NATO's Black Elephants

Black elephants? My friend Professor Paul Cornish puts it succinctly, “The real threat to NATO and its cohesion are Black Elephants; risks that are widely acknowledged and familiar (the ‘elephant in the room’) - but ignored. When the elephant can no longer be ignored it is passed off as an unpredictable surprise (a ‘black swan’) by those who were slow to address it. NATO’s biggest Black Elephant is the reluctance of its member countries to spend on defence.”

Embedded herein is the link to my video contribution to an event organised by Rome's Aspen Italia and the Istituto Affari Internazionale on October 8^th entitled The Future of NATO.

I do not pull my punches!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AR6QADCO3k&feature=youtu.be 

Julian Lindley-French

The NATO Strategic Integrated Operating Concept

“It is important to emphasise that the willingness to commit decisively hard capability with the credibility to war fight is an essential part of the ability to operate and therefore of deterrence…we cannot afford any longer to operate in silos – we have to be integrated: with allies as I have described, across Government, as a national enterprise, but particularly across the military instrument. Effective integration of maritime, land, air, space and cyber achieves a multi-Domain effect that adds up to far more than simply the sum of the parts – recognising – to paraphrase Omar Bradley – that the overall effect is only as powerful as the strength of the weakest Domain…We must chart a direction of travel from an industrial age of platforms to an information age of systems.”

General Sir Nick Carter, “The Integrated Operating Concept”, 30 September, 2020

Exercise Joint Warrior

NATO’s Exercise Joint Warrior is underway. It brings back fond memories. In 2013 I had the honour of being an observer. Apart from ‘decorating’ the wardroom of HMS Westminster with the substantial and substantive consequences of my patent lack of sea legs, and being pretty ill for twenty four distinctly unmemorable hours thereafter, I gained an invaluable insight into the maritime-amphibious business of the Alliance. Joint Warrior 2020 finishes tomorrow having conducted a series of mainly anti-submarine and contested landing exercises in the North Sea and having involved over 6,000 personnel and 81 ships from 11 nations.  Critically, the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) was also present in tandem with the Royal Navy. The past? No. The future.

The British-led exercise also pointed to the future by showing how a European maritime-amphibious future force could operate with the US future force in a contested battlespace. For the first time the new Royal Navy Carrier Strike Group was revealed with HMS Queen Elizabeth at its F35B Lightning 2 power projection core. The exercise was also taking place against the backdrop of NATO’s real twenty-first century challenge: how to transform the Alliance’s defence and deterrence posture, what President Macron rather unfairly called ‘brain dead’ NATO last December, into the super-smart, agile force the Alliance will need by decade’s end. 

It is a force that if needs be must have the capability and capacity to act across the mosaic that is hybrid, cyber and hyper warfare. A transformation that must also take place whilst the coming COVID-19 economic crisis wreaks havoc with European defence budgets. Even today even Europe’s largest navies, the Royal Navy and French Navy, are so small that if they seek to carry our Mahanian sea control, à la the RN Carrier Strike Group, it can only be done at the expense of Corbettian sea presence.  Any smaller they will be unable to perform either role. The solution?  A deep combined European Future Maritime-Amphibious Force built around a command hub focussed on the British and French navies.  The irony is that Britain’s departure from the EU may make such a force easier to realise now that the spectre of an EU Army/Navy has been removed from British concerns. 

Zircon and the US Future Navy

Future Allied defence and deterrence is not the only challenge implicit in Joint Warrior 2020. On October 6^th, US Secretary for Defense Mark Esper previewed Battle Force 2045, the plan for the US future navy. Esper offered the vision of a five hundred ship US Navy comprised of both manned and unmanned ships. The essential points of the Esper Plan is for more nuclear attack submarines, 50-60 amphibious assault ships that could also be used as light aircraft carriers (this is ironic for the Royal Navy as it pioneered such ships and then scrapped them), large (1000-2000 tons) and medium (500 tons) unmanned ships, together with extra-large sub-surface platforms (50 tons) that can host hypersonic missile and Artificially Intelligent drone swarms, with the future fleet supported by 80-90 frigates and longer range carrier strike aircraft, both manned and unmanned, that have far greater ‘reach’ than afforded by the F35B Lightning 2.

