Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is an honour and a great pleasure to represent NATO here today, before such a distinguished audience and in a city that is the very avant garde of change and transformation. Our Command, Allied Command Transformation, is one of the two Strategic Commands in NATO, based in Norfolk, and is the catalyst of the Alliance Transformation a process to ensure that our Nations military are prepared to meet the challenges of the future.
Threats changed from a cold war scenario with a well defined enemy to a wide spectrum of risks, threats and potential strategic surprises.
During the past decades NATO has extended incrementally its interests outside the traditional area of responsibility. This process has seen the further involvement of NATO in the security environment. NATO today is an actor in a security environment where global challenges require global responses. Alliance members, however, need to have a common understanding of the nature of the future principal risks, and challenges they face and its military consequences.
Moreover, only with a clear vision of the role and core tasks will the Alliance be in a position to take the necessary political decisions, to prioritize the many tasks and identify the resources to fulfil them.
For this end, the Alliance is currently in the process of preparing a new Strategic Concept, that would lay out NATO's enduring purpose and nature and its fundamental security tasks, identify the central features of the new security environment, specify the elements of the Alliance's broad approach to security, and provide guidelines for the further transformation of its military forces.
To support and inform this process, Allied Command Transformation has in May completed the year long Multiple Futures Project (MFP), thereby providing a framework for the strategic assessment of the future and an understanding of its corresponding security and military implications for the Alliance. We looked at the trends and drivers, we developed plausible futures that we used to develop implications that we need to confront with.
One of the key conclusions drawn from the MFP is that the character of the evolving security environment places the Alliance and the international system at a crossroads, where crucial choices need to be made. In order to remain relevant and effective, NATO cannot limit its transformation efforts to marginal changes: successful transformation rests on a shared awareness of risks, challenges, solidarity and burden-sharing.
The adversaries are likely to confront us by combining irregular or conventional modes of attack, using a blend of primitive, traditional and high-tech weapons and tactics.
The nature of these evolving risks and threats will pose new demands for tools of prevention and response, making our military strength only one component of a much larger capability set that the Alliance will need to use. We will increasingly need to work in partnerships, leverage relationships with other international organisations to improve the transparency of information and decision-making. A comprehensive, interagency approach, developed in concert with other international organisations like the EU and UN, is fundamental to the security of a diverse Alliance.
As technology becomes less expensive and more widely available, our adversaries will focus on vulnerabilities, attacking our populations, centers of commerce and our integrated global economy, including our social networks and the facilitating but vulnerable global commons that we use to connect and prosper: the sea, air, space and cyberspace. Ensuring access and use of the global commons will be of central importance to security and prosperity of our peoples, and to successful Alliance operations.
The Alliance is also aware that it must turn its attention not just to immediate threats, but also to longer-term risks and challenges such as cyber attacks, disruptions in our energy supply and vital lines of communication, piracy and the inevitable security implications of climate change.
We need to respond to emerging risks and threats and to prepare for the security aspects of climate change. Let me give you a brief outline of how the Alliance is going forward in these areas and which challenges still lay ahead.
Here, I would like to quote the SECGEN, who, on October 1 has stated that “We may not yet know the precise effects, the exact costs or the definite dates of how climate change will affect our security. But we already know enough to start taking action: either we start to pay now, or we will pay much more later”.
The immediate consequences of catastrophic climatic events like storms, flooding and drought are well know to the global society and NATO has an elaborate and well functioning system of civil emergency planning, that spans more than 40 countries.
The challenges lying ahead will still concern such natural catastrophes; however, the true test for the international community as a whole is and will be how to deal with some of the more systemic, longer-term climatic changes that impact the livelihoods of peoples. These changes have humanitarian, economic, cultural and politic implications that can result in ethnic and religious conflicts (after large scale migrations); in tensions arising over access to vital resources (especially water, gas and oil), and in geopolitical and economic shifts when for example ice melting yields access to new trading routes and potential new resources.
