The south Caucasus and NATO’s defence education enhancement programme. The measurement of its effectiveness

Khayal Iskandarov,Piotr Gawliczek

doi:10.33445/sds.2021.11.1.7

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to review NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme (DEEP) and to bring to the fore the measures of effectiveness regarding its implementation and to determine its shortcomings in the South Caucasus region. At the same time, the paper highlights the efforts of the DEEP teams to influence the partner educators through dialogue and encouragement. The authors refer to the best examples considering the measures of effectiveness. Considering the outcomes achieved by the partner nations, they endeavoured to apply Kirkpatrick model for measuring DEEP’s effectiveness in the South Caucasus countries. The paper discusses how they can more effectively address the challenges in their professional military education (PME) through their tailored DEEPs. The paper analyzes the processes that led by the South Caucasus nations, their national interests and what steps still need to be taken to realize their ambitions to be intellectually interoperable with NATO forces.

Highlights

Education and training are one of the main domains of cooperation between North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and partner nations
Until the mid-2000s, NATO support to partner states had primarily focused on the guidelines of the 1999 Training and Education Enhancement Program (TEEP), which was intended to promote interoperability “in the field” (Jean d’Andurain, 2012)
It is offered to partners not as an exact prescription to be adopted wholesale but rather as a set of generic suggestions to consider in drafting their own course content, drawing on the methods in curriculum development they see in the document

Summary

Introduction

Education and training are one of the main domains of cooperation between NATO and partner nations. It is what is motivating NATO to shift its attention from weapons systems to joint, multinational and interagency education and training of those people who more broadly develop and employ the doctrines, strategies and policies that integrate all the instruments of power – political, military, economic and informational – to produce leaders better equipped to deal with a range of issues that define the twenty-first-century security environment: “smart power” (James Keagle, 2010). The nations in the South-Caucasus region have been struggling to reach Western standards in every possible field since they got their independence from the USSR. Their armed forces were founded in the period of chaos resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union when all three countries were suffering from wars. It begs the question of “How to measure the effectiveness of DEEP’s implementation?” Comparative analysis, synthesis, inductive and deductive methods have been used in the paper to come up with conclusive outcomes and recommendations for the countries in the region

Objectives

Results

Conclusion