On October 7^th, as Exercise Joint Warrior got underway, and as a sign of the challenge Allied navies will face, President Putin’s sixty-eighth birthday present was a successful test of a 3M22 Tsirkon (Zirkon) hypersonic anti-ship missile which can travel at over 1.2 miles/2 kilometre per second up to 1,200 miles/2,000 km. A message? Absolutely. NATO? In my speech to the Committee for Standardization at NATO HQ in Brussels at the end of last month I said that the next ten years will see the equivalent of seventy years of past military technological development crammed into it and more.  There are some good signs. For example, the US and UK already enjoy what might be called an AI Special Relationship, but far more needs to be done by the Allies to compete in what could be a deadly race between democracy and autocracy.  

The NATO Strategic Integrated Operating Concept (NSIOC)

The Plan? Certainly, NATO needs a new Strategic Concept that reaffirms the enduring purpose of the Alliance and its fundamental tasks given the fast changing nature and scope of contemporary and future risks and threats. Critically, the Alliance also needs a NATO Strategic Integrated Operating Concept that would populate General Carter’s vision with real resources, something the British alone will be unable to do.  This is because the essential challenge for NATO deterrence and defence concerns the balance the European Allies must strike post COVID-19 between cost, military capability, military capacity, technology and the fast expanding military task-list that is being generated by the new strategic environment.  The next decade really will be different and dangerous.

That challenge is reinforced by the urgent need to effectively and efficiently organise cash-starved Bonzai European militaries into a force that can contribute meaningfully to Allied defence and deterrence, maintain interoperability in extremis with the US future force, and if needs be act as a high-end, first responder in and around Europe. As an aside, London should be congratulated for looking ahead but for the British there is also a profound danger that the forthcoming Integrated Review 2020, with its headline-grabbing focus on space and digital domains, will simply be yet another of those ‘clever’ London political metaphors to mask further cuts to Britain’s already waning fighting power. In other words, Britain’s future force only makes sense in a NATO context and only if it can work at the high end of operations with the Americans.

Thankfully, there are signs that such hard realities are beginning to be gripped. NATO’s new Concept for the Deterrence and Defence of the Euro Atlantic Area (DDA) is designed as a stepping stone en route to an adapted/transformed Alliance. It is also designed to deliver an unambiguous, consistent and continuous demonstration of Alliance military power with a commitment to operational purposefulness by emphasising not just awareness of, but also future effectiveness, across multiple warfare domains and in multiple geographic areas.

Given the level of strategic ambition necessarily implicit in NATO’s future defence and deterrence posture, including further reforms to the NATO Command Structure, the 2010 NATO Strategic Concept (‘Active Engagement, Modern Defence’) now belongs to another age.  This is because NATO will have to engineer a new force and resource centre of gravity at a higher end of military effect whilst also securing its citizens from what I have called 5D continuous strategic coercion (deception, disinformation, disruption, destabilisation and implied destruction).

The Path of Transformation

Realism is also needed as the path of NATO transformation rarely runs smooth and many Allies are still deeply reluctant to embrace the change needed to save the Alliance upon which they rely for their defence. In 2018 the North Atlantic Council tasked General Scaparotti, the then Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), to set out his ‘Strategic Thoughts’ about both the threats to the Alliance and the response.  This led to the 2019 NATO Military Strategy (NMS) which is entitled ‘Comprehensive Defence, Shared Response’ (CDSR).  The NATO Military Strategy adopts a whole of security approach and not only frames the development and employment of the Alliance’s Military Instrument of Power (MIoP), but also offers a road-map to the future. There are three core elements to the Strategy. First, it recognises the need for the Alliance to confront again geostrategic competition, as well as the dangers of pervasive instability and the strategic shocks they can trigger as central to the strategic environment with which NATO must contend. Second, the Strategy identifies Russia and Terrorist Groups (TGs) as the main strategic threats to the Alliance, given their depth, breadth, duration and complexity. Third, the Strategy recognises the need to move away from Crisis Response and both contest and counter these threats by developing a common capacity for competition and deterrent power in peacetime, crisis and defence. Critically, whilst NATO remains a defensive Alliance the 2019 Military Strategy also moves the Alliance from having a reactive posture to a deliberate strategy for force deployment and employment.

