While everybody is focusing on New Hampshire, a very important meeting of NATO defense ministers is scheduled for Brussels tomorrow. Julian Barnes reports in The Wall Street Journal:
“The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is developing a new strategy to speed decision-making and improve its response to the kind of unconventional warfare the West says Russia has used in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. …
A new hybrid warfare playbook would attempt to lay out the kind of assistance the alliance would provide should a member state come under outside pressure from Russia or another country. Such support could include sending cyber experts to help respond to computer hacking attacks, communication specialists to counter propaganda or even the deployment of NATO’s rapid reaction spearhead force. …
As part of the effort to develop the strategy, when alliance defense ministers gather in Belgium on Wednesday, they will review possible hybrid scenarios the alliance could face. The discussion is designed to hone their ability to make decisions quickly.”
The really good thing here is that NATO officials are planning and thinking things through ahead of time, so they can be ready and prepared if and when something does happen. Instead of putting things off and hoping they don’t happen, they are getting ready ahead of time. So they will have plans and options ready and available to put into effect right away.
In addition, according to U.S. General Philip Breedlove, NATO’s supreme allied commander:
“This discussion is working on the political decision-making, so our senior-most leaders can understand the kinds of decisions they need to make, and that often those decisions have to be made with imperfect intelligence, ambiguous data.”
In other words, not only are the defense officials getting plans together, but they are working to educate the political leaders, so the political leaders can understand what Russia (or whoever else) is doing in the mists and confusion, and so they are ready to respond promptly if things do happen, instead of stumbling around, not knowing what to do.
This kind of thinking and planning is the essence of good strategy. It is encouraging to see NATO doing it.
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