The military aspect is here indeed only one tool in the toolbox: our work points us to need of interacting and engaging more even in advance of such issues, and we must adapt our organisations to act more interagency, exchanging information and making of cooperation and open architecture a norm.
So, protect information, in a need to share scenario, will become even more of a challange. NATO’s cyber defence policy establishes the basic principles and provides direction to NATO’s civil and military bodies in order to ensure a common and coordinated approach to cyber defence and any response to cyber attacks. It also contains recommendations for individual NATO countries on the protection of their national systems. We coordinate the cyber defence Centre of Excellence in Estonia and we have a Cyber Defence Concept which adds practical action programmes to fit within the overarching policy.
To better understand the threats in the cyber environment, NATO also needs to increase its cyber intelligence capability. This would include developing a greater ability to asses risks and vulnerabilities within the cyber world, modelling and profiling potential adversaries, and conducting damage estimates for potential targets. Timely and transparent provision of risk and threat information is particularly important when we need, conversely, to enhance openness and reach outside organisation: we cannot protect by closing systems anymore, rather we have the opposite requirement.
Furthermore, the Alliance needs to retain the technological advantage and strengthen the ability to rapidly asses emerging technologies and their potential use against the Alliance. The relationship with industry is very important in this regard. We have developed an initiative to improve collaboration with industry on practical activities that was discussed very successfully at the last Industry Day organized by ACT at the beginning of October.
The Multiple Futures includes also several references to maritime security risks and challenges on the maritime commons presented by demographic shifts, energy scarcity, organised crime, technology-savvy adversaries, terrorism and the proliferation of WMD. In this regard, NATO is developing a Maritime Security Operations Concept and a new Alliance Maritime Strategy. Both documents will be finalised by next year and feed into discussions on the new Strategic Concept. NATO’s role in counter-piracy is one important aspect of these discussions on maritime security, where the Alliance is investing significantly, as part of a broad international effort.
Operation Ocean Shield builds on the experience gained during Operation Allied Protector, NATO’s previous counter-piracy mission, and develops a distinctive NATO role based on the broad strength of the Alliance by adopting a more comprehensive approach to counter-piracy efforts. NATO’s capacity building effort will aim to assist regional states, upon their request, in developing their own ability to deal with piracy. This element of the operation is designed to complement existing international efforts and will contribute to an improved maritime security situation.
One important point in my view, however, is that we should work more in finding practical ways to build on the various international organisations’ and stakeholders’ strengths in order to develop pragmatic mechanisms for co-operation. This includes, of course, industry, a partner with which we want to develop closer relationships. I am convinced that a successful cooperation with industry could greatly enhance the effectiveness of counter-piracy efforts and, more in general, improve maritime security. I see a great potential in initiatives that involve information sharing and collaboration with industry.
There are several areas where NATO can contribute, for example with maritime forces and situational awareness. However, the principal added value of NATO is the standing command and control military structure. NATO can also help in support of maritime capacity building to improve local maritime governance with capabilities in lessons learned, education and training, technical assistance, and interoperability.
The key challenge is how to establish roles and mechanisms in order to improve cooperation between international military and non-military actors, define partnership and interagency models, and interoperability and security agreements for information exchange and sharing.
The coordination efforts should complement what others already do in order to build synergies between military and civilian stakeholders and develop an integrated approach that incorporates the strengthening of legal and maritime institutions, the involvement of local authorities, and the improvement of regional capacities. This can be done only working together by building an environment where information is made available and shared among the various actors. This would allow better situational awareness, the improvement of the decision making processes and the mitigatation of risks in the operational area.
In summary, security in today’s globalised world is much more demanding to achieve and far less perfect. The Alliance will have to maintain existing, and in some cases develop new capabilities and adapt its structures to address the emerging security risks and challenges. NATO, in this context, is one actor willing and able to contribute and complement what other international organizations and stakeholders do. Being able to establish and work in partnerships will be key for NATO to be relevant and contribute to global governance
Thank you very much for your attention, I am looking forward to hearing the experts on piracy, cyber risk and climate change – and to a good discussion afterwards.