The DDA emerged from the Military Strategy under General Wolters, the current SACEUR to act as the bridge between the Military Strategy and is called (by me) the NATO Strategic Integrated Operating Concept (NSIOC).  This is because DDA is about the core business of credible defence and deterrence: warfighting in the Twenty-First Century. As such the DDA provides NATO with a coherent framework and approach to such a challenge by addressing military deterrence activities in peacetime and defence actions in crisis and conflict. DDA also addresses scale of threats and ambition of response by considering Alliance roles and tasks around ‘360 degrees’ of large-scale, long-term complexity. Critically, it also seeks to address something your correspondent has long been pushing for: strategic interdependency between the Alliance’s ability to address threats from Russia inside its area of responsibility (AOR), and Terrorist Groups outside its AOR.

Above all, DDA is an Alliance effort to fully understand that complex nature of modern warfare as a contest, where deterrence must demonstrate an informed and unambiguous ability to defend, whilst defence will demand control of several geographic areas and multiple domains of warfare simultaneously.  Critically, the DDA is analysis-led not cost-led and focuses on how Russia and Terrorist Groups not only gain geographic, domain and readiness advantage, but also how they operate over space and time. To that end, the DDA establishes clear geographic and domain Deterrence and Defence Objectives (mapped to activity) that would also impose tactical, operational and strategic dilemmas on adversaries.  As I understand it, China is not discussed at great length but the methodology could be applied to such an end.  The increasing role of advanced civilian-generated technology (AI, big data, quantum computing, Nano, bio etc. and et al) is also not addressed directly but is implicit.  

Exercise Joint Warrior 2020 must be judged against the backdrop of both the DDA and the NATO Military Strategy. What does it suggest about Joint Warrior 2030? Impressive though such NATO exercises may appear as a news item, power is relative and the maritime-amphibious domain is but one domain of Allied deterrent and defence effect that will need to be credible across air, sea, land, space, cyber, information and knowledge. In other words, the DDA opens the door to a smart NATO that all such exercises must contribute to by combining firepower, resiliency, manoeuvre and innovation.  Indeed, the DDA reimagines deterrence by denial so that is not simply a function of weight of force, but through active and hyper-fast reinforcement of what are known as ‘Fires’ (both multi-platform & multi-domain) held at depth and distanced underpinned by agile and robust command and control. As such, the DDA demands far greater and far more dynamic force readiness and responsiveness that will be critical to the multi-speed, multi-scale, multi-domain NATO that must be developed in the years to come as part of a future war NATO Strategic Integrated Operating Concept.

Exercise Joint Warrior 2030

Exercise Joint Warrior 2030 has two distinct elements both critical to the high-end testing of both its maritime and amphibious capabilities. Much of the NATO Task Group is comprised of forces assigned to the new Allied Command Operations Heavy Mobile Force, some 90% of which is European.  The maritime element first establishes an air, sea and sub-surface defensive ‘bubble’ around the force using both manned and unmanned systems. F35 Lightning 2s, together with a raft of ‘loyal wingmen’ drones, also provide an extensive ‘umbrella’ for the force as well as undertaking a range of hyper-joint tasks ranging from surveillance to electronic hyper warfare, data gathering and aerial top cover. Below the surface British and French nuclear attack submarines, with their ‘loyal school’ of underwater unmanned vehicles, provide a similar defensive bubble supported by super-quiet Dutch and German electric-powered submarines.

The amphibious element is where the changes in NATO materiel and doctrine of the last decade are most obvious. Some miles offshore a wave of landing craft and CB90 assault craft depart the British heavy aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales and stealthily make their way to the shore.  At the spear-tip of the force is 45 Commando, Royal Marines, US Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade and the Royal Netherlands Mariniers, together with the new AI-enabled Joint Commando Air-Maritime Assault Force. Most of the force continues to the beach undetected, but halfway into the target part of the force veers away. From the decks of the assault craft ghostly figures ascend to the heavens.  3 Commando Brigade, Royal Marines is going into action.  Equipped with the latest Mark 5 Gravity Jet assault suits the battalion represents the future of airborne assault https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL02e4L-RQo&feature=youtu.be. As each commando rises into the night sky s/he carries an assault rifle and a series of small ground attack missiles. Heavier personal equipment is carried alongside by a personally-assigned ‘intelligent’ lift drone.  

