CAPABILITIES

NATO must strengthen its capacity in three key areas: an expeditionary capacity to operate at strategic distance against new and diverse threats; a comprehensive capability to better integrate military and civilian activities; and a missile defense capacity to protect Alliance territory and populations against emerging missile threats. First on hard capabilities. NATO is developing these step by step. NATO has established:

• A NATO Special Operations Coordination Center in Mons, Belgium, that boosts the effectiveness of Allies’ special operations forces by increasing interoperability between nations, sharing key lessons learned, and expanding and improving training, all of which are yielding concrete gains on battlefields in Afghanistan.

• A NATO Response Force that is being .updated. to make it more usable and deployable if the need arises.

• A strategic airlift consortium to allow interested Allies and partners a mechanism to pool limited resources to own and operate C-17s.

• An initiative to enhance NATO helicopter capacity, first in Afghanistan, to lease private helicopters for non-military transport. In the medium- and long-term, we are examining ways to pool support and maintenance functions and to acquire additional helicopters.

• A NATO Cyber Defense Policy, to be endorsed at Bucharest, will enhance our ability to protect our sensitive infrastructure, allow Allies to pool resources, and permit NATO to come to the assistance of an Ally whose infrastructure is under threat. I thank the Senators on this.

• Committee for focusing attention on this issue following the cyber attacks against Estonia.

• A new focus on Energy Security, for example, by reviewing how NATO can help mitigate the most immediate risks and threats to energy infrastructure. I appreciate the leadership of Senators on this Committee for their involvement in energy security and believe NATO is building a response to the concerns you have raised.

• A Defense Against Terrorism Initiative, in which Allies have improved their precision air-drop systems and enhanced intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance technologies to detect terrorists. The Allies have also equipped large aircraft to defend against Man- portable Air Defense (MANPADs) weapons, and worked together on technologies to detect and counter improvised explosive devices.

• A NATO Maritime Situational Awareness initiative, to ensure Information Superiority in the maritime environment, thus increasing NATO’s effectiveness in planning and conducting operations.

I could go on. But let me stop here just to note that, notwithstanding all the concerns we have about levels of defense spending among the Allies, and Allies’ need to develop and field more expeditionary forces for NATO operations, NATO’s military capabilities are better off than they were seven years ago. We are continuing to work to make them better still.

Many of these new capabilities are being tested in Afghanistan – which is also where we are learning how to better integrate civilian and military efforts. With each passing month, all of us Allies learn more about what it takes to wage a 21st-century counterinsurgency effort—a combined civil- military effort that puts soldiers side by side with development workers, diplomats and police trainers. Whether flying helicopters across the desert at night, embedding trainers with the Afghan military and police, conducting tribal councils with village elders, or running joint civilian-military Provincial Reconstruction Teams, our institutions are reinventing the way we do our jobs.

As Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said, this requires new training, new equipment, a new doctrine and new flexibility in combining civil and military efforts in a truly comprehensive approach to security.

And a final point on capabilities is missile defense. Article 5 of the NATO Treaty says NATO Allies will provide for collective defense. It does not allow for exceptions when the threat comes on a missile. NATO has been studying missile defense for years, and we expect that at the Bucharest Summit, NATO will take further steps to acknowledge growing missile threats, welcome U.S. contributions to the defense of Alliance territory, and task further work in strengthening NATO’s defenses against these new threats. We have taken on board advice from some in Congress, and some of our Allies, as we have advanced a more NATO-integrated approach to missile defense.

NATO’s work is focused on the short-range missile threat, technical work regarding future decisions on possible long-range threats, and possible opportunities for cooperation with Russia. The U.S. and NATO efforts are complementary and could work together to form a more effective defense for Europe.