А если серьезно.
Какие задачи должны решать сейчас европейские армии ?
Date Posted: 01-Oct-2002
Jane's Terrorism Watch Report - Daily Update
Date of Event 24-Sep-2002
NATO must adapt to counter terrorism role, US says
NATO must adapt to the need to fight terrorism and rogue states or accept that it has become irrelevant, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday. According to a report in The Guardian, Rumsfeld stressed that the US remained committed to NATO but said its armed forces needed to reorganise from a Cold-War order into a more fast-acting, mobile force better suited to counter-terrorism. The US wants to see NATO create rotating brigades of 5,000 soldiers drawn from its own forces and European partners, armed with hi-tech weapons and equipment to protect them from chemical and biological attacks.
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Date Posted: December 18, 2001
FOREIGN REPORT - DECEMBER 20, 2001
Nato's changes in 2002
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There will be serious differences between the European members of the alliance and the United States over the military budgets and contributions to the Alliance. Nato agreed in 1999 on a so-called Defence Capabilities Initiative, which was designed to spur member states into investing much more in their defences. Little has been done, although the Europeans are now claiming to make precisely the same effort inside the European Union. The Americans will point out that everything the Europeans are doing inside their Union on defence matters can be accomplished by Nato.
The dispute will be papered over, but the long-term trends for Nato are not encouraging. The Americans increasingly view Nato as a political, rather than a purely military alliance. They see the advantage of keeping Nato going, but have no intention of using the integrated Nato military command structure for any future operations they are proposing to mount, if only because they are not interested in haggling with every small Nato member state. The result is that Nato will continue to exist, and lip service would continue to paid to its historic achievements. But any institution which lives more on its past than its future is sure to atrophy. This appears to be Nato's long-term predicament, despite the fact that 2002 should be a good year for the Alliance.
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Date Posted: June 20, 2002
JANE'S INTELLIGENCE REVIEW - JULY 01, 2002
Closing the gaps in capability and threat perception
Sebestyen Gorka
More than a decade after the dissolution of both the Warsaw Pact and the USSR, the threat perceptions and needs of NATO members have diverged. At the same time, new missions have been found for it that were not envisaged when the original Washington Treaty was framed and when the geographically-defined NATO command structures were created.
The new missions
According to Christopher Donnelly, the special adviser to NATO Secretary General Lord George Robertson: "Today, we have seen the line between war and peace blur, along with the distinction between external and internal security threats."
Very few, if any, of the current and even aspirant NATO nations have to seriously consider the threat of territorial aggression on their soil by a neighbour state. Nevertheless, the majority of NATO member states persist in maintaining static territorially defence-oriented forces and NATO's military planners have yet to stop running contingency exercises that run along the scenarios of the Cold War.
Today's threats to NATO members include the spill-over of ethnic conflicts and civil wars; migration; organised crime; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) technology; spill-over of resource-based conflict; information attack; and other forms of asymmetric warfare. The difficulty of NATO's response to this complex list is compounded by the fact that each nation state perceives its vulnerability to each threat differently.
NATO functioned well in the past, in part because the nature and level of threat to all concerned was the same. Each member had clear tasks to execute, including the establishment of its own self-defence capability; ensuring that it could provide and receive military assistance to and from its allies in time of war.
In the new threat environment, there is a lack of consensus on the overall threat, and the capabilities to address them have also changed. Self-defence is no longer just about fielding a static army that has a deterrent effect. It is about tighter border regimes, more effective law enforcement co-operation, and the use of intelligence agencies in the fight against transnational crime and terrorism. The need to be able to receive military help domestically has changed into a need to be able to receive allied assistance when a nation's units are already deployed abroad. It also applies to the capacity of non-military assets to absorb assistance from other non-military allied assets, such as counterintelligence forces or even police authorities. Likewise, the ability to help others outside of one's country is no longer restricted to military assistance and, even when it is, such expeditionary assistance is in far more demand than it was and for far greater periods of time in areas that previously were treated as out-of-area.
