The Chair of NATO’s Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, said, on Wednesday 17 January, that society had to realise that we are living in an age of the unexpected.
“In order to strengthen our collective defence and at the same time support Ukraine in its existential fight, we need a whole of society approach. We need public and private actors to change their mind-set from an era in which everything was plannable, foreseeable, controllable, focused on efficiency…. to an era in which anything can happen at any time. An era in which we need to expect the unexpected”, he explained ahead of the 190th session of the Chiefs of Defence Staff Military Committee.
For him, in this age of the unexpected, the focus needs to be on efficiency.
The admiral explained that in order to be fully effective, a warfighting transformation of NATO was necessary, adding that public/private cooperation would be essential.
“The ability for NATO to ‘expect the unexpected’ is directly tied to the ability to see things from a different perspective. To apply new and different ways of working and to accumulate different threat perspectives” he stressed, highlighting cooperation with Alliance partners. In his view, on the military front, “there are still a lot of steps to be taken to get to where we want to be for our collective defence”. What’s more, we need to ensure that “political will goes hand in hand with military capabilities”.
The Alliance’s Deputy Secretary General, Mircea Geoană, said that the Washington Summit in July will enable NATO to make further progress in ensuring the security of its population, its allied nations and the rules-based international system. “We will strengthen our collective defence, especially our air and missile defence. We will boost our support for Ukraine and work even more closely with our partners around the world”, he promised. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)