NATO members and defence industries must step up commitments to meet the military’s needs to prepare for all eventualities because we are “in an era in which anything can happen at any time”, the alliance’s military committee chief, Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, said on Wednesday (17 January).
“To be fully effective also in the future, we need a warfighting transformation of NATO,” Bauer said while opening the meeting of the 31 NATO members’ chiefs of defence, adding that “public-private cooperation will be the key” to do so.
The Western military alliance’s members adopted new defence and deterrence plans at a leaders summit in Vilnius last July, including 300,000 troops defending NATO’s territory, and now governments need to recruit personnel, invest in additional capabilities, and adapt the command and control structures.
Bauer called those plans “the most comprehensive defence plans NATO has had since the end of the Cold War”.
Failure to spend more on defence may threaten NATO’s ability to defend and deter aggression, Bauer has warned before.
As the war in Ukraine comes near the two-year mark, almost all NATO members have increased their defence spending and pledged at the Vilnius summit to spend 2% of GDP on defence,
Governments have also promised to pass contracts with the industry to sustain military donations to Kyiv and replenish their depleted stockpiles, but companies have said they still lack orders to boost and ramp up production capacities.
Four countries used NATO’s Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA) to jointly procure US-made Patriot missiles, but the new defence and deterrence plans are looking long-term and beyond the war in neighbouring Ukraine.
“Together, we have to make sure that political will is matched with military capabilities,” Bauer said, chairing the meeting of all chiefs of defence from 31 NATO members.
“Militarily, there are many more steps to be taken to get where we want to be for our collective defence,” he said.
Governments are “now actively working to maximise the executability of these new defence plans”, Bauer said.
Different streams of work should be in focus, he added, including putting “more troops on higher readiness”, capability building and development, adaptation of NATO’s command and control structures, creating and sustaining more enablement in logistics, host nation support, maintenance, military mobility, and replenishment and prepositioning of stocks.
Exercices will also be scheduled to try the brand new plans, he added.
Public and private actors’ help
Bauer pointed out that the existence and the current abilities of the military alone cannot sustain the efforts of defending and deterring, and sent a wake-up call to the governments and companies to work for it as well.
“The responsibility for freedom does not lie on the shoulders of those in uniform alone.”
“We need public and private actors to change their mindset from an era in which everything was plannable, foreseeable, controllable, focused on efficiency…. to an era in which anything can happen at any time; an era in which we need to expect the unexpected; an era in which we need to focus on effectiveness.”
The military alliance is trying to incentivise the industry to increase production, notably based on its Action plan, which shows future equipment needs long-term.
The chief of NATO’s military bosses called for a “whole-of-society approach” to “strengthen” the collective defence and at the same time support Ukraine with defence equipment.
Since Russia attacked Ukraine 593 days ago, NATO “has entered a new era of collective defence, and together we are defending much more than the physical safety of our one billion people and 31, soon to be 32, nations”, Bauer said.
“We are defending freedom and democracy.”
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]
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