NATO Summit to focus on Afghanistan, alliance future
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E-mail Xinhua, May 18, 2012
Alliance future
Apart from Afghanistan, the NATO summit is also to deal with the increasingly uncertain longterm viability of the organization. However, as countries face daunting financial and fiscal challenges, while grappling with elections, NATO is unlikely to be best positioned to deal with the issue, but how it reacts could provide clues.
In a recent press interview, Stavridis said while not necessarily a top agenda item, the apparent inability of some NATO partners to spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense as agreed is likely to come up during the summit.
According to NATO statistics, only five members, including the United States, Britain, France, Albania and Greece met that goal as of 2010.
As European countries try to deal with the debt crisis, more spending cuts maybe on the way. Stavridis expressed concern that the situation could adversely impact military readiness, and said the United States needs to pressure those who do not meet those minimum levels of spending.
NATO is also trying to find other ways to deal with budget shortfalls, betting on the success of "smart defense" -- essentially pooling capabilities in light of shrinking defense budgets confronting all the NATO members.
Missile defense is a poster child of such endeavor, and U.S. officials have said the first phase of President Barack Obama's European Phased Adaptive Approach has completed, and the new missile defense system has reached interim operational capability, meaning it could be integrated with the NATO command-and-control system to begin standing up the NATO missile defense system.
Apart from missile defense, U.S. officials indicated leaders would also note the Baltic air policing mission, in which NATO member nations rotate their fighter jets to defend the airspace over Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia, as well as a new alliance ground surveillance system that will give commanders a comprehensive picture of the situation on the ground.
Stavridis said NATO's operation in Libya drove home the importance of such a system, and as a result, 13 allies plan to procure a variant of the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle and the associated command-and-control base stations and to operate them on behalf of all NATO members.
"As we face these financial pressures today, clearly we need to, in any alliance, come together in efficient ways so we can ... generate capability for reasonable amounts of money," he said.
The leaders are also to adopt a Deterrence and Defense Posture Review, which will "identify the appropriate mix of nuclear conventional and missile defense capabilities that NATO needs to meet 21st century security challenges," according to Gordon, assistant secretary of state.
A recent paper done by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Brookings Institution and the Royal United Services Institute noted that leaders are unlikely to reach a consensus on major decisions to reshape the alliance's deterrence and defense posture, but will likely agree to extend something like the status quo.
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