Small Wars Journal

"NATO Must Redefine Responses to Unconventional Threats"

Thu, 07/31/2014 - 5:56pm

Breedlove: NATO Must Redefine Responses to Unconventional Threats by John Vandiver, Stars and Stripes

NATO’s top military commander on Thursday said the alliance should redefine its core commitment to defend its members from external aggression by factoring in new and unconventional threats such as cyberwarfare and irregular militia operations.

“We need to mature the way we think about cyber, the way we think about irregular warfare, so that we can define in NATO what takes it over that limit by which we now have to react,” Gen. Philip Breedlove, NATO supreme allied commander, said during a stop at a U.S. Patriot antimissile site in southern Turkey. For NATO, Article 5 of the alliance’s founding treaty has long served as the bedrock of the 28-nation pact, ensuring that an attack on one member demands a collective response from all. Its roots are in the Cold War when the threat was singular — overt military action from the Soviet Union. Now, Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and its involvement in eastern Ukraine show how threats in Europe have morphed, Breedlove said…

Read on.

Comments

JohnBertetto

Thu, 07/31/2014 - 10:54pm

NATO factoring these threats into its mission is common sense. Foreign policy analyst Eric Jones discusses the possible future of NATO, adressing the evolution of the NATO mission, NATO enlargement, and facing hybrid threats. First, in a 23Jul14 piece on Russian influence in Eurasia and written in the immediate wake of the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17,:

"Talk of enlarging NATO to absorb countries such as Georgia will be revived with renewed vigor as U.S. policy makers assess a weakened Russian role in the international system. Recent efforts by Georgia to achieve member-state status in The Atlantic Alliance were scuttled by geopolitical posturing and the risk averse nature of many members of NATO. However, calls for the integration of the strategically valuable Caucasus state have been renewed as NATO seeks to strengthen its geostrategic advantages over Russian influence in its near abroad in the aftermath of the downing of Malaysian flight 17. A rational expectation in the weeks and months ahead will be to observe the intensifying of the public effort to influence the member-states of NATO to move to admit Georgia as a member of the Alliance. Georgia remains strategically valuable terrain along essential transportation routes for natural resources extracted from deposits in Central Asian states such as Kazakhstan. Additionally, Tbilisi has remained a steadfast opponent of Russian imperialistic assertiveness, having fought a war against Russia for control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the summer of 2008."

http://foreign-intrigue.com/2014/07/ukraine-russia-and-the-west-ahead-a…

and today in the first of a three-part series at SOFREP:

"Since NATO forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the alliance has been in a state of war, battling insurgencies in an asymmetric environment. This is a massive change from NATO’s previous mission to ensure the collective defense of member-state in the alliance against attacks waged by external states. In the short life of NATO, the organization has shifted from its original mission of collective defense against The Warsaw Pact in the Cold War to a collective security mission in places such as the former Yugoslavia, and back again to a collective defense mission in battling the insurgencies of Afghanistan. Today, the alliance again confronts the threat of external countries upon both its member-states and their neighbors. In this, we find a hybrid of NATO’s previous two overarching missions of collective defense and collective security."

http://sofrep.com/36287/russia-west-nato-birth-adulthood-evolution/

It will be interesting to see which way NATO decides to play out its future.