Opening remarks by Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, General Denis Mercier

at the joint press conference with the Chairman of the Military Committee, General Petr Pavel and Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Curtis M. Scaparrotti

  • 18 Jan. 2017 -
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  • Mis à jour le: 23 Jan. 2017 15:40

Thank you very much, Petr and Mike. You know that my role here is, as a commander of the transformation of NATO is to look at how, in coordination with the Military Committee and especially with the Chairman and SACEUR, how we can continue to improve today. But the role of my headquarters is as well to try to continuously anticipate and look at new ideas and try to shape tomorrow and then to define how we can bridge the two. 

In this meeting, we dealt with many issues related to the improvement of the NATO’s posture following the decisions made at the Warsaw Summit, and these decisions that are related to defence and deterrence and that are related to projecting stability. The question is, for us, and from our headquarters is, we continue to improve this, and how we can anticipate some breakthroughs and to try to put that on the table. When we have the CHODs in the Military Committee format, the question is, to see if these ideas meets their expectations and it’s a good way to test these ideas and see if they support them. If they do it, the next step will be how we implement those ideas all together and how we make them approved. This is exactly what we did and as the Chairman highlighted that we discussed partnership.  We are we improving what we do today, through the implementation of two pilot projects. Through Individually Tailored Road maps with specific partners, but the idea was “is it sufficient?” How we can expand that in the future? So we discussed that with the CHODs and then the question will be how we bridge the two. This is my role here in NATO and this is why it is complimentary to work all together.