Driven by events, NATO embarked on a long and winding operational trajectory as soon as the Cold War drew to a close.2 As the Gulf War un-folded and the Soviet Union’s economic system collapsed, the earliest oper-ations pursued defensive and humanitarian missions. It was in the context of the Balkan wars, however, that NATO acquired its new identity as a crisis management organisation. First providing a no-fly zone and close air support to United Nations (UN) peacekeepers (Operation Deny Flight), then engaging in coercive bombardments (Operations Deadeye and De-liberate Force) and eventually intervening massively on land in order to implement the Dayton Agreement (the NATO-led Implementation Force [IFOR] and subsequent Stabilisation Force [SFOR]), NATO became ever
2 For a historical overview, see NATO’s Operations 1949–Present, Mons, Supreme Headquarters Allied Pow-ers Europe, 2009, www.aco.nato.int/resources/21/NATO%20Operations,%201949-Present.pdf (accessed 6 June 2013). For a more extensive discussion, see D.S. Yost, NATO’s Balancing Act, Washington DC, US Institute of Peace, 2014.
more deeply involved in the containment of the conflict in Bosnia. The template of coercive airpower and stabilisation on land was repeated in a condensed form only a few years later in Kosovo (Operation Allied Force and the NATO-led Kosovo Force).3
In response to the 11 September 2001 attacks, the United States top-pled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. As the international community set out to reconstruct this war-torn country, leadership over the Interna-tional Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was from 2003 onwards delegated to NATO.4 In the years that followed, an insurgency developed and the Al-liance had to cope with ever more difficult circumstances in which to stand up Afghan National Security Forces capable of providing self-sustaining territorial control.5 Responsibility for security was gradually returned to Af-ghan hands in the 2011-2014 timeframe. At the time of writing, planning for a follow-on training mission (Resolute Support) was ongoing.6
Apart from its major engagement in the Balkans and Afghanistan, NATO also undertook a number of smaller missions. These ranged from training Iraqi security personnel (NATO Training Mission-Iraq) and pro-viding training and airlift support for the African Union, to the conduct of maritime security operations in the Mediterranean and off the Horn of Africa (Operations Active Endeavour, Allied Provider, Allied Protector and Ocean Shield). The most notable of these other engagements, however, was the air campaign designed to stop the Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi from violently suppressing popular domestic protests that broke out in the spring of 2011. Although this engagement started as a coalition operation,
3 For an autobiographical account of NATO’s engagement in the Balkans, see: W. Clark, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo and the Future of Combat, New York, Public Affairs, 2002.
4 For an account of the early NATO engagement in Afghanistan, see: S. Beckmann, From Assumption to Expansion: Planning and Executing NATO’s First Year in Afghanistan at the Strategic Level, Carlisle, US Army War College, 2005.
5 This adaptive coping process is described at length in: A. Mattelaer, “How Afghanistan has Strengthened NATO,” Survival, 53 (6), 2011, pp. 127-140.
6 See: NATO Defence Ministers endorse concept for new post-2014 mission in Afghanistan, Brussels, NATO, 5 June 2013, http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/news_101248.htm (accessed 9 July 2013).
NATO went on to enforce an arms embargo as well as a no-fly zone. Op-eration Unified Protector effectively sought to protect civilians by targeting the offensive capabilities of Gaddafi’s forces from the air.
Several of these operations triggered major differences of opinion within the Alliance as well as within the broader international community, both before and after the actual campaign. Such disagreements bear witness to the fact that NATO operations are not unilateral actions, but must be con-sensually supported by a community of nations. The Alliance framework allows both Allies and partner nations to preserve their own political pri-orities and identity, yet still benefit from professional support structures whenever joint actions are envisaged. In fact, it can be argued that Europe-an nations frequently found themselves at the forefront of initiating these operational endeavours. To a large extent this related to a very practical need for (multinational) command and control facilities.
In the former Yugoslavia, several European nations and Canada first attempted to address these conflicts through the framework of UN peace-keeping.7 It was only after the horrors of Srebrenica and many casualties among the Blue Helmets that a more robust approach was chosen. (Eu-ropean wariness about UN command arrangements has, for that mat-ter, never entirely disappeared.8) In Afghanistan, ISAF started as a small, UN-mandated stabilisation force driven by European troop contributors.
