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I am pleased to have this opportunity with Secretary Rumsfeld to brief you on this morning's study seminar, Dynamic Response 07.
At the meeting of Alliance Defence Ministers in June of this year, Secretary Rumsfeld kindly invited his colleagues to participate in a ground breaking event in conjunction with our informal meeting here in Colorado Springs.
The theme of the seminar was transformation and the vehicle for addressing it was NATO's new Response Force.
Defense Ministers and their senior military and civilian advisors were presented with a complex scenario, set in 2007, which drew out the implications of transformation and examined how the NATO Response Force might operate in a fictional crisis.
The scenario involved a NATO stabilisation operation in a fictitious partner country and a parallel and terrorist threat involving chemical and biological weapons. Not a likely eventuality but by no means an impossible one either.
As the scenario unfolded, Ministers discussed freely the implications, for them as decision makers, for their national armed forces and for NATO.
This was one of the best discussions we have had among Ministers in my four years as Secretary General. But because it was private, and designed to inform and provoke not to reach decisions or conclusions, I cannot go into details about what Ministers said.
But I can say that the seminar reached the following common understanding of what needs to be done:
First, future crises will require:
- prompt decision making in capitals;
- advance planning in NATO; and
- rules of engagement to deal with the unexpected.
Second, crises which start small can finish big, and crises can happen concurrently. NATO therefore needs to be more flexible.
Third, better intelligence gathering analysis and sharing is needed at all stages of a crisis.
Fourth, NATO needs good practical working relations with the UN, the EU and countries in a crisis region. And we need to be able to explain what we are doing and why to our publics.
And finally, NATO countries must complete the Prague transformation agenda, and make their armed forces much more genuinely usable for deployed operations.
In my view, the study seminar was a great success. It generated a range of insights into the continuing process of NATO's transformation. I hope that other imaginative events can be organised for future Ministerial meetings.
Let me turn now to Secretary Rumsfeld for his impressions.
[ Statement by US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld ]
Before I take your questions, I will briefly sketch the course of the regular meetings that will take place later today and tomorrow. Allied and Invitee Ministers will meet this afternoon to discuss the Alliance's overall transformation efforts.
There will be a Ministers-only dinner this evening which will be an opportunity to continue our discussions in a more intimate setting.
I expect a key theme to be how we can increase the deployability and usability of NATO's forces. This is a major challenge. Out of 1.4m soldiers under arms, the 18 non-US Allies have around 55,000 deployed on multinational operations in the Balkans, Afghanistan and elsewhere, yet they feel overstretched. If operations such as ISAF in Afghanistan are to succeed, we must generate more usable soldiers and have the political will to deploy more of them on multinational operations. The blunt message from Colorado is this: we need real deployable soldiers not paper armies.
Following on from the issue of usability, we will tomorrow take up NATO's current operations, especially in Afghanistan and the Balkans. At 12:00, I will hold a concluding press conference.
Thereafter, NATO and Invitee Ministers will be joined for a working lunch by the Russian Defence Minister, Sergey Ivanov, after which the NATO Ministers will hold an informal meeting with him. Issues will include current operations and defence reform.