First ever NATO conference on expeditionary operations concluded
About 125 specialists on expeditionary operations from NATO member and Partner nations, the NATO-Russia council and the United Nations gathered in Rome this week for a two-day conference. The event took place at the NATO Defense College, where the senior speaker was Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Transformation (DSACT) Admiral Luciano Zappata, Italian Navy.
“This is the first time that we have had an open forum to discuss how NATO forces could become more expeditionary in character and design. This is particularly important because there is still no official definition for Expeditionary Operations in NATO,” Zappata said to set the scene.
The speakers stressed that the requirement for out-of-area operations will have to change the way the Alliance thinks, plans and executes its deployments to far-away places with little or no host nation support and for an extended period of time.
“We need to teach people how to think, not what to think”, said NATO Defense College Commandant, German Army Lieutenant General Wolf-Dieter Loeser, to illustrate the need for creativity and flexibility, and the need to work in concert with other, non-military actors.
“We need to realize that this work [future Alliance Operations] can be done only in partnership; it requires the involvement of NATO and non-NATO, military and non-military agencies and actors; it underpins the need of shared views and increased exchange of information and collaboration between NATO and nations”, Zappata said.
“At the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, earlier this year, the Heads of State and Government described NATO’s transformation as a continual process, which demands constant and active attention. We need to work to further strengthen the common understanding of transformation, when addressing our requirement to be more deployable and expeditionary.”
Dr. Jamie Shea, head of the policy planning branch at NATO Headquarters and one of the conference’s most senior speakers, put it like this: “NATO’s military operations will in the future only be the top of the pyramid. The Alliance is just as much going to support others, like we are supporting the African Union [in their peacekeeping operation in Darfur] and also with regard to defence reform.” Shea compared the requirement for flexibility and tailoring of future Alliance activities with “Lego”, the toy building blocks that can be put together in numerous different ways.
“The rapidly changing security environment, the different scenarios where the Alliance could operate and the composition of the forces, which vary in quality and number, pose the challenge of building the flexible, modular, adaptable and interoperable forces and capabilities required to meet the full range of Alliance missions. In the present and future scenarios the “one size fits all” does not work,” Admiral Zappata said.
Source: NATO Defense College
http://www.ndc.nato.int/news/sc112/C2/sp_C2_exops.html