NATO became involved in ISAF as a result of a German-Dutch request for planning and force generation support when commanding the third rotation. This planning and command role has significantly expanded ever since, but with every new operation plan being signed off by all Allies. In Libya, it was again some of the European Allies that were the most vocal about the need for action. The US decision to “lead from behind” was arguably the primary reason why NATO subsequently assumed command
7 See for example: M. Rose, Fighting for Peace: Lessons from Bosnia, London, Warner Books, 1998.
8 Cf. R. Hatto, “UN Command and Control Capabilities: Lessons from UNIFIL’s Strategic Military Cell,”
International Peacekeeping, 16 (2), 2009, 186-198.
of the Libya campaign.9 In the absence of US air command assets, Euro-pean nations had no feasible alternative but to resort to the NATO Com-mand Structure. In many ways, the conduct of military operations under the NATO flag therefore qualifies as the last resort, only pursued when all other options have been exhausted. Yet, as these missions were undertaken as a matter of agreed policy, NATO as an organisation could not help but internalise the lessons these military campaigns generated.
Institutionalising expertise: the role of command structures and joint doctrine
NATO was not designed for conducting the operations it was eventu-ally asked to undertake. Quite the contrary: it carried the historical legacy and structure of the Cold War for confronting an altogether different set of missions. Successive post-Cold War strategic concepts and Alliance state-ments recognised that the strategic environment was rapidly changing and that NATO had to adapt correspondingly.10 This was more than a theo-retical exercise. As new operational requirements imposed themselves, the Alliance was forced to change along with, and get better at, the job it was given. This process of constant evolution played out in the “NATO hard-ware” component – the NATO Command Structure – as well as in the
“doctrinal software” (i.e. the body of Allied doctrine and Standardisation Agreements). These twin pillars served, and continue to serve, as the insti-tutional containers of military expertise.
The NATO Command Structure in many ways qualifies as the organi-sational backbone of the Alliance. It constitutes a nervous system of multi-national headquarters that connects and directs the NATO Force Structure
9 On the changing role of the US within the Alliance, see e.g. E. Hallams and B. Schreer, “Towards a ‘post-American’ alliance? NATO burden-sharing after Libya,” International Affairs, 88 (2), 2012, pp. 313-327.
10 A good illustration is the “Strategic Vision” statement prepared by NATO’s Strategic Commanders: J.L.
Jones and E.P. Giambastiani, Strategic Vision: The Military Challenge, Norfolk and Mons, ACT and ACO Public Information Offices, 2004.
(i.e. the pool of in-place and deployable forces that are available to the Alliance under pre-specified readiness criteria). Currently capped at 8,800 staff posts spread across two Allied Commands (Transformation and Op-erations), it provides the organisational and procedural means to plan and conduct operations at short notice and to prepare the Alliance for future challenges. Given that the NATO Command Structure represents the ven-ue where most staff work takes place, it provides the Alliance with an insti-tutional memory. Perhaps most importantly, the existence of a permanent and multinational command chain represents the most tangible manifesta-tion of Alliance cohesion and solidarity.
NATO forces can only operate together effectively on the basis of a common understanding of how to do business. This is where Allied doc-trine and standardisation efforts come into view. This body of documents meets the Alliance’s need for a shared vocabulary and commonly agreed processes. Throughout all member nations, NATO doctrine streamlines military thinking about how to deal with complex problems in conceptual terms. It stresses essential principles, fosters specific operational approach-es and enablapproach-es an agreed command philosophy inspired by the canon of Western military thought.11 All of this is particularly relevant for military education and exercises. Throughout the Alliance, junior as well as senior officers are educated and trained – at least in part – on the basis of the same capstone documents. This is where the NATO School in Oberammergau and the NATO Defense College in Rome play their part. Ultimately these educational efforts enable live military exercises on a large scale. Some of these serve, inter alia, to provide a rigorous certification mechanism for successive rotations of the NATO Response Force and thus to improve in-teroperability. Exercise Steadfast Jazz, which took place in November 2013, constitutes a recent example in this regard.
