At NATO Annual Conference Brussels 14 April 2005

NATO and military transformation: What can ACT contribute? Address by Admiral Edmund Giambastiani, Supreme Allied Commander Transformation Transforming NATO – A Political and Military Challenge Good morning all and thank you Sir Paul. Secretary General, Excellencies, Fellow Flag and General Officers, Ladies and gentlemen, good morning again. I'm honoured to be able to address, along with the Secretary General and General Jones, this body for the Secretary General's first annual transformation conference and I'm particularly pleased that he picked transformation of both the military and the political side as our topic. Let me also join the Secretary General in thanking the Royal United Services Institute for co-hosting this event. RUSI continues to play an important role in enabling thoughtful dialogue of the key challenges facing this Alliance. This is particularly true of the linked political and military transformation efforts that the Secretary General has just spoken about. I'm also pleased to report that we were fortunate, in my US hat and also in my NATO hat, to have co-hosted a recent Security Transition and Reconstruction conference in Norfolk, Virginia, the first ever that we have hosted along with RUSI, a great start and a great effort here within the last eight weeks. Now to build on the Secretary General's address this morning I want to stress three points. I'd like to first describe how the building blocks that NATO has invested in can enable the comprehensive transformation that the Secretary General has laid out. The second point is that I'd like to outline some of the challenges we see in creating the most effective Allied force for peace and stability in the world today and in the future. And then finally, the third point, is to discuss how Allied Command Transformation, or I'll call AC-T, can help enable not only the military transformation but the political transformation that the Secretary General has described. Now as many of you know, NATO has worked extraordinarily hard since the Prague Summit of 2002 to put in place the key military building blocks for the future. It has created a more streamlined command that the Secretary General talked about: Allied Command Operations, led by General Jones, where we've placed all of our operational forces under one individual's command. Obviously the creation of a military command dedicated to transformation, Allied Command Transformation. And the NATO Response Force that you continually hear about that both strategic commands can use to execute operations, in the case of General Jones, and to advance, change and innovation militarily within this Alliance through AC-T and Allied Command Operations. And finally, a robust experimentation plan and lessons learned process to investigate and exercise both the military and potentially the political aspects of this overall NATO transformation. Now at the grandest scale these ongoing changes reflect our Alliance's commitment to shift from the territorially-based, static defence posture of the Cold War where costs fall naturally where they lie to an expeditionary more agile posture where NATO meets the threats where they are and where our Heads of State designate. With these tools and with the collective support of the nations we are changing the conduct of truly joint operations--and I use the word 'joint' in a much larger sense to include not only militaries within a country but those within an Alliance; those who join with the Alliance, intergovernmental, non-governmental and international organisations; and changing the military mindset to embrace change and innovation on a routine basis. Now some examples of this to date, and I'll use some specificity here, include first of all the creation and the crafting of a what we'll call a Bi-Strategic Commander Strategic Vision, we call it, General Jones and I, the military challenge which was written at the direction of the NATO's Military Committee; that describes the way General Jones and I, and our staffs, expect future military operations would be conducted and therefore provides insights in implications for the transformation in a military sense of forces, concepts and capabilities. Establishing new NATO training centres like the Joint Warfare Centre in Stavanger, Norway; and also the Joint Force Training Centre in Bydgoszcz, Poland--which I had the pleasure of signing and finalizing the NATO Memorandum of Agreement between the Polish government and NATO yesterday--and also new National Centres of Excellence to partner in this work such as, yesterday, the finalization and, if you will, the formal acceptance of the Naval Mine Warfare Centre of Excellence offered by both Belgium and the Netherlands in addition to the Joint Air Power Competence Centre approved by the North Atlantic Council just last month. These are examples of bringing these Centres of Excellence into the Alliance. And finally, introducing new and robust training methods and curricula into the NATO Alliance and national academic institutions to address the change in culture- the change in culture and also the change in mindset that transformation requires. Innovative concepts and capabilities like an effects-based approach to joint operations in the NATO Network-Enabled Capability are the result of the collective insights and observations that many of you have provided in such seminars, exercises and experiments that I'll try to list here today; some of which the Secretary General has mentioned. First of all, if you think back to October of 2003, the Dynamic Response where NATO's political leaders and military leaders addressed the operational challenges faced by this newly conceived NATO Response Force and the types of capabilities that the NRF will need. Then in General Jones and I, in January of 2004, co-hosted in Norfolk Allied Reach 2004 where NATO's military leaders, over 90 percent of all flag and general officers and their immediate staffs within the Alliance, built on these defence ministers' insights at the operational level. We followed that on in February of this year in Norway with Allied Reach 2005 where we investigated different alternatives and considered new methods and tools to deploy, employ and sustain this NATO Response Force. I'll be very brief on what the result of this was, I know General Jones is going to be much more expansive on this. Crisis Management Exercise 2004, run here in Brussels at the NATO Headquarters, that investigated concepts and tools for decision superiority, intelligence sharing, interagency cooperation at the political and strategic level, followed this year once again where we've inserted some experimentation and concept development in a Crisis Management Exercise 2005 at the NATO Headquarters. A combination of what the Secretary General is talking about here of both the political and military sides of this transformation. Multinational