UPN, Alm.del - 2012-13 - Bilag 260: Smart Defence

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IntroductionIn February 2011, NATO’s Secretary General introduced theSmart Defenceinitiative.The idea behind Smart Defence is “ensuringgreater security, for less money,by working together with moreﬂexibility”.As part of this approach, the SecGenadvocated for nations to“pool and share capabilities, to set the right priorities, andto better coordinate our efforts”.1This brief will discuss the key concepts of Smart Defence with regard to theinitiative’s likelihood of facilitating efforts by NATO nations to build adequate andcoherent military capabilities. Further, the brief will suggest ways to reinforce theSmart Defence initiative and to ensure better coordination of reductions in nationalmilitary capabilities.

Why Smart Defence?The Smart Defence initiative was launched by the NATO SecGen in 2011, and thereare good reasons to believe that the initiative could turn out to be successful:First of all, the currentﬁnancial crisis has led to signiﬁcant and uncoordinated cutsin defence budgets amongst almost all of the European NATO nations, and theUS is planning to cut defence spending by approximately $1 trillion over the nextdecade. The defence cuts could ultimately limit NATO’s ability to undertake Article5 missions as well as other core missions agreed to in the 2010 Strategic Concept.Secondly, NATO’s operation in Libya in 2011 made it clear that there are severalgaps in the capabilities of the European NATO nations. Essentially, the operationcould not have been undertaken without the involvement of the US in providingcertain capabilities, e.g. Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance and Air-to-Air Refuelling.Thirdly, the current rebalancing of focus from Europe to Asia by the US indicatesthat the European NATO nations may have to take on greater responsibility if NATO,in the future, is to play an active role in providing security for its members.And lastly, there is a growing disparity between US defence spending and Europeandefence spending, which in the long run could jeopardize the transatlantic link. Thiswas very clearly expressed by former US Secretary of Defence Robert M. Gates inhis famous speech in June, 2011.2

maintaining and acquiring defence capabilities – in other words, nationsworking together to deliver capabilities that they cannot afford alone.3To this end, NATO’s responsibility is to make sure that cooperation, prioritization,and specialization are done in a cooperative way between the nations.The nations’ responsibilities are to identify relevant projects and partners forcooperation and appoint a lead nation for each project, and to engage in bilateralor multilateral cooperation with each other.

SpecializationNATO describes specialization like this:With budgets under pressure, nations make unilateral decisions to abandoncertain capabilities. When that happens the other nations fall under anincreased obligation to maintain those capabilities. Such specialization “bydefault” is the inevitable result of uncoordinated budget cuts. NATO shouldencourage specialization “by design” so that members concentrate on theirnational strengths and agree to coordinate planned defence budget cuts withthe Allies, while maintaining national sovereignty for theirﬁnal decision.6Specialization can also take place as so-called “pooling” and “sharing”. Poolingentails a multinational structure, multinational leadership and common funding,whereas sharing implies national structures and national leadership and funding.

Will Smart Defence be an enabler for maintaining and develo-ping coherent military capabilities?CooperationThere are currently 24 Smart Defence multinational cooperation projects7– allfunded by the participating nations on a case by case basis. The 24 projectsare mostly of a relatively small scale, e.g. interoperability improvements, logisticpartnerships, and individual training and education programmes. These projects andcooperation on a limited scale in general would most likely happen by themselves,as they did in the past, and not just because of the Smart Defence initiative - e.g.theﬁve Nordic countries that have traditionally cooperated on defence issues in theso called NORDEFCO to explore common synergies and facilitate efﬁcient commonsolutions8. This and similar cooperation initiatives are taking place because ofnational interest - the nations involved can see a beneﬁt in doing it.Even if Smart Defence turns out to be an enabler for more intensive cooperationamong like-minded nations, it likely will not signiﬁcantly impact the nations’ militarycapabilities since most of the cooperation is on a relatively small scale. In the longterm, however, cooperation between nations will help build trust and solidarityamong the nations, which is essential to making Smart Defence succeed.

