Alexander Mattelaer

How Afghanistan has Strengthened NATO

Despite the doom and gloom about the Afghanistan campaign, in political and military terms NATO may yet emerge as a leaner and more effective organisation.

Preparing NATO for the Next Defence-Planning Cycle

The Atlantic Alliance will be turning more than one corner in 2014. Aside from the end of combat operations in Afghanistan, the year also marks the conclusion of the first cycle of the NATO Defence Planning Process. The arcane world of defence planners arguably represents the principal sphere in which NATO will define a new balance between collective defence and crisis management. Alexander Mattelaer discusses the key debates informing the next defence-planning cycle, and argues that the Wales Summit must provide political guidance for a new level of ambition, extend the planning horizon, and link up with recent European initiatives in the defence-industrial realm.

Rediscovering geography in NATO defence planning

ABSTRACT This article explores the relevance of geography in NATO defence planning. Historical analysis of strategic concepts and other planning documents suggests a pendulum movement from treating geography as the central organising principle within the alliance, to downplaying its role in favour of functional considerations, and back. In view of mounting tensions alongside Europe’s eastern and southern flanks, this argument acquires contemporary relevance with regards to how alliance responsibilities can be (re)distributed. Rediscovering the early principle that allies should concentrate on those tasks for which they are the most geographically suited offers a promising approach for a new division of labour.

International organisations and military affairs

There are some basic mistakes making the text refer to the wrong aircraft or non-existent ones, such as references to the “Yak-35 Forger” (p. 215) and “F-4 (‘Wild Weasel’) Thunderchiefs”, (p. 202), instead of the Yak-38, F-4 Phantom and F-105 Thunderchief; in the case of the latter pair, the “wild weasel” role, more properly “Suppression of Enemy Air Defences,” is not fully described. Given the growing importance of SEAD from Vietnam onwards, this is a shame. These are not the only errors. The destruction of the Thanh Hoa bridge, rightly noted as a significant demonstration of the capabilities of precision-guided munitions, is erroneously recounted (pp. 199, 200). Rather than a single Paveway bomb destroying the structure on 27 April 1972, the bridge was first rendered impassable to road traffic with electro-optically guided weapons, while the attack using laserguided Paveways was conducted on 13 May to ensure that rail traffic could no longer cross. This later raid saw the use of 24 Paveways (and nearly 50 unguided bombs), not just one. We are told (p. 229) that “all the while American, Belgian, Dutch, Italian and West German F-15s and F-16s were also equipped to carry theatre nuclear weapons,” a statement which ignores the fact that at the time the F-15 was used only by the United States, and not in the nuclear strike role, while the Italians and West Germans did not use the F-16 at all. Although the former air force did eventually use leased F-16s in the early 2000s as a stopgap, this was in the fighter role. The overall effect, then, is to leave a reviewer with a slight sense of disappointment. Professor Black has sought to provide a truly innovative and comprehensive introduction to air power which moves beyond more traditional accounts, and succeeds to an extent. The difficulty is that even for an introductory work, some of the analysis is lacking the depth that might be hoped for, while important aspects such as the Berlin Airlift are barely covered at all. The editorial mistakes further detract from the book. It is, no doubt, a good, thoughtful and broad introduction to the subject worthy of study, but it is not quite the essential work that it might have been.

Understanding European Crisis Response Operations

Undertaking military operations is a complicated business. Military power can only be a rational instrument of policy as long as it can deliver the intended results according to a pre-specified plan. Harnessing the use of force to serve the ends of policy constitutes the essence of military strategy. Having said that, it is equally well known that any strategy can be thwarted by a multitude of factors. ‘No plan of operations’, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder famously noted, ‘extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength’ (q.i. Hughes 1993: 45). Yet it is not only the confrontation with an independently thinking adversary that complicates the making of strategy. In war, Carl von Clausewitz (1832/1976: 119) argued, ubiquitous friction causes even the simplest thing to become difficult. Increasingly, the armed forces of European states have experienced that the infamous ‘fog of war’ applies not only to the realm of military history but also to the contemporary operating environment. While policy objectives can range from the conquest of territory to the keeping of the peace, all military operations ultimately concern the exercise of power — with all struggles and unpredictability this entails.

