Vorsitzender des NATO-Militärausschusses: Auf das Unerwartete einstellen

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Aus Zeitgründen hier nur zum Nachlesen eingestellt: Der Vorsitzende des NATO-Militärausschusses, der niederländische Admiral Rob Bauer, hat das aktuelle Treffen der Chiefs of Defense (CHOD), der obersten Militärs der Mitgliedsstaaten, mit einer aufrüttelnden Rede begonnen. Von tektonischen Verschiebungen ist die Rede, und vom Einstellen auf eine Ära des Unerwarteten.

Aus dem von der NATO veröffentlichten Wortlaut vom (heutigen) Mittwoch:

Together, we have to make sure that political will is matched with military capabilities. And with the rules-based international order being under immense pressure, the importance of this cannot be overstated.

The tectonic plates of power are shifting. And as a result: we face the most dangerous world in decades.

NATO has entered into a new era of collective defence. And together we are defending much more than the physical safety of our 1 billion people and 31, soon to be 32, nations – We are defending freedom and democracy. (…)

Never before have NATO and national defence plans been so closely interlinked. This will shape our armed forces for decades to come. Allies are now actively working to maximise the executability of these new defence plans.
That includes:
• putting more troops on higher readiness;
• capability building and development;
• adaptation of NATO’s command and control structures;
• creating and sustaining more enablement: logistics, host nation support, maintenance, military mobility, and replenishment and prepositioning of stocks;
• and crucially: more collective defence exercises and training against these new plans.

Militarily, there are many more steps to be taken to get where we want to be for our collective defence. However, the responsibility for freedom does not lie on the shoulders of those in uniform alone.

In order to strengthen our collective defence and at the same time support Ukraine in its existential fight, we need a whole of society approach. We need public and private actors to change their mind-set from an era in which everything was plannable, foreseeable, controllable, focused on efficiency…. to an era in which anything can happen at any time. An era in which we need to expect the unexpected. An era in which we need to focus on effectiveness.

In order to be fully effective also in the future, we need a warfighting transformation of NATO. That will be the main focus of today’s session led by the Supreme Allied Commander Transformation. For this too, public-private cooperation will be the key.

In the final session of today – the first NATO-Ukraine Council in Chiefs of Defence format – we will hear an update from our Ukrainian partners and discuss the current situation while reaffirming our continued support to Ukraine.

This war has never been about any real security threat to Russia coming from either Ukraine or NATO. This war is about Russia fearing something much more powerful than any physical weapon on earth: democracy.

If people in Ukraine can have democratic rights, then people in Russia will soon crave them too. That is what this war is actually about. In 2024 a record-breaking 2 billion people on earth will cast their vote in a democratic election, and yet the concept of democracy needs to be defended more than ever.

The Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian Armed Forces are doing this in a way we have never seen before. In the darkness of war, they are a beacon of light that shows the world what it means to fight for what you believe in.

Today is the 693rd day of what Russia thought would be a 3-day war.
Ukraine will have our support for every day that is to come. Because the outcome of this war will determine the fate of the world.

Ladies and Gentlemen,
The ability for NATO to ‘expect the unexpected’ is directly tied to the ability to see things from a different perspective. To apply new and different ways of working and to accumulate different threat perspectives. For this, our cooperation with Partners is key.

(Foto: Admiral Bauer, r., mit Bundeswehr-Generalinspekteur Carsten Breuer – Foto NATO)