Dear Irina,

The live session will be available here, in this Discussion Forum. Just join us at 16.00 (CET, I guess it's 17.00 pm in Latvia), 3 February!.

The Moderating Team

Hello Jerzy!

Our format only allows for fairly short questions. I wonder if we could work to narrow your question down to a sentence or two.

What about:

How will NATO’s Rapid Deployable Corps be better integrated into the NATO force structure?

Does this communicate the essence of your question?

OK, Jerzy!

Can you think of a better but concise formulation?

Thanks again for your comments.

Dear Experts,

I would like to ask you two questions:

1. Do you think that NATO shall conduct preventive operations /not necessarily military/ in order to prevent or better deal with possible conflicts and threads in the future?

2. How do you plan to increase the support and trust to the operations conducted by the organization among the members, partners and the society as a whole?

Thank you!
Best Regards,
Iliana Panayotova

Dear experts,

In terms of NATO"s force structure, what are the greatest points of consensus on the new Strategic Concept and what are the greatest points of disagreement?

Thank you,
Rich Dodge (Oklahoma)

Bonjour,

Je voudrais bien savoir si, dans le cadre de sa stratégie de défense, l’OTAN a déjà envisagé de prendre des mesures préventives pour faire face, à moyen et long terme, à l’accroissement de la puissance militaire de pays émergents tels que la Chine.

Avec tous mes remerciements

"Dear Timo,
thank you for this excellent question. One of the most important issues today is to ensure exactly that. Allied Command Transformation, located in Norfolk, Virginia, USA has this as its main focus and is constantly pressing for this. So, the short answer is yes.
If you would like a slightly longer answer, here it is:
Most of the attention of military and political leaders today is focused on the output of ongoing operations. But everyone knows this is not a mission that will be completed “over night”. Consequently, we must not only focus on those pressing needs today, but also those of tomorrow, next year and the years to come. Therefore, we must focus also on the lessons identified and hopefully learnt, by changing the way we do things and the materiel we use to do it. These improvements must be coordinated to avoid individual nations making similar mistakes, and then it must be introduced through training and exercises. The improvements should of course be refined through concept development and experimentation.
We must avoid focusing only on ongoing operations of paramount importance to the alliance. If we did that, we are likely to reduce our ability to solve other tasks and see gaps in our future military capabilities. This would leave us vulnerable, and might “invite problems” by providing a potential aggressor with NATO soft spots that could be exploited.
We have to be able to carry out the total span of NATO’s mission and make sure that the required military forces can be made available. This is done by deriving the (minimum) military requirement from the political level of ambition and the agreed threat to NATO and to ask each individual nation to contribute specified forces. And we have to exercise those missions, again learning and implementing improvements using NATO Response Force as a vehichle.
The procurement process for weapons systems and military equipment is time-consuming, both from a technological and a bureaucratic point of view. We must try to plan well ahead. Europe and NATO face new and dangerous threats. We must focus on the future. Obviously, it’s impossible to predict. We know that the climate is changing, what could this mean to the alliance in the way of “changed” geography, what are the possible security consequences of energy shortage, failing states, the development in Russia, China or India?
We owe future generations a longer term and a more comprehensive view on security. We must examine the future security environment across a broad spectrum of challenges, try to identify trends and possible scenarios and analyze the consequence for allied nations.
We cannot use this for making concrete plans on what to do, but we can make ourselves better prepared and try to identify common trends and requirements which can be of great help in planning future military capabilities."

Admiral J. Berggrav, Supreme Allied Commander Transformation’s Representative in Europe

First of all, I’d like to congratulate Mrs. Gerlinde Niehus for moderating with grace, intelligence and charm the 4-th live video session and to thank her distinguished guests for answering my question regarding the impact of NATO’s New Strategic Concept on the intelligence capabilities.
The query I submit for the present session refers to ACT. Given the strategic objectives of NATO’s Allied Command Transformation (ACT) to provide support to missions and operations, to improve cooperation among allies, partners and international organizations and to act at the forefront of military transformation, I kindly ask you to tackle the way ACT will operate within the context of a New Strategic Concept. Will there be any changes? Does ACT consider setting up, developing and exploiting new Centers of Excellence (CoE’s) according to the new missions and with a view to improve operational capabilities and interoperability?
In addition, one last question:
Because Romania has already played an active role in NATO Doctrine Area by offering expertise in issuing HUMINT Doctrine and hosting The HUMINT CoE, would you consider a deeper involvement of Romania in OSINT NATO’s activities? Could it become a major OSINT player in the Intelligence landscape? Maybe a CoE OSINT?... What requirements must be accomplished to become a sponsor nation of such a CoE and to be accredited by NATO?
Kind regards,
Roxana Stefanescu
Bucharest, Romania