By Julian French.
Izmir, Turkey is a strategic tipping point for NATO. The December end of major combat operations in Afghanistan is being foreshadowed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine-Crimea. Ideally, at this pivotal moment NATO’s September 2014 Wales summit should consider the strategic and operational future of the Alliance into the 2020s.
To that end, I am attending high-level conferences in Washington, Britain and Paris to consider those issues and will act as rapporteur for one of those meetings. It is against that backdrop I have just attended and addressed the Corps Commanders’ Meeting at Allied Land Command in Izmir, Turkey in support of Lt. General Hodges and his team. Are NATO corps ready for the coming challenges?
So, what is my assessment of NATO’s corps? There were two NATOs on show in Izmir – hard corps and soft corps NATO. Some NATO nations get this and understand the need to re-generate Alliance deterrent credibility via a high-end force built on deployable strategic headquarters of which the corps are a key part.
Other NATO nations reject this and continue to emphasise low-level peace support operations and security force assistance – a kind of strategic Telly Tubbies land. The trouble is that too many of Europe’s political leaders are also attracted to this fool’s paradise and all too keen to make the false economy of endless defence cuts. It is a kind of strategic appeasement.
Therefore, NATO leaders must consider two options urgently. The preferred option would be a reformed force re-established on corps that are themselves firmly established on a high-end warfighting capability.
To that end a reform, experimentation, exercising and education development programme should ideally be put in place now to harmonise force concepts, structures, capabilities and doctrines.
Another option is in effect what exists today – corps that are similar in name only, operating at very different levels of ambition and capability. At present several NATO nations seem profoundly opposed to the idea of high-end reform.
My sense of the conference was of good people grappling with big issues and trying to back engineer grand strategic solutions via the military-strategic backdoor.
They will only get so far. What they need is clear political guidance allied to a renewed requisite level of ambition that properly prepares NATO forces for the undoubted challenges ahead. Surely that is one lesson of President Putin’s adventurism – if that is our politicians have the courage to see tha