The current NATO
Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has been quietly evolving its character from that of a collective defence alliance to a collective security organisation. This is best demonstrated by its move into areas not even considered by the Washington Treaty, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. Nevertheless, this transformation has been an 'evolution by default' as opposed to a conscious and declared change of identity since, while NATO has accepted new missions, this has not been accompanied by the radical internal reform needed to efficiently tackle these new missions.
This is due to the confluence of a political inertia within the alliance and the fact that NATO has - in comparison to the past, when it never had to run live operations - become overburdened. As NATO deployed for the first time, in an attempt to manage the 'hot peace' of the 1990s, and at the same time expanded to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, little time and energy was left within NATO HQ to prompt reform.
Elements of the US administration are aware of the need for internal reform, but their number has yet to reach a critical mass. The UK is also pro-reform, but this is not an adequate caucus. While Lord Robertson, the head of the bureaucracy and chairman of the North Atlantic Council, also has a reform agenda, there is as yet no formal reform strategy. Thus the secretary general has been forced to 'make policy via speeches', as is clear from his recent pronouncements on transatlantic relations and the 'war on terrorism'.
That said, nearly half the necessary work has already been done, at least as far as setting sights is concerned. The New Strategic Concept, as approved at the NATO Washington Summit of 1999, put in writing the missions that NATO has to address. These include the threat of WMD proliferation and international terrorism, as well as the need to heighten capabilities that would shift NATO nations towards smaller more deployable assets. The problem, however, is in the implementation, which largely has not occurred since the summit. Even concrete programmes to address the capabilities gap between the USA and Europe, such as the Defence Capabilities Initiative, have floundered due to a lack of political will to stabilise and increase defence expenditures on the continent.
Recipe for relevance
At the Prague summit in November, NATO will have an opportunity to address the reform issue. As well as inviting at least four new candidate states to begin accession negotiations, NATO could finally declare the need to make radical changes.
The first such change would be simply to implement the demands of its own New Strategic Concept of three years ago. The second would be to ensure that military planning within the NATO staffs is altered to reflect the current needs, to include unconventional conflict scenarios and actions where military forces alone are not capable of resolving crises. Next could come a decision to encourage the creation of a new command HQ that would be responsible for managing the co-operation of US assets under Combined Joint Task Force operations as envisaged by the second Common Foreign and Security Policy pillar of the European Union. Lastly, NATO could take the step of creating 'in-house' expertise in counterterrorism.
More difficult is the question of what to do with the threat-perception gap slowly developing between Washington and its European allies. More and more, it seems that Europe wishes to return to a 'business as usual' state-of-affairs, while the USA does not. This, too, could be addressed at Prague in a joint statement on the continued need for operations against Al-Qaeda. ·
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Date Posted: October 01, 2002
FOREIGN REPORT - OCTOBER 03, 2002
Bush plans to reform NATO: An exclusive report on a radical idea
While the media's attention remained concentrated on Iraq, the United States made a little-noticed proposal in Europe. On face value, it looks unremarkable: Washington wants to establish a new NATO rapid reaction force. But in practice, this represents the first indication of an American desire for a much more profound reform of the European-based military alliance. Taken to its logical conclusion, it would also entail a fundamental reorganisation of the way NATO conducts its business and reaches decisions.
On paper, NATO has not done badly since communism ended in Europe. The alliance's problem has often been how to keep nations from knocking at its doors, rather than how to justify its continued existence. The wars in Yugoslavia also helped: with the Europeans ultimately unable to agree on what their policy should be in the Balkans, NATO became the framework for ensuring the security of Bosnia, Croatia and Macedonia, and the body which conducted the Kosovo war in 1999. Furthermore, NATO reached an accommodation with Russia. Even the thorny issue of who should be included in the alliance has now been resolved: after admitting Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, NATO will now invite most other candidate countries (the three Baltic states, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria) to join as full members.
