Atlantic Council BRENT SCOWCROFT CENTER ON INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
ISSUE BRIEF
Train, Hone, Deter Enhancing NATO’s Exercise Program MARCH 2016
MATT BRAND
N This issue brief is part of the Transatlantic Security Initative’s ‘Charting NATO’s Future’ project examining how NATO can adapt to the long-term challenges it faces, conducted in partnership with the Norwegian Ministry of Defense. The Brent Scowcroft Center’s Transatlantic Security Initiative brings together top policymakers, government and military officials, business leaders, and experts from Europe and North America to share insights, strengthen cooperation, and develop common approaches. Through high-profile public conferences, off-the-record strategy sessions, and content-rich publications, the initiative provides practical, relevant, and bipartisan solutions for transatlantic leaders, as they navigate this tumultuous inflection point in the history of the world’s most important political-military alliance.
ATO exercises play a vital role in ensuring that Alliance forces can respond to any contingency quickly and effectively. Not since the early 1990s has NATO’s exercise program drawn as much attention from NATO’s national leaders as it does now, due in large part to Russia’s increasingly aggressive misbehavior. The NATO exercise program provides the vital functions of keeping the member states’ forces interoperable by integrating new technologies into the force, practicing new doctrine, and validating units for their rotation into contingency roles, like the NATO Response Force. Exercises are the most important step in preparing Alliance forces to arrive ready to dominate the adversary and to work closely with allies and partners, governmental and non-governmental alike. They are the best preparation for service members to deploy, succeed, and return home. With a little bit of effort, they also can provide the secondary benefit of being tools for deterrence and reassurance. Administering the NATO exercise program is a complicated process that requires meaningful contributions from both the Alliance’s Allied Command Operations (ACO) and Allied Command Transformation (ACT). In general, ACO determines what the requirements of the exercise should be (validation of the future NATO Response Force, for instance) and ACT prepares an exercise to meet that requirement. At first glance, it doesn’t seem the best design to have two four-star headquarters divide the responsibility for running an exercise program of this size. In practice, the current organization is not ideal but it does the job. The hard-working service members and civilians from the Alliance’s twenty-eight member states that support the program have responded effectively to the revised guidance outlined at NATO’s Wales Summit in 2014, which the NATO civilian and military apparatus subsequently refined at headquarters.