As the Commandos begin the assault a further phalanx of ‘intelligent’ fast strike drones lift off the decks of the British aircraft carrier and make their way towards the littoral. Royal Air Force,  Royal Navy and US Marine Corps F-35B Lightning 2s are also warming up on the deck to reinforce the shock the Royal Marines, Special Air Service and Special Boat Squadron are about to inflict.  Timed to match the moment of the enemy’s least readiness and thus create maximum shock and confusion, the SAS and SBS force move towards their respective objectives.  As they advance flying commandos appear from several directions at once and target each individually identified ‘mark’, whilst a swarm of AI drones probe and then penetrate enemy defences destroying their digital net. The Special Forces, now supported by the ground force, quickly seize the objective and establish a bridgehead for the follow-on force. Fleet Air Arm Merlin 3 helicopters with advanced noise suppression blades move in behind the intelligent machine attack drone ‘swarm’ so that the Royal Marines and their US and Dutch counterparts can maintain momentum from the Littoral.   

Fantasy? Some years ago I led a significant project for the commander of an important Allied navy into the future of so-called ‘brown water operations’. Entitled Effect in the All Water Battlespace: Riverine Operations the essence of the report was how best to fight and stay in a contested Littoral environment and at the same time reduce the cost per naval platform per operation through innovation, adaptation and a strategic partnership with key civilian actors, such as the Smit Tak and Mammoet.  To meet its goals the study combined strategy, innovation and technology to form new partnerships and ideas. Two key findings were that a) many civilian contractors are used to operating in contested zones; and b) much of the technology available to such contractors was far in advance of their military counterparts. The ultimate aim was to understand how an essentially European force could better fulfil its mission in the Littoral as quickly, effectively, affordably and successfully as part of what is known in the jargon as ‘ship to objective manoeuvre’. In other words, the report thought future. That is precisely what others are now doing.

As Exercise Joint Warrior got underway another exercise was taking place, albeit on a wholly different scale. On October 1^st, China’s National Day, a large-scale amphibious ‘invasion’ began which was designed to simulate an assault on Taiwan.  The exercise was a test of a People’s Liberation Army Navy Marines Corp that is currently being expanded from a 20,000 strong force of naval infantry into a power projection force modelled on the US Marines Corps some 100,000 strong. The PLANMC is indicative of the fast change underway around the world and places Europe’s increasing strategic unworldliness in stark relief.

If NATO is to remain relevant it needs more than a new Strategic Concept. It needs a NATO Strategic Integrated Operating Concept and a NATO Europe Future Force that can demonstrate to themselves and their American allies that Europeans are at last willing to pull their strategic weight, meet the associated costs and take the necessary risks. Given the growing world-wide commitments of America’s over-stretched forces the credibility of Alliance defence and deterrence need nothing less. A good start? NATO HQ starts promoting the Concept for the Defence and Deterrence of the Euro-Atlantic Area rather than trying to hide it!

Julian Lindley-French

NATO 3.0: Standardization, Interoperability and Mobility

 “Imagine this: seventy years of military technical advancement crammed into ten years. That is the challenge NATO must confront if it is to preserve the peace”.

Professor Julian Lindley-French

October 1st

Why S & I?

On Tuesday I had the very distinct honour of addressing the seventieth anniversary meeting of the Committee for Standardization at NATO HQ in Brussels in support of my old friend, Assistant Secretary-General Camille Grand and Lieutenant General Scott Kindsvater. My presentation was entitled “Seventy Years On: Meeting the Standardization-Interoperability Challenge”. My message was characteristically blunt as it needed to be: critical to the future Defence and Deterrence of the Euro-Atlantic Area will be the speed of relevance of allied defence capability and capacity with unity of effort and purpose integrated at the level and myriad points of required network-centric effect.  

Why? Standardization and Interoperability are two sides of the same capability and capacity ‘coin’ and key to generating credible and relevant force at an affordable cost in the post-COVID 19 environment.  However, NATO’s future architecture, together with the specialisation and interoperability that supports it, will need to change rapidly over the coming decade. Central to that will be the ability of the Alliance to move forces and resources across its area of operations far more nimbly and securely than today, with the digital at least as important as the physical. 

This is because the Alliance faces two possibly existential challenges: the now war and the future war. The now war is already underway and stretches across the 5Ds of complex strategic coercion in the form of systematically applied deception, disinformation, destabilisation, disruption and implied or actual destruction. In a speech this week General Sir Nick Carter, Chief of the UK Defence Staff acknowledged as much in his vision of a new British Integrated Operating Concept.  What he was describing was, in effect, a future defence against future war, the deterring which will become NATO’s primary over the next decade. The speed of command and warfare will accelerate exponentially as super-computing steadily gives way to quantum computing which in turn drives forward increasingly intelligent and autonomous artificially intelligent drones and other systems. Given that what will NATO’s ‘battlespace’ look like in 2030? Bio, hypersonics, Nano, big data and advanced machine learning will all abound?  NATO needs to answer that question because if it does not others will, most notably China and Russia.

