Joint Operations 2030

I have already referred to the NATO Research and Technology Organization's  3-year long Long-Term Scientific Study on Joint Operations 2030.  The Alliance had done studies like this in the 90s for the individual services (air, land, sea), but this was the first study to broaden the scope to include not only the 'joint' realm suggested in the title, but also the broader 'comprehensive' realm. Being 'owned' by the (15!) member states who decided to participate in it (and thus committed resources to it) and not by the Alliance as a whole, the study was thus blissfully unbeholden to the various restrictions that continue to be imposed on NATO-wide planning work in this field.

The final report took much too long to come out, and is not all one could have hoped from it. But the ideas contained in it are still very much worth discussing, as the capability set that the multinational research team derived is quite distinct from many similar exercises. This is not surprising as the entire philosophy was to focus on those capability areas that were not receiving enough attention in regular national and/or NATO-level processes [the EU's role in defense capability is still disappointingly weak] such as the Alliance's Long Term Capabilities Requirements (LTCRs). I will return to both the substance of the research and the way in which we do this kind of work (which has ample room for improvement) at some later point, but I already wanted to post some of the recommendations and take-aways I personally took away as a member of the core team. 

• The Alliance (and it member states) should consider moving towards a broader concept of ‘capabilities’, and put those broader capabilities (even) more centrally in their defense efforts than is the case today. As example, NATO's Conference on ‘National Armaments Directors’ (CNAD, one of the customers of the JO2030 study) should see itself more and more as a conference on ‘National Capability Directors’ and not just merely of ‘National Armaments Directors’. Similarly 'Defense Materiel Organizations' would better be renamed in 'Defense Capability Organizations'. 
• The JO2030 study advanced the use and understanding of the concept of 'defense capability' along a number of lines of meaning including: 
• Seeing defense capabilities more in terms of ‘the ability to…’ instead of ‘capable of …’ i.e.  being more solution (effects?)-focused than just platforms- or even systems-focused; 
• working with capabilities that are more strategic and not just operational or tactical; 
• working with capabilities which are ‘soft’ as well as ‘hard’; 
• being, not just militarily focused but more comprehensive, striving to work more across the entire DOTMLPF chain and to extend out to a whole-of-government and even whole-of-society approach; and, 
• extending this reach more forward to provide resilience (i.e. security through capabilities for others and not just for oneself). 
• The study efforts revealed that NATO Nations have very uneven capability derivation and development processes and capacities. There is an enormous potential to improve NATO capabilities by improving national defense planning methods. A number of the capabilities that were derived over the course of the JO2030 Study represent defence planning capabilities (i.e. balance of investment models, planning methods, and risk models). The Alliance and its nations should explore better ways to develop such models and to make them more widely available. For example, NATO, through ACT, could adopt a greater role as a repository of benchmarking and ‘best practices’ in defence planning. 
• The domain of defence planning would benefit from better (and broader) capability taxonomies. The Study Group considered that the impact of taxonomies on capability-derivation is often underestimated. As defence planning moves more towards capability ‘portfolios’ the value and impact of these taxonomies is expected to increase. 
• The Alliance should find better ways to derive solutions to defence and security problems by leveraging not just the traditional engineering-dominated realm of applied 'hard' sciences but all  scientific disciplines – including the Natural, Formal, and Social Sciences. The fact that the study group had a hard time reaching into these communities should give cause for reflection.  
• The Alliance should focus more on proactive capabilities and not just reactive, ‘one-off’ efforts or responses. These proactive efforts need also to be sustained efforts, largely by the ‘Western’ community and focused on particularly vulnerable regions or countries. 
• There is a need to find better ways to make the defence planning processes more ‘adaptive’: not just for changing current contexts, but also for changes to future and prospective contexts. 
• The RTO itself should reassess its own structure from the vantage point of the findings of this study. 
• The current era of austerity presents new challenges AND new opportunities for the RTO and its study groups (and especially for broader studies such as JO2030). The problems encountered by this study group demonstrate that efforts such as JO2030 are hampered by the current business model by which such groups are assembled and carry out their work. Many in the group felt that the Alliance can and should do better on this score. 
• It is striking that the current Technical Panels include panels as narrow as ‘Applied Vehicle Technologies’ and as broad as ‘Systems Analysis and Studies’. If the Alliance wants to continue to be able to draw on cutting-edge insights from across science and academia, the RTO will have to look for ways to find a better balance in its panel structure and especially better representation from across all scientific disciplines.