“Two
roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less travelled by, and that has
made all the difference”.
Robert
Frost
Norfolk, Virginia. 4
April. Yesterday I had the honour of addressing NATO’s Allied Command
Transformation as a guest of the Supreme Allied Commander Transformation,
General Denis Mercier. The title of my talk was “The Innovation Game”, whilst the
essence of my argument was that NATO must become a security and defence
thinking machine if Allied defence and deterrence are to be credible in a
non-linear age. How does NATO get from where it is today to where we need it to
be? The Alliance must innovate with ‘ACT’ NATO’s great agent of change.
Nor did I pull my
punches; if the Alliance is to prevail in its mission it must completely
rethink its own role in security and defence and, indeed, the very way we think
about security and defence. Through ACT the Alliance must reach out to
innovators across many fields if it is to forge innovation and the best
practice it fosters in pursuit of comparative strategic advantage. And, there
is no question that ACT is doing some excellent work to foster such goals.
After all, why bother inviting a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad like
me to speak?
The other week, in the
wake of a big conference in Budapest, I had roasted the political and
diplomatic leadership of the Alliance for talking innovation, but not walking
it. Which brings me to the anomaly of ACT. NATO has a command ready-made to
think, to experiment, and to take innovative risk. What impressed me was the
quality of the people at ACT, the first and most important battle any
organisation must win if permanency of innovation is to be built into its DNA.
But there is a ‘but’. There
are at least two barriers to ACT acting to effect as NATO’s innovation hub. The
first barrier is NATO itself. ACT should be the elite think-tank of the
Alliance, the experimenter, the simulator. And yet, the NATO system does not
allow SACT to choose the best and the brightest from across the Alliance.
Tellingly, one officer said to me that “eighty percent of the work is done by
twenty percent of the people”.
The other barrier was the
cynicism of some ACT staff members. The civilians at ACT have no career
progression beyond ACT and can become ‘parked’. Military officers come and go
and, I suspect, many of them leave little creative turbulence in their wake.
Now, having worked in my time at both NATO and the EU I know how easy it is to
be crushed by the stultifying preponderance of lowest common denominator
bureaucracy. After a time it is simply too easy to say, “oh well, I tried”.
THAT is perhaps NATO’s biggest trap right now.
Why does ACT matter? If
the Alliance cannot prove it adds value to US security it will fade. As I write
this I am on the train from Norfolk to Washington DC for high-level discussions
on the future of NATO. This week President Trump and his team are preparing for
the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping, and considering what to do with a
dangerously predictable North Korea.
NATO faces a crisis of
ends, ways, and means. Innovation, with ACT in the lead, would not only
demonstrate to an increasingly sceptical Washington that the Allies ‘get it’
and that Canadian and European security is as much about keeping America strong
where it needs to be strong, as it is about American troops defending the NATO
space. It is that implicit ‘contract’ that is the very essence of the twenty-first
century Alliance.
If an ambitious innovation
agenda is to be realised the whole command must become an innovator,
established on an innovation culture. Innovation would thus become a vital
component in NATO’s strategic communications to allies and adversaries alike
about the ability of the Alliance to adapt.
However, for that messaging to be generated ACT needs to be systematic
in its approach to innovation. That means ACT must build a development
programme that can act as a vehicle for innovation, reach out to new partners
in innovation, and establish a knowledge-led approach to the understanding of
risks, challenges, and opportunities. That also means everyone at ACT buying into
the effort. Innovation only ever works if people really believe in it.
Innovation to what end? The
Alliance must adopt what I call an outcomes-based approach to security and
defence. That means big and bold thinking
about ends, ways and means, and what tools – both civil and military – the
Alliance and its nations will need to generate such outcomes. At the very least NATO will need to strike a
radical new balance between efficiency and effectiveness.
NATO is at a fork in its
long road, albeit deep in a dark wood called uncertainty. Innovation is where
strategy meets practice to close the gap between ends, ways, and means and thus
create clarity. To that end, ACT should be equipped with the tools, but above
all the people to think radically about how NATO innovates. In other words, ACT
must cut a new path through that dark wood because Allied Command Future
Operations (for that is what ACT is) IS the future of NATO.
Allied Command
Innovation?
Julian
Lindley-French