How S & I?

How? Let me assume that in spite of the growing threat to Europe from the likes of China, Russia and a host of global reach, catastrophe-seeking terrorist groups, Europeans are not going to opt for what would theoretically at least be the most efficient application of limited security and defence resources – a common defence.  Given that, and the growing pressure on the United States and its armed forces from a host of threats the world over, the only logical way for Europeans to close the yawning gap between the defence they need and the defence they can afford is to forge a much closer collective defence ‘identity’ through NATO. 

Only NATO can ensure standardization and interoperability take place at sufficiently high a level to preserve and strengthen the all-important deterrent: high-end military interoperability with the US future force.  The purpose of NATO of standardization and interoperability should thus be the creation of a robust, digitized, high-end, first responder, multi-domain fully autonomous (if needs be) NATO Europe Future Force able to operate alongside US forces in an emergency and deal with the most pressing of contingencies in and around the Euro-Atlantic air, sea, land, cyber, space area of operations if US forces are busy elsewhere. Critically, such a force must be ready by 2030 at the latest. If not, then we Europeans will be complicit in creating the conditions for future war through the de facto appeasement of a fast changing and dangerous reality and the slow retreat of NATO forces into deep vulnerability via the Maginot Line cul-de-sac that is low-end force 'co-operability'.

 Why NATO?

The EU certainly has a role to play. PESCO, the European Defence Agency, the European Defence Fund and the Co-ordinated Annual Review of Defence (CARD) have a critical role to play. There will also be several EU and NATO countries that will be very keen for such an effort to be focussed on the former to 'protect' their respective defence industries. However, if standardisation is EU-led it will inevitably be more to the analogue rather than the digital end of the future tech industrial standards that will increasingly shape the future force. This would lower the capability centre of gravity of the European Future Force and weaken interoperability in the future complex battlespace between US and European forces. This would inevitably place US forces under even more pressure to be the vanguard of all Allied military engagements. Enemies will know this and thus seek to create as many simultaneous attacks as possible to expose NATO’s critical and growing vulnerability: US military over-stretch and an inability of non-US forces to withstand shock or generate a meaningful response in the wake of a high-end attack in Europe.

Will industry play ball? NATO S and I must be as much about shaping and exploiting industrial tech standards as building the future force. It needs to. The NATO Industrial Advisory Group (NIAG) has a vital role to play. However, the age of naïve globalisation must be brought to an end. Allied governments must convince the West’s civilian tech-industry to be a little less global and little more Western when it comes to future defence and deterrence. After all, that is precisely what Beijing has done by investing in the ‘Chinaisation’ of its tech and the standardization and joint interoperability of its own increasingly impressive future force. Parochial Euro-Atlantic defence industrial protectionism will also need to be removed from these issues with the NATO Europe Future Force a driver of defence technological and industrial innovation via better aligned US and European security and defence industrial interests. 

In short that will mean a host of projects that see US tech opened up with better European access to US ‘black box’ technology, far earlier industrial involvement in both European-led and US-led project specifications (e.g. a much better version of the F35 programme), with Europeans far more willing to buy far more off the US shelf without inflated US servicing contracts. Finally, Europeans will need to create a much wider concept of what is a 'defence' industry in the 2020s. The British ‘Aircraft Carrier Alliance’ is a case in point. To build the new ships the ACA sought to exploit much of the national supply chain and far beyond. It was lumpy and costly but important lessons about innovation were learned.  In return the US must commit to buy far more European equipment with the NATO Europe Future Force a vehicle for the development of much more European ‘kit’ the US might want to buy. That means a European Defence and Technological Industrial Base (EDTIB) that is far broader, far more responsive and far better at fielding advanced ‘make a difference’ equipment than today, as well as agile enough to support a host of new technologies (AI) and the start-up companies that drive much of the innovation.

What about M?