Comparing Planning, Friction and Strategy Processes

The preceding operational case studies allowed for the identification of a number of case-specific conclusions. Some of these feature as recurring threads throughout this book, such as the split between political and military processes, the prominence of resource-related questions and the suitability of planning doctrine for designing contemporary operations. This chapter deepens the analysis by adopting a comparative perspective. The analytical toolkit analysed in Chapter 2 — planning systems and friction processes as windows on strategy-making — will be reconsidered in the light of the preceding empirical material. This demonstrates how European states go about in using their armed forces for delivering political effect.

The Reorientation of ISAF

The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) at the time of writing constituted the largest ongoing deployment of European armed forces. In the autumn of 2010, EU member states contributed over 30,000 troops out of a total of 130,000. While the NATO operation in Afghanistan is principally led by the US, the sheer size of the European contribution alone — relative to their other engagements — more than justifies the inclusion of ISAF in a study of European crisis response operations (cf. Williams 2011: xi and Korski 2009). As a NATO operation, it illustrates the way the Alliance works as a platform for planning and conducting operations. For historical reasons, NATO procedures form the inspiration as well as the benchmark for the vast majority of military doctrine in Europe. Yet ISAF is not just a simple example of how NATO goes about its business. It constitutes an operation that by the end of 2007 hit a crossroads. While ISAF was originally conceived as a stabilisation operation, this mission was becoming increasingly untenable. Step-by-step, it transformed into a counterinsurgency operation. Although this was a US-driven process, it also illustrates how European states have been trying to come to grips with a rapidly deteriorating situation. As King (2011) has convincingly argued, the ‘ISAF experience’ is transforming European militaries like no other operation.

The Enhancement of UNIFIL

The 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah was followed by the ‘enhancement’ of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). The UN peacekeepers in Lebanon, already present since 1978, were strengthened considerably in numbers in order to provide a more effective security buffer between the two conflict parties. This re-designing of UNIFIL in crisis mode was made possible as a result of the substantial participation of European nations, most notably Italy and France. For most of these European troop contributors, this marked a return to UN peacekeeping since the debacles in the former Yugoslavia. On at least two accounts, the UNIFIL enhancement therefore qualifies as a suitable second case study in this study of European crisis response operations. On the one hand, UNIFIL can be qualified as a contemporary example of European militaries undertaking a ‘classic’ peacekeeping operation, where a ceasefire agreement is followed by the insertion of a military buffer separating the conflict parties. On the other hand, UNIFIL arguably provides the best example of European states conducting a military operation under UN flag. The leadership role assumed by the European troop contributors turned UNIFIL into a genuine laboratory on how to plan peacekeeping operations in a challenging environment and displayed the conditions under which these states were willing to consider deploying their forces under UN command.

Planning and Friction as Windows on Strategy

Strategy is made in the operations planning process, which is a politico-military dialogue characterised by omnipresent friction. Operation strategies therefore carry their own internal limitations as a result of the discrepancies between the political and military system producing them. This chapter sets out to illuminate the three components of this argument. The first of these concerns the operations planning process. As this is the practical manifestation of the politico-military interface, it serves as the methodological compass for dissecting the ensuing case studies. The second component is built around the more elusive concept of politico-military friction. Starting from Clausewitzian inspiration, the diverging logics of political decision-making and military planning are explored. The third component relates to the process of making strategy, which is portrayed as an intertwining of planning and friction. In other words, the first two concepts in the planning-friction-strategy triad are presented as the constitutive components of the third.

The Launch of EUFOR Tchad/RCA

In the course of 2008, the European Union launched a military operation in eastern Chad and the northeast of the Central African Republic, codenamed EUFOR Tchad/RCA (hereafter shortened to EUFOR). As the largest autonomous EU military operation to date, it qualifies as an ideal illustration of how crisis response operations are planned and conducted within the framework of the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy. Given that EUFOR was planned in a deliberative environment and amounted to a relatively straightforward operation of limited duration, it provides a ‘clean’ illustration of how European crisis response operations are conceived on the drawing board.