NATO Speech: Remarks by General James L. Jones, SACEUR at NATO Annual Conference, Brussels, 14 April 2005

At NATO Annual
Conference

Brussels

14 April 2005

What has NATO learned from its operations?

Remarks by General James L. Jones,
Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR)
Transforming NATO – A Political and Military Challenge

SIR PAUL LEVER (Royal United Services Institute, RUSI): Thank you very much for setting out AC-T's mission. If I can venture the thought, it is one that future historians, I believe, will look back on NATO's decision to change its command structure, and to introduce Allied Command Transformation as one of the most far-sighted and revolutionary decisions that the Alliance ever made.

But thinking about change is one part of the coin, another part is delivering operations. And we're now fortunate to have General Jones, SACEUR, to tell us what NATO has learnt from its operations.

General.

GENERAL JAMES JONES (Supreme Allied Commander Europe): Thank you Sir Paul, and good morning ladies and gentlemen. It's a high honour and a great pleasure to be here. Secretary General, thank you for your introductory remarks which set the stage, and Admiral Giambastiani, thank you very much for your illuminating presentation on the very important role played by Allied Command Transformation.

I want to start by telling you that I associate myself very much with the RUSI paper on transforming NATO. I think it's an excellent document, and if you haven't had a chance to read it I would recommend it to you, because it really lays it out quite well.

In discussing transformation I'm struck by the fact that there are two aspects of transformation really in the Alliance that we're dealing with. One we talked about quite frequently, the other one not so much.

The one we talk about quite frequently, I think, is the physical nature of transformation. What is that we need to do in order to become more effective, more agile, more expeditionary, more deployable? And the Prague Summit really set the stage, I think, for putting us on the right path. The reform of the Allied Command structure, the NATO Command structure, the establishment of the Prague Capability Commitments, the creation of the NRF, the recognition that we need to acquire some capabilities that we don't have. And all of that is quantifiable and measurable. We know how much it costs. We know how long it's going to take to get there.

The other part of transformation, though, that I think is equally important has to do with the transformation of our philosophy, of our culture. We were all brought up, I think, in a Cold War and we knew that the Alliance was essentially static, pretty linear, pretty defensive, and in its philosophy, pretty reactive. Is this the right mindset for the Alliance in the 21st Century?

The Secretary General and Admiral Giambastiani challenged this, I think, with some very good questions surrounding, not only the use of our forces, but the use of the NATO Response Force. Is it, in fact, to be a creature of proactive change, or is it destined to become like a nuclear deterrent, something that sits on the shelf and is rarely used?

I think these are important questions because I think fundamentally the Alliance and the wide range of missions that its increasingly taking on is... really has to address the issue of whether it wishes to be involved in deterring crisis, in pre-crisis operations, and if so, what is the mechanism by which it does so?

So the philosophical aspect of transformation and the fundamental nature of what this type of transformation is, in addition to the physical nature of it, I think is important.

I think the Secretary General is quite right, thus far transformation has generally been confined to the Allied Command of Operations. Virtually everything's been done in the last few years has been related to the military capability, and it's, I think, high time, and very, very appropriate that we expand transformation to include the broader aspects of the institution itself. And the Secretary General, I think, properly thrown down the gauntlet on this particular issue for institutional reform.

The last point I'd like to make before I start on the lessons learned is, to really highlight the fundamental importance of the nature of the relationship between Allied Command Operations and Transformation. This is really, in my opinion, one of the most powerful changes that we made in the Alliance, and the degree to which Allied Command Operations and Allied Command Transformation are seamlessly joined and profiting by the two missions; that are so linked, but yet so disparate, to bring those things together in very real and timely ways. Lessons learned as a result of operations is a continuing process, and being able to inculcate those things in how we do our operations. I think perhaps the greatest connection between ACO and ACT lies in really the development of the NRF and the necessity to stay very, very linked together at all times with regard to these lessons learned, transformational concepts and the training that ACT can bring, the ideas that ACT can bring to our operations.

So that relationship is fundamental, very important to me, I know very important to Admiral Giambastiani, and will be equally important to our successors.

I will address you now on the subject of what we've learned from our NATO operations. I now bring a little bit over two years of experience to the responsibilities that I have, and so I will be fairly direct and very brief.

One of the first lessons learned, that I have taken away from my two years experience is that there's a gap... there exists a gap between the will to resource... to take on missions, and the willingness to resource the missions. This is not news to anyone here. It's been said by our previous Secretary General. It's been said by our Secretary General, that this is something that I think we need to work on, and... because it affects not only the manning of our operations and the timely manning of our operations, but the equipment that is provided and the money that is provided to resource the operations. And we spend an awful lot of time, ladies and gentlemen, talking about the second part.

The first part seems to come quite easily, the second part is very difficult. It's not that we will ever have a perfect solution, but I believe we can do much better than we're doing.

And right on the heels of that, of course, of a decision to take on a mission, come the Force Generation process, and I must say to you, regrettably, that today as we speak, no NATO mission is fully resourced and fully forced generated. Not in terms of the statement of requirements for manpower, and not in terms of the statement of requirement for equipment, or funding.

