Cape Verde 22 June 2006

Speech by NATO Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer at the Media Day of NRF Exercise Steadfast Jaguar 2006 External link Website of Exercise "Steadfast Jaguar 2006" Multimedia 22 Jun. 2006 - NATO Audio file of the speech by NATO Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer .MP3/1870Kb News 23 Jun. 06 - NATO Top officials witness Response Force demonstration Ladies and gentlemen good afternoon. I hope you can all hear me. It's a pleasure to be here for General Jones SACEUR and myself and of course in the presence of General Back, the leader of this exercise. Let me start by saying here that of course first of all we thank the authorities of Cabo Verde, of Cape Verde, for making this possible and I think from the information I've got up until now, that is going very well, has gone very well, is going very well. And that is important, because if you look around you see that the NATO Response Force is being severely tested here and that is of course the object of the exercise and that can happen thanks to the cooperation of the authorities and I'm on behalf of NATO very grateful for that. My second remark would be that what you've seen and what the NATO Ambassadors and myself are going to see tomorrow, is the test of the NATO Response Force which is the most important tool to show in what way and how NATO has transformed and is transforming. It's changing, it's adapting, it's evolving. You can use the words you would like to use for that. You see here the new NATO, a NATO which has the possibility to be expeditionary, to project stability, to transport its forces as we have done over the past weeks over a what we call strategic distance and to see them operating and acting efficiently and effectively. And you know that the NATO Response Force has many missions. It is supposed to operate over a wide spectre. You have seen one of the examples and you know that this idea of the NATO Response Force, which dates back to Secretary of Defence Rumsfield and the Summit in Prague , has now reached the stage of which we can say that we are going to declare soon the NATO Response Force fully operational. General Jones will, without any doubt, give you more details about this. My point is that if you look at NATO today, an Alliance which is facing a completely new threat and challenge environment, a NATO as I said which is adapting, a NATO which is not the global policeman, but a NATO you see operate with out traditional partners, but also with new partners. And that will also be an important subject at the Riga Summit - a NATO which is expeditionary, which is well-funded, which has the possibility to project stability - and a NATO doing that with partners. An important element of the Riga Summit. You see that here in practice that was of course designed behind desks, you see that here in practice and from the information I have from General Back, it is going and it has gone very well up until this moment and I'm quite sure that it will again go very well tomorrow. And that we do the lessons learned from such an exercise because of course we have serious lessons learned afterwards, we'll see it was a good decision to have the NRF exercising here, it was a good decision to go to Cabo Verde. We were grateful to the authorities and we have seen NATO in action, a proactive NATO, a NATO which is able to project stability through one of its most important elements and one of its most important possibilities to project its stability. That's not to say that there's only the NRF. There's of course the tour par excellence to say it in French. After all, NATO is bilingual active. I leave it here. I'm open to your questions.