In deep trouble
Yet, as the Americans have realised, this is still an alliance that is in deep trouble. The critical issues are organisational and practical. The alliance operates on the basis of unanimity. The principle made sense during the Cold War when no Soviet incursion, however small, could have been tolerated, and when the myth of equality between its members did not matter: it was unthinkable that, say, tiny Luxembourg could have vetoed an operation that the mighty United States considered necessary. Yet this is nonsense today.
Since no conceivable NATO operation affects the security of the continent in the same way, small nations can and do have different opinions; the chances of paralysing alliance decision-making are therefore real.
NATO's tight-wads
Secondly, the Europeans have always spent less than the United States on their defence; and the dispute about 'burden-sharing' is as old as the alliance itself. Now, however, the American stake in Europe is much smaller, and the Europeans' stake in some of Washington's security concerns is equally diminished. The result is that the United States openly resents bankrolling Europe's defences, and the Europeans resent being taken for granted in the Pentagon's military plans.
Ways around these problems have been tried. To alter the principle of unanimity in decision-making would necessitate a treaty amendment. The British have suggested giving the NATO secretary-general enhanced powers with the aim of reaching a quick consensus on action among member states on any future action.
Formal meetings of ambassadors would be replaced by informal negotiations, in which smaller countries would, naturally, be expected to know their limitations. The idea may be adopted later this year, but it will only tinker with the system and not provide a root-and-branch reform.
The alliance as a whole has also debated the possibility of becoming engaged in conflicts outside its immediate remit, which remains Europe. But the French and the Germans have strenuously opposed this process. So NATO remains stuck with a primary responsibility for looking after the security of a continent in which no major wars are expected, but legally unable to become engaged in any other conflicts around the world.
Finally, the alliance as a whole signed a solemn pledge at its Washington summit in 1999 to increase its military capabilities and defence spending. Yet most Europeans spent their time nurturing their own security structure inside the European Union, in what effectively became an accounting exercise: many of the military assets pledged to the European defence 'identity' were the same bits of equipment which were originally pledged to NATO. Defence expenditure fell throughout Europe. Even after the British and, lately, the French have increased their military budgets, Germany continues to spend a puny 1.5% of its GDP on its armed forces, and has no plans to change.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon's current budget is equal to the combined military spending of all the next 15 top military nations put together; the United States is now responsible for half of the entire world's defence expenditure. The United States controls no less than 70 % of all the world's military research and development.
The reality is that the Europeans are not only irrelevant in military terms for the US; very soon, their equipment will be so antiquated that, even if they wanted to, they would not be able to take part in any American-led operation. No wonder, therefore, that the United States simply ignored NATO during the Afghanistan war last year.
A radical idea
The current US proposal is intended to cut through all these problems. Instead of getting bogged down in internal alliance bureaucratic reforms, the Americans suggest creating a small, highly mobile force, from countries which both wish and are able to contribute, to be deployed quickly in any conflict. This does away with changing voting systems inside the NATO Council, or with hopeless efforts to boost the military capabilities of members across the board. It also dispenses with the debate about the role of big or small countries, or with theological disputes about what NATO should do in the world. The newly created Response Force could be there for European missions, but it could also be activated outside Europe, if its contributing countries so desire. And the Americans would obtain a small but mildly effective unit, which can actually do something useful.
There is little doubt that the American proposal is ingenious. The Europeans, who have grown increasingly apprehensive about Washington's overall lack of interest in NATO, now claim to be studying this proposal. But they know that it carries a huge sting in its tail. In effect, the Americans are saying that NATO, as a whole, may not be reformable; Washington is interested in a few niche capabilities, rather than an alliance of 26 states. Nor does the American proposal tackle the fundamental question of whether the alliance can operate outside Europe.
Do not rule out the possibility that the Americans might like to continue to limit NATO's operational area, thereby leaving the rest of the world, wherever necessary, to be within their almost exclusive purview.