And so we're always trying to get to the point where what is good enough to begin the mission. And good enough means increased risk. And I think that while we've been fortunate so far, I believe we need to do more in terms of generating forces in a more rapid, more cohesive way, with more enthus... with the same degree of enthusiasm that we have for taking on the mission in the first place.

There is another aspect of Force Generation, I think, that is increasingly evident, and that is that we cannot generate NATO forces independently of our partners and friends in the military of the European Union. As the Secretary General said just a few moments ago, the battle groups of the European Union represent NRF capability for NATO.

And so we are moving into a Global Force Generation process that seeks to give visibility to nations as far as out as possible as we can in the future as to what the request might be and what the utility of their forces might be expected to be with greater clarity and greater vision far ahead into the future.

National caveats have been spoken about repeatedly. I've certainly done it quite a bit since I've been here. I'm happy to say that we're making improvements in reducing the number of declared caveats, and obviously we need to eliminate undeclared caveats as much as we possibly can.

I might say that one possible solution to the caveat problem would be to ask nations to declare their caveats before the forces actually deploy into the field to support an operation. And being able to resolve those issues before money is spent for deployment and nations join in a particular mission I think would be very beneficial. But in the main we are making good progress. We're not completely there yet, but I think the illumination that's been given to the caveat problem by all personnel, in and out of uniform, has been very helpful.

I think one of the lessons learned over the past few years is the amount of work that we must do in the area of intelligence, and information management. Strictly speaking, NATO has not organic intelligence. We exist in the field on the largess of individual nations. Each of our operations is dotted with their own... with national intelligence cells. I simply go back a year to the riots in Kosovo, which had no predictability in terms of COMKFOR and the operational command, simply because not only have the billets in the Kosovo force for intelligence not been filled by nations, but the national intelligence centres exist independently of the commander in general terms, and we simply have to do better than that.

It's particularly important, if we're really serious about getting into expeditionary operations. To sail an NRF, or to deploy an NRF anywhere in the world without adequate intelligence is not responsible and we cannot do that. Very simply, this is a limiting factor that has to be corrected.

Similarly with information management we must get into providing better information and managing it and letting our commanders have the capability of using that management information skill set in order to effect their operations.

Logistics is another area that is still very much left over from the Cold War defensive stance that we have... that we were in and are still in. Thirty percent of all NATO operations today are composed of host nation support activities. This is to say that if you read that Kosovo was 17,100 troops you may subtract about 30 percent of that as being not available to the commander, not subject to the commander's authority, because they're host nation support elements. And where this becomes extremely apparent as to the need for reform is in expeditionary operations. Obviously the NATO Response Force is supposed to be able to deploy very quickly. It's clear that the logistical tale of host nation support activities is going to have to be modified in the future in order for it to be able to do so.

So the concept of multinational logistics and multinational support is something that we're working. It's embryonic, but it's something that I think in terms of... at least in terms of expeditionary operations we need to be able to do better.

In resource and funding, the Secretary General and Admiral Giambastiani have talked about this. The costs fall where they lie paradigm is again a holdover of the 20th Century and the Cold War. It is, in my view, ill-suited for expeditionary operations, in particular the NRF. And we, I think, need to collectively support the Secretary General's willingness and guidance to look at more flexibility in how we fund our operations, particularly commonly fund our operations.

This has, in my view, an impact on the number of nations that will be able to...or be willing to participate in NRF operations of the future. If nations... if smaller nations are producing niche capabilities that are extremely important and there isn't a lot of them, the ability of those nations to provide those forces, if they are expected to pay for them at all times, will certainly diminish the enthusiasm that they have for joining NRF operations.

So NRF operations and training, at least in my view, ought to at least be partially commonly funded, as much as possible.

We have a good example in the Alliance of success in common funding operational deployments, and that is you have to look no further than NATO AWACS, which is commonly funded by 13 nations, if I have my figures correctly. We don't spend a lot of time worrying about using NATO AWACS with regard to who's going to pay for it, because it's already resources. And so it does a lot of things, it goes a lot of places. It's a great instrument for NATO to use. It's very important, very relevant. It seems to me that we ought to be thinking of the NRF in terms of common funding, just as we do NATO AWACS.

The NATO Response Force, as Admiral Giambastiani and the Secretary General said, is really the transformational vehicle for the Alliance. It's not the only one, but it really is a signal departure from the way the Alliance has done business in the past, particularly in the 20th Century. It is the intersection at which Allied Command Operations and Allied Command Transformation intersect, and help bring transformational ideas to the fore, in very short periods of time.

It is NATO's only joint and combined force. I might highlight the fact that in support of our great friends in Athens, NATO deployed not a labelled NRF force, but it might as well have been that because it also had, as a component, the first special forces integrated unit into the command. And this is the first time that we've used special forces integrated with the other elements in a deployed capability.

And the question comes down, I think correctly so, is how will we use the NRF, what is our intent, what is... are we going to be reactively thinking about it, or will we use it proactively?

So in conclusion I strongly support the idea that transformation should be expanded to include all sectors of NATO. We should always remember that transformation is not free. It's not simply a way in which we can reduce budgets and expect a higher skill set to emanate from it. And that for us to bring the vision of transformation to reality we have to commit the resources, we have to emphasize the need to hold budget lines so that we bring about the dynamic change that is possible, that is truly transformational.