February
3rd, 2022
The TAG
NATO Shadow Strategic Concept 2022
2022 is
an inflection point for NATO. It would be easy to think that the future of NATO
is all about what is happening today in Ukraine. The current crisis is hugely
important but the future of the Alliance is not simply about the future of
NATO-Russia relations. There are other
vital questions that must be addressed. What will be NATO’s role in Europe and
the wider world? What kind of NATO will needed by 2030 if the Alliance is to
continue to credibly preserve peace and protect people? What must NATO and its
nations be collectively thinking about going beyond 2030? These are the
questions that The Alphen Group (TAG), which I have the honor to chair, set out
to answer with the publication today of the TAG Shadow NATO Strategic Concept
2022 (link above) by the German Marshall Fund, the Canadian Global Affairs
Institute and the Norwegian Atlantic Committee.
Strategic
Concept 2022 is no ordinary piece of think-tankery. It is also very much a team
effort involving all the members of The Alphen Group. Whilst I acted as lead writer it is really the
product of some very serious thinking by some very serious people. These include Ambassador Alexander Vershbow, a former NATO Deputy Secretary General
and US Ambassador to both NATO and Russia; Lieutenant-General (Ret.) Heinrich
Brauss, the former NATO Assistant Secretary-General for Policy and Planning;
General (Ret.) Sir James Everard, the former NATO Deputy Supreme Allied
Commander, Europe; Lieutenant-General (Ret.) Ben Hodges, former Commander of
the US Army in Europe; Admiral (Ret.) Giampaolo di Paola, the former Italian
Defence Minister, Chief of Defence Staff and Chairman of the NATO Military
Committee; General the Lord Richards, the former Chief of the British Defence
Staff; Ambassador Stefano Stefanini, and the former Italian Permanent
Representative to NATO; and Jim Townsend, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary
of Defense for Eurasian Affairs at the Pentagon.
NATO tomorrow
Preserving peace and protecting people will demand
of the Alliance the credible ability to both deter aggression at the high-end
of the conflict spectrum and deal with the continued threat posed by terrorism
and the instability it spawns.
Collective defense, crisis management, co-operative security will thus
remain the three core missions of the Alliance but in a markedly-changed and
changing strategic environment compared with 2010 when the last such strategy
was drafted. However, NATO will be unable to project stabilizing influence and
deterrence power if its home-base is critically vulnerable to attack and
corrosive manipulation. Therefore,
Strategic Concept 2022 establishes the improved resilience of Allied societies
as an urgent NATO priority.
Furthermore, Strategic Concept 2022 also envisions
NATO is a very different geopolitical context than 2010. The unrelenting rise
of China as an economic and putative military superpower is changing the
fundamental assumptions Washington must make to realize US security and defense
interests. In the past more capable European Allies would have been nice for
the US to have, it is now an imperative, if not the greatest single strategic imperative
in Strategic Concept 2022. The only way the Americans will be able to maintain
their security guarantee to Europe will be if Europeans take on far more
strategic responsibility for their own defense.
That is one of the many geopolitical lessons arising from the current
Ukraine crisis. The Americans are not only facing the prospect of Russian
aggression in Europe, but also a China that is systematically searching for
ways and means to weaken America, not least by exploiting the growing
over-stretch from to which US forces are increasingly subject the world
over.
Implicit in Strategic Concept 2022 is a new
transatlantic security ‘contract’ that reflects the realities of the 2020s, not
the 1950s, built on a far more equitable sharing of the burdens of both risk
and cost of alliance between the US and its Allies. Specifically, Strategic
Concept 2022 calls on Canada and the European Allies to invest
sufficient forces and resources by 2030 to collectively meet at least
50 percent of NATO’s Minimum
Military Requirements identified by the strategic commanders. These will
include fully usable forces required to cover the whole spectrum of operations
and missions, as well as the strategic enablers required to conduct multiple demanding
large and smaller-scale operations. Such operations will be conducted both
alongside US forces in a variety of regions inside and outside SACEUR’s area of
responsibility, as well as autonomously when agreed.
NATO the day after tomorrow
2030 is the day after tomorrow in
defense planning but what will be change agent to match NATO’s new ends, ways
and means? Strategic Concept 2022 calls on the Canadian and European Allies to by
2030 at the latest stand up a new NATO Allied Command Operations Mobile Heavy
Force (AMHF). The AMHF will consolidate all Allied rapid response forces into a
single pool of forces supported by the requisite force and command structures. Critically,
the AMHF will act as a high-end, first responder Allied Future Force designed
to act from seabed to space and across the multi-domains of air, sea, land,
cyber, space, information, and knowledge. The AMHF will be sufficiently robust
and responsive, and held at a sufficiently high level of readiness, to meet any
and all threats to the territory of the Euro-Atlantic area in the first
instance, and have sufficient capacity to also support those frontline nations
facing transnational threats such as terrorism. The AMHF will thus build on the
Very High Readiness Joint Task Force and the enhanced NATO Response Force, as
well as those very high readiness forces that will emerge from the vital NATO
Readiness Initiative.
The AMHF will enable the Allies maintain a high degree of affordable interoperability with fast-evolving US forces. As such, the AMHF will act as the single most important force integrator as well as the guardian of high-end force interoperability vital to NATO’s deterrence and defense posture. It will also be the synergizing change agent for the introduction into the Allied Order of Battle of artificial intelligence, super/quantum computing, big data, machine learning, drone swarming, and autonomous capabilities (for example, manned-unmanned teaming, decoys, relays, and networked autonomous systems), hypersonic weapon systems to enable an allied capability to engage in hyper-fast warfare.
