Bologna, Italy. 29
October. I love Italy. As I write this I am gazing down from on high
over-looking the Po Valley that separates Bologna from Milan re-thinking
NATO. That in any case was the title of
the conference I have just attended (high level of course); Dynamic Change: Re-thinking NATO. Still, as I wrapped up the conference in my
now accustomed role as a strategic hooligan it struck me that if NATO’s members
could just summon up even a modicum of strategic honesty NATO has an
opportunity to remodel itself that it has never had before nor will likely ever
have again. Indeed, 2014 when NATO leaves
Afghanistan (and it will), will be as close to a defence planning Year Zero as
it is possible to get.
The problem is that
NATO members today range from the “I’m small get me out of here” type of country
through the “I used to be important and I ought to be listened to” country up to
(of course) the one “my way or the highway” country. Apart from the latter they all suffer from a crippling disease called strategic pretence with “national strategies” for NOT
doing things, also called “dynamic” and which talk about “change” a
lot. The result is
NATO’s Defence Planning Process by which NATO’s Europeans – the pygmy powers -
pretend to the “my way or the highway” country that they are fully committed to
what the latter calls “transformation” and the "my way or the highway" country pretends to believe them.
Naturally, the “my way or the highway” country has a 'plan' (they have a lot of those). In the plan the pygmy powers and their bonzai militaries will join
together to render unto someonw they call Uncle Same a NATO Europe cast in his image, albeit a midget version. This may or may not include the Canadians as
no-one can decipher anything Ottawa ever says these days as it is so
politically-correct. Does anyone speak
Canadian around here? Now, another reason the “my
way or the highway” country pretends to believe the pygmies is because
their defence-industrial “champions”, otherwise known as gangsters, have erected
a big neon sign over Europe that flashes “suckers”.
Today NATO Defence Planning is one of
the greatest works of European fiction since Dante’s Inferno: the Four Choices
before the Apocalypse. Indeed, if the
European Onion can be awarded the Nobel Prize for Not Yet Being in Pieces then
surely NATO Defence Planning should be up for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
To finesse this lack of
mutual comprehension away NATO talks a lot about “language”. Indeed, anyone who has worked for NATO knows
the importance of “language” which in human-speak means the use of long words
in by and large indecipherable documents to present full-scale and rapid decline as efficiency and effectiveness.
The thing is that the
pygmies, even the smaller pygmies, are slowly waking up to life beyond December
2014. It is going to be a big, bad and for the
first time in four hundred years not waking up every morning being impressed by
Europeans world (I exaggerate that bit for effect). In such a world defence transformation will
really matter and in defence planning terms 2014 is yesterday. Unfortunately, the gap between what Europeans
need to do to defend their vital interests and what they can do is now so wide
that only a true work of grand fiction can mask it. Most small bands of bedraggled European
brothers (and sisters) that these days pass for armies could now fit inside an old London
double decker bus, if we could afford it that is. Strategic logic would suggest much deeper military synergy for some even defence integration. The problem is the lack of trust after eleven years of Afghanistan.
For those reasons all the future planning
I have seen is old wine in new bottles.
It is of course sprinkled with the current buzzwords of military-speak and
much emphasis is now being placed on two blokes in the Special Forces who
apparently in future will be able to achieve the same as an entire army
today. In the real world Europe’s pygmy governments
are broke, want to cut armed forces further and have no intention of doing very much for their defence. Their respective navies, air
forces and armies are also far more interested in fighting each other than defending
me, which in military-speak is called – jointness.
My own “I used to be
important but ought to be listened to” country is a case in point. Soon to become two “I’m small get me out of
here” countries, and having spent the last eleven years fighting wars with
“please after you” allies, it too has decided to become a “please, after
you” ally as it seems a lot more effective to get others to fight your wars for you than do it yourself. It is a sad delusion not least because the “my way or the
highway” country will soon conclude NATO no way.
Carpe diem as they say in these here parts (or at least used to). NATO is not a Terry Pratchett novel and we Europeans do not live in a Disc-World atop a giant turtle - it just seems like that.
2014: NATO Year Zero
Julian Lindley-French
