NATO Defence Planning Research Articles

Allied Maritime Forces Transformation: Towards a Defence Planning Process That Includes Adaptable Warships

Warships have long service lives. During the life of a warship the types of operations that will be assigned to the ship will change (this happened for example at the end of the Cold War), the technology behind the installed systems will advance (e.g., radar performance and miniaturisation) and new technologies will emerge. New technologies are likely to require changes in the way operations are presently conducted (e.g., off-board systems for conducting mine countermeasures operations) and can deliver new operational capabilities to the ship (e.g., directed-energy weapon systems). For these reasons, warships can only maintain maximum operational relevance through-life if their operational capabilities can be augmented and adapted to meet changing user requirements. NATO nations and partners, and also their peer competitors, are designing and building more adaptable warships. A common characteristic of these ships is that mission essential systems can be added to and removed from the ship in a relatively short time period. Warship roles can thus be reconfigured. The future of this trend is transforming the NATO defence planning process so that the future structure of the allied maritime forces will include an appropriate mix of adaptable warships and up-to-date mission packages that can respond to constantly changing operational tasking. The naval architect is already aware that traditional warship design features must be re-worked to accommodate modular, in addition to—or even to replace—organic systems. This paper considers the transformation from the engineering and management of mission packages, their deployment and integration into new warship designs towards a new maritime defence planning philosophy and process.

Defence Planning in the Fog of Peace: The Transatlantic Currency Conversion Conundrum

Resource allocation to and within defense budgets is grand strategy. NATO and the EU coordinate defense planning and encourage fair burden-sharing among their members. We analyse the effect of agreed planning processes, namely the ‘NATO Defence Planning Process (NDPP)’ on the conversion of political will to resources and then to capabilities development across the transatlantic security community, adding to conversations on hierarchy and order in international politics. In a ‘fog of peace’ featuring diverse threats, and in which allies may disagree on strategic rivals and sources of risk, national and regional political economies shape strategy, not the other way around.

Rediscovering geography in NATO defence planning

ABSTRACT This article explores the relevance of geography in NATO defence planning. Historical analysis of strategic concepts and other planning documents suggests a pendulum movement from treating geography as the central organising principle within the alliance, to downplaying its role in favour of functional considerations, and back. In view of mounting tensions alongside Europe’s eastern and southern flanks, this argument acquires contemporary relevance with regards to how alliance responsibilities can be (re)distributed. Rediscovering the early principle that allies should concentrate on those tasks for which they are the most geographically suited offers a promising approach for a new division of labour.

Comparative Analysis of National Approaches to Military Capability Planning

Abstract National defence planning processes are often compared with the NATO Defence Planning Process (NDPP). Taking into account that NDPP needs commonly agreed criteria to evaluate military capabilities of the different nations, and given the significant effort invested in performance measurement by several nations, it would be beneficial to examine how respective nations are currently assessing their performance within the capability-based planning process, with a view to establishing potential common measures that would benefit individual nations while addressing the needs of NATO at the same time. The principles which the NDPP is based on are referred to in some of national defence strategic documents, although there is no explicitly statement that the national defence planning process should be tailored in the same way as it is the case of the NDPP. In order to find an answer to the above mentioned issue and identify common practices and lessons to support capability planning within nations and NATO an analysis was carried out with the objective of identifying to which extent national planning processes of respective nations correlate with principles of NDPP as well as with principles of the EU capability development.

NATO Defence Planning Process. Implications for defence posture

NATO Defence Planning Process. Implications for defence posture

The Promise of NATO Defence Planning

The Promise of NATO Defence Planning

Aplikace systémové dynamiky v procesu sdílení vojenských schopností

The article describes the application of system dynamics in the process military capabilities sharing of the Czech Republic with Alliance allies. The aim is not to capture the problem in all its aspects, but is focused on the process of multinational capabilities sharing with accent for the Army of the Czech Republic, which has been suffer in the last few years the reduction in the defence spending. Czech Republic gradually came with its defence budget into the group of countries that profit from its membership in NATO, but without its own contribution for developing of its military capabilities. The basic precondition for the capability and readiness of the Alliance to face current and new security challenges, is the necessity to have adequate capabilities. For achieving this goal is essential higher and more responsible involvement the European countries of the Alliance for collective defence, including the Czech Republic. Ongoing Ukrainian crisis and the behavior of the Russian Federation represent a fundamental change in the security environment in Europe and therefore changing the assumptions on which the Alliance is preparing to fulfil tasks. Solving problems in capabilities can be achieve by properly-designed investments in upgrading, by improving NATO defence planning process and accordance with national defence planning process, by consistent execution capability targets that this process generates, but also by use of multinational capabilities sharing. Pooling and sharing capability among individual member states can have a significant impact on the way, how to replace the missing defence sources or how to effectively use increasing of defence budgets, which the Alliance, including the Czech Republic, declared at the summit in Wales.