The AMHF will be flexible and deployable in several guises and under more than one flag, including as a NATO-enabled European coalition (both EU allies and partners) or as a framework for coalitions of the willing and able. Above all, the AMHF will be proof of a transformed NATO by giving shape, purpose and meaning to greater European strategic responsibility. Such responsibility, and the autonomy it eventually fosters will be a function of power not words and reflect the relative military capability and capacity of America’s Allies inside NATO. It must be seen clearly as such. Reinforced by new ‘enablers’, such as combat support and combat service support, and transformative and integrative professional military education the AMHF will be designed to exploit NATO’s richest resource – its free citizens.
NATO the day after 2030
Joe Robinson, CEO of Defence Improbable, in an excellent opinion piece entitled China is stealing a march in the metaverse arms race, offered a
sobering vision of the future: “The metaverse for war is not science fiction.
These capabilities exist to today. I know this because my company builds some
of the foundational technologies”. Strategic
Concept 2022 looks out to 2030 because strategy in democracies is the art of
the politically possible. However, Joe’s
message is compelling. NATO MUST look now beyond 2030 to a world in which
warfare will take place across a new spectrum of hybrid war, cyber war and
super-fast hyper war and be conducted at speeds beyond human command
imagination. A world in which adversaries will seek to systematically exploit
every vulnerability of open, democratic societies by inflicting perma-war
across 5Ds of disinformation, deception, disruption, destabilization, and
applied complex strategic coercion through the implied threat of destruction.
Artificial Intelligence, quantum computing, data harvesting, machine learning
and Big Data applications will (and are) be the harbingers of such warfare, as
well as its multipliers.
Therefore, NATO must begin thinking now outside of
its very well-established boxes. The Alliance will need to enter a new world, a
virtual, immersive, secure world in which NATO can test planning and policy,
craft responses, identify vulnerabilities and reinforce them, and
systematically explore the vulnerabilities of adversaries. Such a response will stretch NATO’s leaders
conceptually and demand a new vision of defense education and information that
stretches from leader to defender to create an entirely new concept of
deterrence that also stretches across the meta-sphere from information warfare
to cyber warfare to the most exotic reaches of seabed to space hyper warfare.
Fast information and knowledge will not only be
vital it must be at the cutting edge of Allied preparedness and readiness, it
will be at the very heart of credible deterrence and defense. To do that the
Alliance will also need new defenders and create for a place for them, people
who are creative, constructive disruptors who do not necessarily fit the
traditional policy or military mold. In
short, to prevail NATO must become a new strategic nexus where political leaders
and military commanders meet academia and the games industry on an equal
innovative footing if the Alliance is to match the speed of relevance in any
future war and thus maintain credible deterrence. Such civil-military fusion
will be as vital as Allied military-military fusion and will need to be driven
by entirely new ideas of standardization, innovation and interoperability. Much
of NATO’s future technology and expertise will come from the commercial sector
and be driven by it. For Europe and its analogue defense and technological base
that will mean nothing less than a digital and digitizing revolution and a
complete rethink about just who or what is in the defense sector of the future.
Less metal bashers, more systems integrators.
In our latest Oxford University book, Future War and the Defence of Europe, General
(Ret.) John R. Allen, Lieutenant-General (Ret.) Ben Hodges and I write “Critically, much stronger strategic public private
partnerships need to be forged both to prepare for shock across the spectrum of
adverse events and to recover from them. One consequence of globalization has
been the progressive decoupling of Western states from Western corporations
with the very idea of the multinational corporation as the antithesis of the
Western nation-state. A far stronger
partnership between the public and private sectors IN states and across states
will now be crucial, and not just to limit the effects of systemic shock”. Amen
to that!
NATO now
Finally, what of
Ukraine and Afghanistan now? Sadly, there is not much NATO can any longer do
for the brave people of Afghanistan other than learn the lessons of a failed
campaign and the need for more robust political cohesion, more intelligent use
of military force, greater civil-military integration and deeper strategic patience.
Ukraine is another matter. Strategic Concept 2022 is clear: the Alliance must launch a Ukrainian Deterrence
Initiative (UDI) as an extension of the Alliance’s Enhanced Opportunity Partner
program. Under the UDI, the allies must do all they can to assist Ukraine to
defend itself, dissuade Russia from launching further aggression, and thus
increase Kyiv’s leverage in pursuit of a political settlement to the conflict
in Donbas. The UDI must include the provision of military equipment and
training, as well as efforts to enhance Ukraine’s resilience against
cyber-attacks, disinformation, economic warfare, and political subversion. The
UDI will also establish a function-driven form of partnership, making it a
formal Alliance responsibility to help train Ukrainian armed forces and to
facilitate their acquisition of modern defensive weapons backed by common
funding. Similar support should be offered to Georgia.
Ukraine is a test of collective resolve. For several Allies who are not on the outer boundaries of either NATO or the EU, and who face debt-ridden post COVID economies, the conceit of many Europeans over Ukraine is very similar to that of Neville Chamberlain about another ‘artificial’ (as he saw post-Versailles Czechoslovakia) country: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing”. Like Chamberlain, many Allies fail to realize the price they could pay in the longer run by holding on to cherished delusions over the shorter-term. At least Baldwin and Chamberlain rearmed from 1934 onwards as an insurance policy. NATO?
The TAG
NATO Shadow Strategic Concept 2022. The Alphen Group commends our report to
you.
Julian
Lindley-French
