National Defence committee  First of all, generally speaking, that will not affect NATO. But there will be consequences for the nations that contribute to those programs because the sharing of the burden and of costs will change. NATO will continue to have the same capabilities. In terms of AWACS, the missi

National Defence committee  Thank you very much. For me, training is a fundamental aspect of Transformation. It is an integral part of Transformation and we need to fully focus on it. At NATO, there has not been a revolution, but there is a very strong evolution of the concepts of training and exercise. T

National Defence committee  It does help, of course.

National Defence committee  Sorry, I'm not sure I got your point.

National Defence committee  The difficulty in the multinational cooperation aspect of smart defence is how you reconcile the nations' calendars and nations' specifications. Examples in the past have proven that going multinational is not always the best solution. We all have in mind experiences where going

National Defence committee  We're continuing to follow this path. NATO will continue the so-called NATO response force, which has been with us now for years and, as you rightly say, has never been employed, for various reasons. One of the reasons, for example, is that when you build forces for a NATO resp

National Defence committee  Specialization by design would not mean that we go down to the type of equipment, that is, whether the nation decides to specialize and to share with others given expertise in a given domain. This does not imply that everybody is using the same equipment.

National Defence committee  No, there is no intent to pre-assign missions to a nation or a group of nations. The intention is to ensure all the aspects of smart defence. But globally in the future, the alliance will have the capabilities needed to fulfill the missions that our heads of sitting government wi

National Defence committee  The first and most visible potential benefit is cost saving. If two, three, or four nations decide to procure some kind of equipment together and if they can avoid having national specifications that add to the common foundation of the procurement program, then they will save mon

National Defence committee  I don't see the link you make with specialization. But on the interoperability itself, yes, it's exactly that. We do not advocate a single type of battle tank, a single type of aircraft, a single type of ship, a single type of rifle. We advocate that when two units, two soldiers,

National Defence committee  As a general rule, we always try to find the most economic approach in all our activities. However, when we are dealing with a real operation, such as the one in Libya, it is up to every nation to propose its own contribution. We also need to bear in mind the basic principle of s

National Defence committee  Transformation is a nice word, but there are many definitions. It's difficult. I'll try to simplify this, but basically my work is twofold. One part of it is support to current operations, how to do short-cycle adaptation to evolving situations; and the other part is long-term tr

National Defence committee  I would argue that most capabilities today are dual use. We can use them again for collective defence and expeditionary.... We don't buy capability; we target it, which would be expeditionary only. I would argue that some capabilities we develop with collective defence in mind

National Defence committee  Thank you very much. I use the term “smart defence” a lot even when I am speaking in French, because an exact translation like “défense astucieuse” seems quite superficial and “défense intelligente” is a little too literal. I have my reservations, but we will try to do better if

National Defence committee  On expeditionary issue, there has been a debate in the past between the means for collective defence and the means for expeditionary. For me, it's the wrong debate. If you look at the geographical extent of NATO, when we have any kind of collective defence situation we may have t