PrioritizationFor years, nations have developed their national military capabilities with littleregard to the capabilities NATO has required them to develop. Smart Defence isnot likely going to change that - nations are sovereign and make decisions basedupon their national interests.Also, the current NATO Defence Planning Process (NDPP) does not exactly supportSmart Defence. The NDPP is a framework for NATO’s capability development - itsaim is to ensure that, nation by nation, NATO’s accumulated capabilities meetNATO’s minimum military requirements. The backdrop for the NDPP is the politicallevel of ambition, which currently calls for NATO to be able to undertake two majorjoint operations and six smaller operations simultaneously. By maintaining this veryhigh level of ambition, NATO is undermining the credibility of the NDPP to an extentthat NATO’s targets for each of the nations’ military capabilities are more or lessdisregarded by the nations. The requirements will, to a large extent, be perceivedas more and more unrealistic as the gap between the targets and the real worldcapabilities widens because of reductions in defence spending. At the same time,there is a lack of transparency when NATO translates the political level of ambitioninto national targets, which further undermines the credibility of the targets.

means that a nation gives up one or more capabilities and relies upon other nationsto provide those functions. Specialization “by design” would likely create a morerational defence structure in NATO for less money.The reason why role and task sharing will hardly gain much traction is that manycore military capabilities, once they are given up, are very hard to build again ifthe strategic security situation changes for the worse. Thus, role and task sharingleads to gaps in the nations’ capabilities that could only beﬁlled by others, andthis increased dependency on other nations is too high a political price to pay formany nations. Essentially, it is a matter of trust: trusting that nation A would makecapability X available to nation B in case of a crisis situation if nation B has chosento give up that capability. This kind of trust is very difﬁcult to achieve even amongstAllies in NATO, and the more critical a capability is perceived to be, the less likelyit is to be given up.In reality, however, many of the smaller NATO nations have already given up core warﬁghting capabilities since the end of the Cold War, e.g. Denmark’s abandonment ofits submarine capability and its ground based air defence capabilities, to mention afew. Many of the smaller NATO nations have, in fact, for years relied on their NATOpartners to provide those capabilities they could not afford to acquire by themselves.Thus, looking at it from the perspective of small nations, NATO is Smart Defence.In general, nations are maintaining and developing those military capabilities thatare perceived to best support national interests and not necessarily those thatsupport a more collective purpose. And they all decide independently when andhow to use their capabilities.

Specialization - pooling and sharingMany military capabilities are so expensive that most NATO nations are not able todevelop them on their own. Many nations should therefore be interested in poolingand sharing capabilities such as Strategic Air Lift and Air-to-Air Refuelling, whichare examples of capabilities that are important to NATO but that not all nationscan afford to have. It makes good sense to pool and share, and the political cost tothe nations involved is low because those nations would not be able to afford thecapabilities on their own in theﬁrst place. All involved nations would beneﬁt fromsuch projects. So why is this not happening to a larger extent?First of all, these kinds of assets are typically not perceived as critical to a nation’sability to defend itself, and thereby they become secondary for most of the smallerNATO nations with limited defence budgets.Secondly, the paradigm for many years has been that the US has provided forcemultipliers, state-of-the-art technology and strategic military capabilities for NATOoperations. As a result, most NATO Allies have refrained from investing in similarcapabilities or even thought about pooling and sharing similar military capabilities.Prior to NATO’s operation in Libya in 2011, it was hard to imagine NATO involvement

