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NATO's strategic sealift capabilities gather pace
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03 March 2005
NATO's strategic sealift capabilities gather paceBy Joris Janssen Lok
NATO's ambition to be a contributor to worldwide peace and stability by providing rapidly deployable forces for crisis response operations is facing a serious hurdle. Highly trained units throughout Europe are on alert to deploy at short notice as part of the newly created NATO Response Force (NRF). However, the challenge is not so much about dealing with a crisis at hand in some remote corner of the planet. It is much more about how to get there in the first place.
To deploy the NRF, an average of 20 ships are required, primarily medium-sized roll-on/roll-off (ro-ro) vessels. According to the most recent analysis by NATO's Planning Board for Ocean Shipping, there are about 860 ships in the ro-ro and roll-on/roll-off - passenger (ro-pax) category worldwide. However, only about 160 of these are regarded as militarily useful (equipped with three to five hoistable decks and meeting NATO requirements for capacity and endurance). Furthermore, ro-ro and ro-pax vessels are generally fully deployed commercially and hardly any ships can be made available unless NATO is willing to pay large amounts of money.
At NATO's milestone Washington Summit of April 1999, a total of 58 defence capability initiatives were identified. These were aimed at addressing a wide variety of capability shortfalls in order to improve the effectiveness of future multinational crisis response operations carried out by NATO and its members. Five of these specifically targeted deployability and mobility (DM), of which two in turn, known as DM2 and DM5, addressed sealift.
A little over a year later, on 1 December 2003, nine NATO members (lead country Norway plus Canada, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the UK), under the guidance of Norwegian Defence Minister Kristin Krohn Devold, signed a Multinational Implementation Agreement (MIA) to establish a sealift capability package of assured-access ro-ro shipping.
As part of the MIA, seven countries agreed to provide funding, while two (Denmark and the UK) committed to contribute 'in kind' by making available their nationally owned sealift capacity.
By January 2004 a Multinational Sealift Steering Committee (MSSC) had been formed to pursue DM5 and the proposed sealift capability package. The latter is made up in part of multinational assured-access contracts through the Luxembourg-based NATO Maintenance and Supply Agency (NAMSA). On 12 February 2004 the nine countries signed an agreement with NAMSA to provide NATO with a strategic sealift capability for rapidly deployable forces.
For the trial year of 2004-05 three ships were to be chartered, but eventually just two vessels were taken under contract, the Spanish-owned MV Cervantes (signed on 12 February 2004 and offering 2,700 lane metres) and MV Carmen B (signed on 20 April 2004 and offering 1,650 lane metres). The combined cost of these vessels was EUR1.3 million (US$1.7 million) and they are to be ready for loading in any port within 10 to 30 days of their call-up.
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