By Nigel Chamberlain and Ian Davis, NATO Watch
Speaking by video teleconference NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen addressed the NATO Industry Day 2012 Conference in Riga, Latvia on 15 October. He said:
We are going through the worst financial crisis in living memory. Governments continue to face tough decisions to get their economies back in order. Across our Alliance today, defence budgets are under severe pressure. I have warned – and I will continue to warn -- against cuts that are too large and disproportionate. Without security there can be no prosperity.
He might have equally warned about cuts that are too small and inconsequential (as remains the case in the largest NATO defence economy) and that without prosperity there can be no security. Of course, he didn’t because that narrative goes against the grain in Washington. Referring to the most recent NATO Defence Ministerial, he said there was broad agreement to ‘hold the line’ on defence spending and to prioritise national expenditure alongside expenditure committed to NATO.
Mr Rasmussen argued that lessons learned from the ISAF mission can help build the foundation for strong, flexible and deployable NATO forces – “forces that are well equipped, well trained, and well connected. This is the goal we set ourselves with NATO Forces 2020”. Again, others have drawn different lessons from the eleven-year war in Afghanistan, which is increasingly seen as a strategic failure.
The Secretary General promoted ‘Smart Defence’ with “Allies working together to deliver capabilities that would be too expensive for any of them to deliver alone”. He added that: “So far, industry appears to have been rather sceptical of Smart Defence. There are worries that it will lead to fewer and smaller contracts”.
He told his audience that there is no alternative, other than having no contracts at all and called for more logistical and communications cooperation, as well as greater collaboration in equipment development and procurement. Smart Defence is as an opportunity for industry on both sides of the Atlantic, he said:
We want to make it easier for governments and industry to work together from the early stages of capability projects. And we want to give industry maximum transparency throughout our NATO Defence Planning Process.
According to the Secretary General, greater transparency will provide industry with the opportunity to come together to propose multinational solutions, instead of individual solutions. He also welcomes unsolicited proposals coming from industry outside the traditional contract process. Recognising that this could create concerns about industrial confidentiality, he proposed a ‘code of conduct’ to handle such proposals and added that participating nations would retain full control on their acquisition strategy.
Finally, Mr Rasmussen encouraged greater participation by small and medium-sized enterprises, in particular in NATO countries with a limited defence industrial capability and suggested that “NATO could help by offering certain incentives”.
Some of those incentives, or business opportunities, were picked up by Defense News the following week: “The NATO Communications and Information (NCI) Agency has announced 2.1 billion euros ($2.7 billion) of potential business opportunities in the area of C4ISR and communication capabilities to support NATO missions and operations”. The NATO Communications and Information Agency webpage states: “In order to better provide these products and services to our customers and facilitate our interaction with our suppliers we have developed contractual arrangements with suppliers from all 28 NATO Nations”.
NCI Agency General Manager, Koen Gijsbers, told Defense News: “We are also seeing interest from industry in NATO applications and capabilities that, in the spirit of the Secretary General’s Smart Defence and Connected Forces initiatives, can be reused by nations for their national purposes”.
NATO is expecting to take tenders early next year on contracts for ballistic missile defence, air defence radars for surveillance and identification, passive electronic support measure trackers for surveillance and identification, satellites, software, servers and specialised hardware for logistics functional services and assets for countering terrorist attacks and IEDs.
In the interests of “maximum transparency”, will details of the agreed contracts be available on the NCI Agency webpage? And is there scope for prior scrutiny of such contracts by national parliamentary mechanisms before they are set in stone? Transparency and accountability ought to be a two-way street involving public and parliamentary oversight and not just limited to easing the path for contractors.