of satisfaction in Colorado that the transformation of NATO, which we agreed at the Prague Summit in November last year, is in fact happening, despite all of the problems of defence budgets and, of course, trying to transform militaries that were designed initially for static defence during the Cold War to Rapid Reaction operations at great distances.

For example, ministers were able to see that the new NATO Command Structure is now in place. The SHAPE commander at Mons in Belgium has now become the Allied Command Operations in charge of all of NATO's operations. And the old SACLANT, which was NATO's Atlantic Command in Norfolk, Virginia, has now become the Allied Command Transformation which is going to be looking not at operations, but at how NATO can retain state-of-the-art technologies and how within the Alliance we can share the best practice of military doctrine and share experiences of operations.

Indeed, it was the Allied Command Transformation that organised the Dynamic Response seminar for defence ministers that I referred to at the beginning.
And the NATO Command Structure has been slimmed down considerably so that we now have only a minimum number of headquarters but those headquarters are much faster reacting, much more mobile than what we had before.

The other area where ministers I think were satisfied that things are moving was in the Prague Capabilities Commitment. Some of you may recall that this was an initiative launched in Prague to focus NATO's defence planning on the kind of assets that we need for modern operations. For example, precision-guided munitions, strategic transport, in-flight refuelling, better support for units which are deploying beyond NATO and which have to be rotated sometimes for many years to sustain the operation.

Indeed in Colorado, another country, Spain signed a letter of intent together with 11 previous NATO countries to develop jointly an interim solution for long-range transport aircraft. Because, of course, it's no good having well-equipped, well-trained soldiers if it takes weeks or months to transport them to a scene of a crisis.
At the same time in Colorado, we took a look at NATO's current operations and what progress we're making. The key issue here was Afghanistan. I said a few moments ago that in mid-August, NATO took a giant step, indeed a crossing of the Rubicon beyond Europe in taking over the ISAF, International Security Assistance Force operation in Kabul, Afghanistan. We have about 5,300 troops there currently under a German commander.

But there's been a lot of talk in the United Nations and in the international community more widely that, although it's very good to have stability in Kabul and to be able to support the provisional government of President Karzai, Afghanistan is a vast country and there's not much sense in having a secure capital if the rest of the country of course is prone to warlords, is unstable, is too dangerous for the government to exert its authority or for the international relief agencies to be able to go out and about do their work. So one of the key issues in Colorado, and an issue which has been on the NATO agenda in recent weeks, is can NATO play a role in the expansion of the ISAF mission beyond Kabul? And in particular, by giving support to these provincial reconstruction teams -- PRTs is the acronym -- which are being set up in many key cities outside Kabul to assist the government in issues like relief, aid, infrastructure repair, and the demobilisation of the militia groups, essential of course for security.
Indeed, Allied Germany has decided already in principle to establish one of these provincial reconstruction teams in the city of Konduz in the north.

So, we've been doing a lot of work in the Alliance over the last few weeks on military options which will enable us to play a greater role in Afghanistan and to have a presence beyond Kabul.

The good news today as I speak to you is that yesterday in New York, the UN Security Council issued a new resolution which gives NATO now the legal mandate to extend the mission. And therefore, I would imagine in the next few days, NATO ambassadors will be looking at revised military planning and will take a decision as to how NATO can play a role beyond Kabul, as I say, particularly in supporting these provincial reconstruction teams.

The decision is not automatic. It's a very challenging job and we have to make sure that whatever task we take on is supported, as you would expect from an organisation like NATO, with the troops and the real hard-core capabilities to do that in a credible way. But at least, we have agreed in principle that the mission should be expanded. Now, we just have to look at the realistic ways of being able to do that.
So, that would be another significant milestone in NATO's presence outside Europe and as a key organisation in helping to manage some of the main security challenges that we face today.

I'd like to mention before concluding just a few other issues on the agenda. One is the Balkans. Although so much of the media attention is now on Afghanistan, I wouldn't like any of you to believe that NATO is losing interest in the Balkans where we first deployed peace support operations. Indeed in Colorado, I think there was a general sense among ministers that Bosnia is a place where we are now making good, good progress. And as a result, next year in 2004, we could probably look towards a significant reduction in NATO military presence there and a gradual emphasis more on civilian reconstruction supported by police forces. And therefore, the day when we can look to the end of the SFOR mission, the mission which NATO has had in Bosnia since 1995, is coming closer, which shows that with perseverance and tenacity, it is possible really to turn the corner and make a success of these missions. And I think that also would create a climate for Afghanistan, even though there we are at the beginning rather than at the end of course.

The other aspect here is that the European Union has shown an interest in taking over the mission from NATO as it did recently in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and that would be good, of course, in terms of promoting the growing role of the EU in security and defence, and having more responsibility carried by the European allies of the Alliance. So I think that is also a theme that will be on our agenda over the next couple of weeks.

In Kosovo, obviously, things are not so well advanced. The Secretary General, Lord George Robertson, indeed is today, this morning, in Vienna, where he is present at the opening of the Proximity Talks between Belgrade and Pristina. These talks are not on the final political status of Kosovo. It's too early for the international community to address this issue. But they are extremely important because they're going to be dealing with issues which will greatly improve, not only, we hope, relations between Belgrade and Pristina but the daily lives of Kosovars, things like communications, transport links and return of refugees. So we very much hope that Belgrade and Pristina will engage seriously in those talks which are fundamental to improving the political situation and creating a climate in which ultimately the final status of Kosovo could eventually be addressed.

As we head towards the head of the year in another round of ministerials in December, the agenda is going to be very heavy indeed. We have another NATO summit already planned for next spring in Istanbul. We know already that one of the key elements of this summit will be saying "welcome" to seven new members of NATO that were invited in Prague to join the Alliance. The process of ratifying their adhesion to the Washington Treaty is going very well in NATO parliaments.

But all of us would like Istanbul to be about more than enlargement, no matter how crucial that is. It also has to be about the ongoing transformation of the Alliance, what the next stages are, and I think you'll be seeing a lot of thinking now going on in NATO and national capitals as to what precisely we can have in terms of new initiatives for the next summit in Istanbul.

Relations with Russia are also ongoing but we had a very good meeting in Colorado Springs with the Russian Defence Minister, Sergei Ivanov. We're hoping within the next few weeks to conclude an agreement with Russia which would allow Russia to open a military liaison mission at NATO headquarters, which would help us to increase the scope of our military interchanges deal with issues like defence reform, combating terrorism together, exchanging intelligence information on new security challenges. Search and rescue at sea are very important of course for both NATO and Russia. And so, look out of course for that issue. And at the same time, we're hoping to step up our cooperation with Russia in the field of peacekeeping, particularly having Russian forces interoperable with NATO forces so that we can do peacekeeping together even more effectively in the future.

As we look to the end of the year, we also look to the end of the term of Lord Robertson, as I said earlier. We know already that he is going to be succeeded by Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the current foreign minister of the Netherlands, a man with a vast experience in European and transatlantic affairs. So we're looking forward of course to that succession taking place at the end of the year.

In the meantime, Lord Robertson is continuing a series of visits to both NATO and partner capitals to carry on his work to move NATO's agenda forward. He was in Switzerland yesterday. He will be in Ukraine on Monday. He will be going to Russia too in the next few days. So, he is very active and of course the more active he is, the more active we are.

So, I hope that in a month's time when I come back, I'll have plenty of new things to tell you about the continuing progress of the Alliance. But that is it for today and thank you very much indeed for your attention.