Reforming the Atlantic Alliance and adapting its structures and procedures to an ever-changing security environment has been a permanent fixture of the NATO agenda since the end of the Cold War. Lessons learned from the Alliance’s engagement in Afghanistan, transformational impulses within member nations and, more recently, resource concerns caused by the current financial crisis, have given additional impetus to the need for further reform.

Psychologically, NATO’s reaching the mature age of 60 has prompted a new sense of urgency, as reform is also meant to facilitate rejuvenation. Last, but not least, the elaboration of a new NATO Strategic Concept offers the opportunity to associate institutional reform with a renewed sense of purpose.

Generally, various reform ideas and proposals have sought to:

• Enhance situational awareness and political consultation, particularly in support of more effective and responsive crisis management, including the initiation of new operations
• Improve the oversight, management and resourcing of on-going operations
• Ensure a better match between political ambition, the development of modern defense capabilities and the availability of resources, notably through a reformed collective defense planning process

Some reform initiatives in the recent past have sought to shift authority over assets and resources to the Strategic Commanders. This was the case, notably, of proposals in the mid-1990s by the then Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic (SACLANT), General John J. Sheehan, to create a new Supreme Allied Commander position with extensive authority over important support functions and capabilities that were spread out across a vast range of NATO entities. The trend, however, has been to move assets away from the NATO Military Authorities, as illustrated by the consolidation of the NATO Military Committee’s Advisory Group on Aerospace Research and Development (AGARD) and of the SHAPE Technical Center into new NATO civil structures, to achieve greater synergies but also enhanced budgetary accountability.

Other proposals for reform made by informed observers have gone much further and challenged the consensus rule that underpins NATO’s ‘governance’ in favor of majority voting or special rights by ‘coalitions of willing allies,’ or have sought to adapt it by restricting its application only to decision making in the Alliance’s governing body – the North Atlantic Council (NAC). […]

OUTLINE

• Reforming NATO: the record and the legacy
  - Reform during the Cold War
  - Reform after the Cold War
• How to make further NATO reform possible
  - NATO’s core purposes
  - Guiding principles for further reform
  - NATO’s ‘building blocks’
• Towards a more agile NATO

Diego A. Ruiz Palmer is Special advisor on net assessment at NATO's international secretariat in Brussels.