Innovative and creative thinking will be as critical as adaptive systems, even if that means changing the way NATO does business. For example, I am currently supporting a major project on enhancing and improving military mobility during a crisis in Europe. Indeed, it is impossible to discuss the future of standardisation and interoperability without also considering military mobility, because the ability to move forces and resources quickly are an essential component of credible defence and deterrence. Frankly, until the European allies share roughly the same strategic assessment with each other, and more or less that of the US, the danger is that little will move S, I and M from being a series of partial, tactical-level projects to becoming part of the Alliance’s future strategic defence and deterrence architecture. Perhaps by introducing other adaptive instruments such as military mobility to the S & I debate, and linking all of it to a new narrative about the enhanced civ-mil crisis mobility it fosters, the Allies will begin to draw their own conclusions about how best to meet their NATO obligations in the most efficient and effective manner possible in the changed and fast changing post COVID-19 strategic environment.

There is, of course, a politico-strategic dimension to all of this. Implicit in S, I and M is a very different concept of transatlantic burden-sharing.  In simple terms, unless Europeans demonstrate to Americans a far greater willingness to share the burden of their own defence in time the Americans may not only be unwilling to bear the load, but also unable. Europeans must not dismiss this threat to the Alliance. The Trump narrative that Europeans are free-riders on the US is taking hold.  An opinion poll conducted for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on September 17^th entitled “Divided We Stand” and led by Dina Smelz, was clear if unsettling. Americans continue to view alliances as a key part of US international engagement, and a majority continue to believe alliances benefit American interests.  However, 57% of Americans interviewed support the Trump administration’s decision to decrease the number of US troops in Germany, whilst an additional 16% percent believed that all US troops should be withdrawn from Germany.”  The good news is that 73% of those interviewed believe the US should remain committed to NATO, whilst 52% supported the use of US forces in the event of a Russian invasion of the Baltic States.

NATO 3.0: The Future Integrated Operating Defence and Deterrence Architecture

Standardization, interoperability and mobility are means to an end for enhanced Allied defence and defence in a fast changing and deteriorating strategic environment. Central to NATO’s ability to fight its now and future war about the re-balancing of NATO’s ends, ways and means.  To achieve that the Allies have to become far better at dividing the political from the structural which prevents the proper assessment of what NATO will need from its nations in the decade to come. This means moving the NATO debate beyond the stale question of whether Allies spend 2% of GDP on defence by 2024 of which 20% per annum must be on new equipment. Rather, the debate must become far more focussed on the best application of collective resources in pursuit of NATO’s future defence and deterrence architecture.  Here, it is the responsibility of the Alliance to offer its political leaders, and indeed its citizens (like me) a clear vision of such an architecture so that we all know what we are paying for. That means going significantly further than both the Defence and Deterrence of the Euro-Atlantic Area (DDA) document or the 2019 NATO Military Strategy.  NATO needs a new Strategic Concept for a new Strategic Architecture!

There also needs to be a much clearer NATO strategic narrative with enhanced standardization, interoperability and mobility at its adaptation, innovation-led core. A new narrative which states unequivocally that in spite of COVID-19 not only are we Europeans moving to do more for our own defence we are determined to build together a new digitised defence within the framework of a new N|TO Integrated Operating Architecture. And, that we fully understand that NATO defence and deterrence cannot be separated from global peace for which a strong US remains essential. For that reason Europeans together recognise the urgent need to ease pressures on US forces by building the first responder, high end, cross domain European future force.

Next steps? This week and for the first time the new British heavy aircraft-carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth took on a full air wing of F35 Lightning 2 strike aircraft and Merlin helicopters as part of NATO Exercise Joint Warrior.  The force is comprised of aircraft from RAF 617 (Dambusters) Squadron, the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm and, critically, US Marines Corps strike aircraft from (VFMA) 211 Squadron. It is an example of not just deep standardization and interoperability, but the deep joint and combined force operating concept that must be a central pillar of NATO’s 2030 defence and deterrence architecture. Such interoperability will be vital to enabling the US to make better use of its forces and resources the world over and keep a strong deterrence presence in Europe with allies. Burden-sharing in politically demonstrable action.

Ultimately, enhanced standardization, interoperability and mobility are critical to what must be a new transatlantic strategic security and defence ‘contract’ – NATO 3.0. The US will continue to guarantee European defence in return for Europeans not only doing far more for their own defence, but helping the Americans to help them.  As such, S, I & M afford the Alliance not only tactical value, but strategic value. Why? Over the next decade seventy years of military-technological advancement really will be crammed into ten and force upon the world-wide web of democracies of which NATO is a critical part the most profound of choices: do we choose to be strategic prey or do we have teeth?

Julian Lindley-French