At NATO Annual Conference Brussels 14 April 2005

National case studies in military transformation Remarks by General Diesen, Chief of Defence, Norway Transforming NATO – A Political and Military Challenge Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. And thank you for the opportunity to address you this afternoon on this subject. I realize, of course, that the invitation was originally extended to my predecessor, and that it may seem a bit forward perhaps to do this a mere fortnight into the job, but having worked in this area on and off over the past six, seven years, I thought I might as well jump off the deep end. I thought I would present the problem of transforming the Norwegian military in this diagram. And the starting point of Norwegian transformation was, of course, like in most countries: the old type of defence force, i.e. long on volume and short on quality; i.e. how to provide the biggest possible force given the minimum quality requirement in a fight for national survival; i.e. tens and thousands of semi-trained reservists and lots and lots of, shall we say, semi-functional equipment, requisitioned from civilian society and so on and so forth. Now, looking at this, with a defence review which started seven years ago we had to consider two economic factors. First, the fact that the American taxpayer, as you know, entirely justified in my opinion, was no longer prepared to pick up the bill for modern defence forces. And second, the fact that the cost of military hardware effectively doubles in real terms every 15 to 20 years. So applying the same logic to a new defence force, it would effectively mean that you would end up with something which is too small to make a difference in an invasion scenario, in addition to the fact that an invasion scenario was not really likely in the first place. So the slightly paler yellow rectangle here is actually the graphic representation of a useless solution to any relevant problem. (LAUGHTER) Assuming, however, that the same amount of money can actually buy an infinite number of quality, quantity combinations, we tried to impose a sort of iso-resource curve on this diagram, because like we heard from the Danish Defence Minister this morning, we don't see that we will get more money coming our way over the next few years. So another and more rational approach would be to scale down the volume requirement even further, to something which is sufficient to deal with remaining national challenges, while decking the quality to the requirement level for an expeditionary, high-intensity, warfare, defence force. So Norwegian transformation, as we speak... sorry... going back. Norwegian transformation, as we speak, consists actually of shifting the force along this curve from the pale yellow to the bright red, kicking and screaming. And what it is, in practical terms, is trying to convert the training base, the training organization, which used to produce this mobilization force, the sausage factory, if you like, to convert that to a modern standing expeditionary force. And in the simplest of terms that means not training conscripts for the sake of training conscripts, but using conscription in much the same way as our Danish colleagues told us this morning; i.e. to use conscripts where they are still useful, and also to use conscription as an instrument of getting in touch with the broader segment of the youth, thereby hoping to recruit on average, a better quality of soldier. Now, so much for the first phase of transformation and now to consider the second. Now the long-term problem, of course, is something with which you're very familiar, and I apologize for the Norwegian currency on the vertical scale, but if you want to convert that to euros you have approximately eight kroner to the euro. And the problem is, of course, that operating and maintenance costs will increase... I mean, the price of goods and services, will rise over and above the rate of inflation--that's something like two percent every year--which leaves, of course, a diminishing part of the budget for investment and digging into that from the opposite side is the deplorable fact that, as I said, the cost in real terms, because of the technology factor, of military hardware doubles on average every 15 to 20 years. So what we have here is a diminishing purchasing power for a diminishing part of an inflation adjusted budget, but a budget which is not rising in real terms. There's no real term growth in the budget. And it doesn't take the brain of a rocket scientist to see where this is going. Small- and medium-size countries, in our opinion, will not be able in the future to sustain balanced defence forces on a purely national basis, and so it comes down to the problem to which, again, our Danish neighbours presented their solution this morning; i.e. doing away with entire capabilities and in that way getting a defence structure which doesn't contain the entire spectrum of capabilities which you would normally expect to find in a modern conventional defence force with its own national logistic support base. We think that the preferable way of doing this would be to do it the other way around; to retain as many capabilities as possible, but to have some sort of transnational sharing of the logistic and support burden to maintain and sustain these capabilities. Although we totally realize that this is a rather more difficult approach in political terms, since it requires a broader understanding and agreement across a greater part of the Alliance, or between a number of Alliance members, that this is what we will do. We will get together, but it was brought home to me just a few days ago, when I was visiting the main logistic and maintenance facility of the Norwegian air force, and they were taking four or five F-16s totally apart, 16 miles of wiring lying around, and hosts of very clever people, engineers, technicians, doing this, and this is something which they'd... I mean, converting an F-16 to the next generation variety is eight months, working two shifts every day, and you can just imagine the sort of logistic organization going into that. And the question is, can we actually support and maintain that if we are looking after something like 45 planes? In the future, obviously not. On the other hand, if we do believe, as we do, that fighter aircraft is absolutely indispensable in any defence force, something will have to be done in the order of creating some kind of transnational or international support system allowing as many countries as possible to retain as many capabilities as possible. So that, ladies and gentlemen, and if not, and if we fail in this, given the almost sub-critical nature of many of our capabilities, I'm sad to say that, as I say, if we fail in this strategy, roughly a third of the 24 or 25 main capabilities in the Norwegian defence inventory will disappear over the next five to ten years.