Experiment 3, now this you can see there's a sequence of these. I sponsor them in my US hat, where NATO, for the first time partnered with the US Command on multi-level effects-based planning and how to do multinational information sharing in collaboration--a key to making alliances and alliance operations effective. In short, NATO has created the military building blocks to implement these methods and tools of tomorrow's force to more effectively meet the operational challenges of today. So what are the challenges and where do we need to go from here? What are the challenges and where do we need to go? It is vital to understand that in my view NATO's military credibility today and in the future is measured by three standards: deployability, usability and sustainability in a military sense. Former, now-deceased, US Navy Fleet Admiral Ernest King once famously said after being schooled a bit by General George Marshall, "I don't know what hell this logistics thing is that Marshall is always talking about, but I know I want more of it!" (Laughter) Admirals have advanced a bit since then I think. We know what deployability, sustainability and usability mean and we want more of it- and we want more of it. That is why the first challenge we face collectively is the mission of what I'll call the broader joint organize, train and equip. This is particularly true of the NATO Response Force. We need to turn national capabilities into coherently integrated NATO capabilities, we need to build coherently integrated forces that can operate as this larger joint whole where multinational, civilian, agency, international and even non-governmental organisations, can plug and play effectively as necessary for the mission at hand. Some of the other key challenges to succeed in the mission to joint organize, train and equip include: Making defence planning: Making defence planning more useful to individual Allies and of producing naval NATO capabilities, obviously, of deployability, usability and sustainability. Use of the NRF or using the NRF: If we do not use the NATO Response Force it will become a dead weight instead of a centrepiece of transformation or as the Secretary General said here this morning to catch dust on a shelf. Establishing common funding, capabilities and culture: Lack of funds-capabilities are impediments to the expeditionary force we have been directed to deliver. Eliminating as many national caveats as possible on funding, generated forces, rules of engagements and NATO staff officers, sounds like a military officer talking about how to make military operations as deployable, usable and effective and expeditionary as possible. And finally, adding discipline to the capabilities, development and delivery process: In other words, how to act on results of experimentation and insure security investments meet the needs of today and tomorrow, not just yesterday. We need to overcome these challenges in order to organize, train and equip a coherently joint force that is deployable anywhere our Heads of State dictate and they must be usable for the entire spectrum of military operations I think is, the Secretary General has suggested, not just for high-end combat missions but also peacekeeping, peace making and the whole range of security, transition and reconstruction missions again as dictated by our Heads of State. Part of our transformation mission is to integrate the organisations and capabilities of the nations into a coherent whole. As you can imagine this is not an easy job since we now have 26 nations to integrate plus we have many others who contribute to the Alliance, each with its own particular methods, culture, forces and capabilities. And of course the Alliance must have the political-military harmony of collective will and level of ambition to execute any of its expeditionary operations so that us in the military can in fact execute them as directed. This last point gets back to the Secretary General's central theme here: Military and political transformation are two sides of the same coin. It is clear that no one organisation can overcome these challenges by itself. The problem sets are too complicated and varied. Much of the work too, the political and military investments, must obviously come from the nations. But in this process Allied Command Transformation working in close partnership with Allied Command Operations and the nations can provide unique capabilities and expertise to help tackle these many challenges. Indeed, these are the very kinds of challenges that a dedicated learning organisation such as AC-T was helped to resolve, all the while assisting General Jones and Allied Command Transformation to meet the commitments of our ongoing military operations. As I mentioned earlier, AC-T wakes up every day thinking how to effect change, deliver innovation, and create a culture of adaptability. We can embed prototypes with operators, new courses with educators, new approaches in training and doctrine and new capabilities in defence planning. Through our experimentation program we can continue the effort to explore closer political-military cooperation along the full range of military operations. With your help we are making progress in the defence planning process and also in the defence requirements review to ensure we generate the right forces with the right capabilities to be deployed at the right time. And lastly, through the new concepts like Effects-Based Operations we can redefine an interdependent operational relationship between the military and civil organisations based on what we like to describe finely as supported and supporting relationships. Supporting does not mean subordinate or less important- Supporting does not mean subordinate or less important. It's a functional distinction that focuses effort on customers and mission. In my view, this is a key component of what we mean by the effects-based approach to operations. In short, AC-T is working to provide the framework through the NRF for the military capabilities needed by the Alliance and its nations. We have and will continue to conduct experiments, exercises and seminars with both military and political leaders to challenge the assumptions, weigh risks, develop alternative solutions to meeting the operational requirements of today and those in the future. We intend for the Joint Force to possess the capabilities that will enable it to be decisive across the full range of military operations as I said from peace support to major combat to post-conflict security transition and reconstruction missions. So long as the level of ambition for this Alliance is supported by the contributions and commitments of the nations, we believe the building blocks are in place to realize these goals and we look forward to working with you in the days and months ahead to resolve our common challenges. Thank you again for this opportunity for your attention.