What can be done to overcome the obstacles?To put it very simply, the nations do whatever serves their interests best. Therefore,the challenge for NATO is how to change the setting and make the nations investmore effectively in their own security - in terms of military capabilities that arecoherent and serve the purpose of the Alliance, while at the same time serving thepurpose of the individual nations.One of the main challenges is how NATO can articulate common, realistic prioritiesconsistent with the mission and level of ambition of the alliance while aligning thepriorities of each nation with the priorities of the alliance.To this end, it does not make sense to maintain a very high level of ambition andrequire the nations to spend more and develop new capabilities when, instead, thechallenge currently is the other way around: to maintain as many critical capabilitiesas possible while nations are desperately trying to save money.Thus, NATO must,ﬁrst of all, develop a more realistic, lower level of ambition. Thechallenge is to reach consensus on a new level of ambition since there are differentinterests among nations. Basically, there are two main groupings within NATO: agroup of nations wanting to give priority to collective defence and a group of nationswanting to prioritize NATO’s ability to operate “out of area”. At the same time, thereis an increasing need for the European NATO nations to be able to “walk alone”if the US is engaged elsewhere, e.g. in Asia. In any case, the US would, for theforeseeable future, be able to undertake missions on a global scale on its own, sothe challenge is really for the European nations to reach a consensus on the extentto which they want to be able to undertake crisis response operations without theUS - how many operations they would be able to undertake simultaneously, on whatscale and how far from Europe. In any case, it is essential for the level of ambitionto be in harmony with the nations’ interests if they are to accept it as a baselinefor capability development.Based on a more realistic level of ambition, a transparent analysis should beundertaken to derive a more credible catalogue of minimum capability requirements- that process would ensure that NATO would be able to meet the political level ofambition. Realistic, transparent and consensus-based capability requirementswould serve as an incentive to the nations to align their national priorities withNATO’s priorities.

Further, NATO should play a more active role in trying to integrate aspects of SmartDefence with the NDPP, e.g. by looking at how, in a structured way, to develop“islands of cooperation” between NATO nations with common interests. For example,it should look at the following issues:Level of ambition - Or rather, strategic culture. For example, some nations believethat NATO should focus mainly on defence and security in Europe while otherssee NATO as a potential global player.Geography – Often, nations within the same geographical area share threatperception and have a tradition for cooperation in other areas than defence.Size, language, culture, shared values, etc. also matter.NATO should not apportion requirements and set targets for speciﬁc nations butinstead should do that for groups of nations willing to cooperate closely on capabilitydevelopment. Nations with a high level of trust in each other should be identiﬁed, andkey enabling capabilities not perceived as critical for the nations’ security interestsshould be identiﬁed, e.g. air transport, air-to-air refuelling, helicopter support, etc.,with the aim of getting the nations to engage in role and task sharing or to pooland share capabilities.Once specialization with less critical capabilities has been established, it couldserve as a basis for building further trust and for specialization in areas the nationscurrently see as critical to their respective national interests. What is important isthat the targets, both those set for an individual nation as well as those set for agroup of nations, are premised on a consensus-based political level of ambitionand are perceived as essential by the nations and thus work as a true incentive topursue the targets.In conclusion, Smart Defence has the potential for becoming a success. But in orderto make a real difference, NATO must agree to a more realistic level of ambition andadopt a more transparent NDPP process. First and foremost, NATO must take on amuch more active role in identifying areas of common interest among nations andin aligning these with the NDPP to the maximum extent possible.

1 Anders Fogh Rasmusen,“Building Security in the Age of Austerity”,Keynote speech atthe 2011 Munich Security Conference, February 2011.2 Roberts M. Gates,The Security and Defense Agenda (Future of NATO)”,Speech,Brussels, Belgium, June 10, 2011, retrieved fromhttp://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1581,accessed 27.04.2013.3 Alexander Vershbow,“Closing the gap: Keeping NATO strong in an era of austerity”,Speech at the 48th Annual Security Conference of the Norwegian Atlantic Committee, Oslo,Norway, February 2013.4 NATO website,http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_84268.htm,“SmartDefence/The Constituents of Smart Defence”,accessed 27.04.2013.5 Ibid.6 Ibid.7 NATO website,http://www.nato.int/nato_static/assets/pdf/pdf_2012_10/20121008_media-backgrounder_Multinational-Projects_en.pdf,media background, “Multinationalprojects”,accessed 27.04.2013.8 NORDEFCO website,http://www.nordefco.org/The-basics-about-NORDEFCO,“AboutNORDEFCO”,accessed 27.04.2013.