Smart defence efforts set for crucial year in 2013

NATO officials are wrestling with 'smart defence' to shift the concept for pooling and sharing of military capabilities between allies away from ad-hoc and short-term approaches to a more permanent footing, officials stated in Brussels on 27 November.

However, how to successfully embed this idea in national thinking is far from clear. "It matters tremendously whether you define smart defence narrowly or broadly. If you make it too broad, it means nothing. If you make it too narrow – just sharing a capability – that makes it too modest for delivering anything of substance," a NATO defence planner stated. "The worst would be specialisation by default where a critical capability accrues to just one partner. This is a big debate within NATO right now."

Smart defence was floated in 2010 by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen in response to the financial crisis's severe reduction of defence spending and to United States pressure on its European allies to fill NATO's capability gaps.

The smart defence concept was endorsed by allied leaders at their Chicago summit in May when they announced the launch of about two dozen bilateral and multinational 'Tier 1' short-term projects.