Interview

with NATO's Assistant Secretary General
for Defence Investment, Peter Flory

Q: We are here today with Peter Flory, the NATO Assistant Secretary General for Defence Investment. Welcome. Thank you for taking the time to come and speak to us, especially here on Thanksgiving.

PETER FLORY (NATO Assistant Secretary General for Defence Investment): It's a pleasure, and I'll get home after for dinner.

Q: After only a few months in the job as Assistant Secretary General for Defence Investment what would you say have been your biggest challenges so far?

FLORY: The biggest challenges in this job have to do with managing and delivering complex, large, multinational defence cooperation projects. So one of the challenges is delivering the ones that we have, several of which I inherited when I came here. One of those is AGS (Alliance Ground Surveillance). One of them has been the strategic airlift capability, on which we made a lot of progress last summer.

Part of the challenge is also trying to find new ways to deliver capabilities that are maybe less complex and in particular faster at delivering the capabilities we need at a time when the Alliance is at war, and when delivering capabilities is urgently required, so that we can get them in the hands of the men and women who are carrying out missions on our behalf.

Q: About a month ago NATO held a conference known as CNAD, which is the Conference of National Armament Directors. Do you care to elaborate on what was discussed at this conference?

FLORY: Well, it is a day and a half long conference, so it covers a lot of ground. Some of the highlights I mentioned earlier, the AGS, Alliance Ground Surveillance program meeting, held the day before the CNAD meeting, the NATO Defence Ministers in Noordwijk directed us to field this capability as soon as possible, to proceed to get ourselves on contract by the middle of 2008, so that we would be able to meet an initial operational capability target of 2012. We worked hard on that. We do not have a final agreement on the way ahead yet, but we expect to have that shortly. That was one of the most urgent tasks we had before us.

We also talked about a number of other issues. We talked about how to improve cooperation with partner nations in developing capability. We have a number of partner nations that have a lot of expertise, technology, energy and resources and are anxious to make a contribution; many of the same nations that are deployed in the field with us in Afghanistan and Kosovo. To that end we decided to open up the Defence Against Terrorism Program of Work at the partner nations on a case-by-case basis. Until now only two of our areas have been opened, soon all of them will be.

We also added a new area of work, one I think that is particularly important in light of the press coverage recently of the tragic issue of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. It is an area that's going to look at capabilities, non-lethal capabilities, that allow troops to carry out their mission at a lower level of force and lethality, and that is something we hope to bring on-stream quickly and see results from shortly.

We also talked about, going back to my earlier comment, on the new ways to deliver capability. We have a program with the compelling acronym MAJIIC (Multi-sensor Aerospace-Ground Joint Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Interoperability Coalition) which is a way for nations to share ISR information (intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance information). It is a joint ISR project, something that was put together by nine nations working together. We want to take that, operationalize it, and get it on the ground in Afghanistan within a year.

We also talked about transatlantic defence, industrial cooperation, which is an important issue for the CNAD group (the national armaments directors). I think if we can do better there we can do a better job both of delivering capability efficiently at the best price, and we can also do so in a way that actually strengthens political support for capability development within nations.

Q: Interesting. Over the past few months missile defence, as always, has been widely discussed in the media. Could you tell us what has been NATO's role in developing responses to the growing missile defence threat?

FLORY: NATO's been involved in missile defence since the mid-1990s, I would say, dating back to after the Iraq's use of missiles during the first Gulf War. We have several programs, several areas of work there. The ALTBMD project, that's Active Layered Theatre Ballistic Missile Defence project, was approved by the Alliance in 2005. It is the development of a NATO capability that would protect deployed NATO forces against missiles with ranges up to 3,000 kilometres. It is on track now to deliver an initial capability in 2010-2011 timeframe and a more advanced capability against longer-range missiles, missiles at the longer end of the zero to 3,000 kilometre range by 2015, or 2016.