Both the NATO Command Structure and NATO doctrine are in
con-11 For an introductory overview, see: Allied Joint Publication 01 (D), Allied Joint Doctrine, Brussels, NATO Standardization Agency, 2010.
stant evolution under the influence of newly assigned tasks and past opera-tional experience. Doctrinal developments illustrate this most clearly. The experience of the Balkan operations endowed the Alliance with what is now known as the Operations Planning Process, the accompanying Guidelines for Operational Planning and the NATO Crisis Response System. Simi-larly, thinking about the “Comprehensive Approach” is also a product of operational experience. Loosely defined as a means to enhance a comple-mentary and coherent response to crises by all relevant actors, both civilian and military, this concept embodies NATO’s search to embed itself in the broader international architecture. The approved NATO Comprehensive Operations Planning Directive reflects the Afghanistan experience – in par-ticular, the fact that the Alliance was called upon to execute ever more tasks and interact with civilian agencies.12 This process of codifying past experi-ence into lessons learned and doctrine takes place at all levels. It is not by chance that the Alliance adopted a doctrine for peace support operations in 2001 and a doctrine for counterinsurgency in 2011.13 Like all software, doctrine requires regular updating to get the bugs out and to allow for new functionalities.
In a similar vein, albeit less visible, the NATO Command Structure (Figure 2) is subject to continuous change.14 The round of reforms initi-ated in 2010 and to be completed by 2015, reflects some of the signature elements of recent operational experience at all levels. One can observe, for example, that a gradual inversion of command hierarchy is taking place.
The NATO strategic commands are increasingly cast in a supporting role instead of a directive one. This reflects the fact that mission commanders such as COMISAF are not fulfilling a tactical function (as older NATO
12 Cf. A. King, The Transformation of Europe’s Armed Forces: From the Rhine to Afghanistan, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011.
13 Allied Joint Publication 3.4.1, Peace Support Operations, NATO Standardization Agency, 2001, and Al-lied Joint Publication 3.4.4, AlAl-lied Doctrine for Counterinsurgency (COIN), NATO Standardization Agency, 2011.
14 See: G.W. Pedlow, The Evolution of NATO’s Command Structure, 1951-2009, Mons, SHAPE, http://
www.aco.nato.int/resources/21/Evolution%20of%20NATO%20Cmd%20Structure%201951-2009.pdf (accessed 3 November 2013).
doctrine would have it) but are de facto executing a strategic function in its own right. At the same time, the (operational-level) Joint Force Commands located in Brunssum and Naples are being subjected to a relentless drive towards greater deployability so as to be able to feed the staff requirements of expeditionary operations. Finally, great attention is paid to safeguarding critical expertise in the tactical, component-level headquarters. Operation Unified Protector provided a sharp wake-up call to preserve and reinvest in adequate air command and control assets. Similarly, it underlined the value of NATO’s Standing Maritime Groups, which have dwindled in size but remain critical for seamlessly transitioning between exercises and op-erations.15 Maritime expertise has now been fused together into a single centre of excellence, Maritime Command Northwood. At the same time, the know-how required to conduct multi-corps-sized operations is retained at the Land Command Headquarters in Izmir.
Figure 2: NATO Allied Command Operations
All of this is not meant to say that Allied doctrine and the Command Structure reform are driven by operational requirements alone. These dis-cussions feature major political and financial considerations as well.
Ar-15 See: B.A. Smith-Windsor, “NATO’s Maritime Strategy and the Libya Crisis as Seen from the Sea,” Re-search Paper No. 90, NATO Defense College, March 2013, p. 6.
SHAPE Mons
guably, the primary function of the recent Command Structure reforms was to save up to €20 million annually on the common-funded NATO military budget. As anyone familiar with the “flags to post” plot discus-sions can testify, the Command Structure constitutes not only a vehicle for commanding operations but also an arena in which different Allies com-pete for influence inside the Alliance.16 Yet, despite these broader political considerations, it is important to underline the function NATO doctrine and the Command Structure serve as storage rooms for military expertise.
More than anything else, this is what makes NATO a unique organisation.