Preparing NATO for the Next Defence-Planning Cycle

The Atlantic Alliance will be turning more than one corner in 2014. Aside from the end of combat operations in Afghanistan, the year also marks the conclusion of the first cycle of the NATO Defence Planning Process. The arcane world of defence planners arguably represents the principal sphere in which NATO will define a new balance between collective defence and crisis management. Alexander Mattelaer discusses the key debates informing the next defence-planning cycle, and argues that the Wales Summit must provide political guidance for a new level of ambition, extend the planning horizon, and link up with recent European initiatives in the defence-industrial realm.

Obranné plánování NATO (neustále) v tranzici

NATO Defence Planning Process (NDPP) is a subject of quite frequent reviews and amendments in order to meet the needs of NATO as an organization and of each Ally. The current initiative, based on a tasking from the Chicago summit in May 2012, is referred to as "Enhancing the NDPP". It particularly aims at making the NDPP more relevant to national defence planning and more visible at political level. More emphasis is also placed on timely consultations among Allies whenever they intend to make significant changes in their defence inventories and capabilities. Recently approved NATO Defence Planning Capability Targets (June 2013) previously known as Force Goals, are for the first time affected by application of the so-called "50% planning assumption" which aims to redress the burden-sharing imbalance between the US and other Allies.

Permanent Structured Cooperation and the Future of the ESDP: Transformation and Integration

The low deployability of Europe’s armed forces is a well–known problem. The primary cause of this problematic state of affairs is the still almost exclusively national focus of defence planning, while capability gaps at the aggregate EU and NATO levels are being ignored. The question must be asked whether the existing mechanisms for capability development, in the ESDP as well as NATO, are sufficient to achieve the required transformation from static to expeditionary forces within a reasonable time frame. The only way to achieve the quantum leap that is necessary to realise defence transformation is through pooling, which, by reducing intra–European duplications, can produce much more deployable capabilities within the current combined defence budget. From that point of view, Permanent Structured Cooperation, the new mechanism for capability development to be established by the Lisbon Treaty, has great potential. If successful, it will require a rethinking of NATO defence planning and its relation with the ESDP, as well as the start of a broader strategic debate on a defence white paper for the EU.

Why Not NATO? Military Planning in the European Union

This article explains why the EU in recent years has gained an upper hand in Allied defence planning. The development is surprising in light of reforms undertaken by NATO in the mid-1990s and also the 1998-99 US ambition to reinforce NATO's defence planning process with the Defence Capabilities Initiative. The article argues that a number of European governments, notably including the British and French, has been motivated to seek change because NATO's defence planning process has proved difficult to adapt to new low-intensity threats and also because governments seek to control the political development of the EU itself. The article illustrates how these concerns are directly visible in the current EU design for military planning and offers an assessment of future NATO-EU relations.

Strategic choices: Their roles in NATO's defence planning and force modernization: Part II

Strategic choices: Their roles in NATO's defence planning and force modernization: Part II

Strategic choices: Their roles in NATO's defence planning and force modernization: Part I

To the extent that ‘strategic choices’ implies choices among a broadly conceived set of alternative objectives, means and employment of means to achieve objectives, NATO has essentially no choices at this time. NATO’s principal strategic problem is the declining credibility of nuclear escalation threats to deter Warsaw Pact conventional aggression. But political, technological, fiscal and manpower constraints foreclose strategic choices which would decisively alter this situation and sharply limit the range of realistic choice to quite modest changes in NATO’s conventional defence posture.

Disarmament and other options for Western policy—making on chemical warfare*

The increasing prominence of scenarios of non-nuclear war in NATO's defence planning has made the proper status of chemical warfare weapons increasingly difficult to assess. The perplexities largely stem from the relationship between chemical weapons and the nuclear threshold, and what that may mean for overall deterrence. Alone among the NATO members, France and the United States have retained chemical weapons in their arsenals. Both are now poised to modernize and expand their chemical forces. The American administration wishes to proceed with this at once, and has cited undisclosed evidence of increasing Soviet chemical warfare capabilities in justification. It has also argued that modernization and expansion would strengthen the West's negotiating position in the continuing Geneva talks on chemical warfare disarmament. At the end of 1985, the US Congress made its funding of the administration's programme conditional upon a formal expression of support from NATO. In May 1986 NATO defence ministers duly adopted a 'force goal' to this end, but made it clear that, in doing so, they were not assenting to any deployment of the new weapons to Europe. These developments have brought the issue of planning and preparedness for chemical warfare into unprecedented political visibility in Western Europe. Public opinion has not viewed the issue with equanimity. Like the neutron bomb, this subject has great potential for divisiveness. In political terms it is unsurprising, therefore, that a note of genuine conviction can be heard in the voices of West European leaders extolling the virtues of negotiated chemical warfare (CW) disarmament; and West European delegations to the 40-nation Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, where CW has been under discussion since 1968, are now negotiating with an evident will to succeed. Some of the problems confronting CW disarmament are explored in the pages which follow. The starting point is an analysis of the present CW arms control regime1 and of the CW policies that have so far flowed from it.