We also have work on territorial missile defence. This is an area where the Alliance has not yet made a decision to proceed, but a great deal of analytical work is under way. The CNAD conducted a study called the Missile Defence Feasibility Study, which was approved in 2006. It found that missile defence was technically feasible for the Alliance. Since then, of course, we have had the announcement of the U.S. discussions with the Czech Republic in Poland on the possible U.S. third missile defence site in Europe. So we were tasked by the Defence Ministers in June to go back, look at the Missile Defence Feasibility Study, update the analysis there to take into account the contribution that would be posed by a U.S. missile site in Europe, of one were deployed, and to come back and report on that and a number of other issues to the Defence Ministers' meeting in Vilnius in February. And with an eye towards supporting informed discussion and debate and possible decisions there at Vilnius and then at the NATO Summit in Bucharest in April.

Q: Okay. In your area of responsibility, you already talked about this a little bit, but what are the main activities for the Alliance in the fight against terrorism?

FLORY: We're actually at the broadest level supporting ongoing operations through capability development, which is something we do everyday and that supports a wide range of Alliance activity. Some of the more specific projects, we do have our Defence Against Terrorism Project of Work, which looks at a wide range of threats and tries to develop solutions, technical solutions, but also doctrine, information sharing, best practices, anyway we can improve the capability of the Alliance to respond to things like improvised explosive devices, the threat of explosive ordinance attacks, potentially attacks on harbours, attacks on large aircraft, mortar attacks, all these things that are threats that the Alliance encounters every day. Also looking at some longer-term threats, infrastructure protection and other matters.

We are also working in another committee, the NATO C3 Board, on a couple of important items of Alliance defence, one of which is cyber defence, which is an area that has achieved a great deal of publicity recently in the wake of the attacks against Estonia.

This is a form of attack that nation states can carry about, but it is also something that one person, one terrorist, or one person with a computer can do, and can cause all kinds of troubles to NATO systems, to national systems, to commercial systems, to important economic and financial systems.

So this is an area where we are also working. This is, again, not in the CNAD, this is in the NC3 Board, but it is one of the things we are doing.

I would say, if you asked me to pick a priority issue in counterterrorism work I would say it's our Counter-IED Working Group that we have under the Defence Against Terrorism Program. This is an effort that is led by Spain. We have twice annual counter-IED briefing days where we bring together, co-chaired by me and Allied Command Operations and Allied Command Transformation, experts from the field, technical experts, soldiers who have been there, intelligence experts, to try to come up with solutions.

We have some of the initiatives we have ongoing right now is putting together a counter IED database, trying to improve the deconfliction between various counter-IED jammers that are used in theatre. We have a Counter-IED Integrated Project Team. We have got a lot of different things going on, but IEDs are the threat that are killing Alliance soldiers every day. Sadly they are, also, because of the way that our opponents use them, they are also causing the deaths of innocent civilians—men, women and children in Afghanistan. So if I had to pick a particular urgent priority that would be the one.

Q: When you say IEDs, for the people who do not know the NATO acronyms, it means the Improvised Explosive Devices?

FLORY: I'm sorry, I thought I spelled that out. It's a "déformation professionnelle" here at NATO to talk in acronyms, but no, that is exactly right. Improvised Explosive Devices, or what we used to call bombs.

Q: Bombs. Okay. We are less than two months away from 2008. What will be your main priorities for the New Year? You already mentioned Vilnius and Bucharest, IED, do you have room for anything else?

FLORY: Vilnius and Bucharest will be focusing our work. We have been tasked to have results in the area of missile defence, pulling together the various strands of analysis, some of which I mentioned to you before, but also the policy analysis that other groups of NATO, the EWG, are doing, for example, work the Military Committee is doing. EWG, being the Executive Working Group, to support discussions at Vilnius, at Bucharest. We have been directed to have a cyber defence policy for NATO. This is another area where the Executive Working Group has the need, but the C3 Board, which has prepared a lot of the analysis of the Estonia situation and on ways in which we can improve NATO's capabilities is playing a key role in that.

In general, looking out over the sort of the course of the year past Bucharest, we'll still be working on AGS. That is something we hope to have resolved and, as I said, earlier, a contract signed by the middle of next year, on ongoing progress. I hope to see the final Memorandum of Understanding signed by the Strategic Airlift Nations early next year. We have got a lot going on. And in the meantime, as I mentioned earlier, the challenge of finding better ways, more efficient ways of delivering complex, multinational defence cooperation programs, but doing so more quickly to meet the real world demands of our operators, our commanders and our soldiers in the field in the modern world.

Q: Thank you very much for coming.

FLORY: Thank you very much.