Military

SHAPE News Summary & Analysis

9 October 2003

NATO

• Coverage of Thursday’s session of an informal meeting of NATO defense ministers and defense chiefs in Colorado Springs focuses on the leaders’ participation in exercise Dynamic Response ’07. Media generally note that the exercise provided the opportunity to explore ways of using the NRF. NATO defense chiefs took part in an unprecedented secret exercise in Colorado springs Wednesday that dramatized the need for agile decision- making and more deployable forces to deal with fast moving crises, writes AFP. More broadly, the dispatch adds, the ministers were discussing how to transform an Alliance created to defend Europe into one better suited to meet threats that are less predictable and more likely to arise outside Europe in ungoverned parts of the world. Stressing that the leading edge of that transformation is the NRF, the dispatch adds that a ceremony formally establishing a prototype unit is to be held Oct. 15 in Brunssum. It remarks that France, which is not a member of NATO’s military structure, nonetheless will be one of the major contributors of ground troops to the force. “NATO’s defense ministers and military chiefs locked themselves away at a top-secret U.S. base Wednesday to play out a fictional scenario involving civilian evacuations, terrorist strikes and the threat of chemical or biological attacks to test the Alliance’s planned rapid reaction force,” reports the New York Times, adding: “Plans calls for the Alliance to be able to deploy a brigade within five to 30 days of receiving orders. Senior NATO officials conceded that, given the Alliance’s requirement for consensus decision-making, the rapid deployment force might not move so quickly given political considerations that might arise in the capitals of various NATO nations.” In a related broadcast, Deutsche Welle reported that following Dynamic Response ‘07, Defense Minister Struck said he would seek to speed up the decision-making process in Berlin so that Bundeswehr soldiers could be more quickly deployed to crisis areas. According to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, reported CNN, NATO needs to put together a quick-response military team to respond to threats in a post-Cold War world. The broadcast continued: “A prototype of the NRF comes into existence next week for testing. By next October, it is to be ready for real-world use on a limited scale, and by October 2006, it is to be fully operational. It will be comprised of a core force of 5,000 troops, augmented by about 15,000 in support. This marks an important departure for NATO, which has never in its 54-year history had a multinational military unit combining air, land and sea power for use anywhere in the world on short notice.”
  
  
• Le Monde observes that U.S. officials at NATO are praising the French armed forces’ capabilities, saying Paris’ military forces are those in Europe most capable to deploy in theaters of operations abroad. “Gen. Jones … as well as the US Ambassador to NATO, Nicholas Burns, have both praised the French armed forces for the way they organize their cooperation with NATO, the article says and adds: “In an interview with Newsweek, Oct. 6, Gen Jones declared that ‘France probably has the most expeditionary army, i.e., ready to deploy to distant battlefields,” adding, even if this does not please the British, ‘And writ large.’” Recalling that in 1991 he served in northern Iraq alongside the French Daguet army division, the newspaper quotes Gen. Jones saying: “France has impressive military capabilities across the whole spectrum of operations. They’re good at peacekeeping; their Air Force is modern, state of the art; their Navy is modern; their land Army … is a very, very fine army.” Noting that one week before, Ambassador Burns told journalists in Brussels that “France is a precious ally of the United States,” despite “our differences,” and also praised the French armed forces’ capabilities, the article adds: “French military chiefs have been discretely invited by their authorities not to publicly glorify themselves over the appraisal of the two U.S. officials of their countries’ military capabilities. These judgments could appear as a ‘poisoned compliment,’ it is being said in Paris, at a time when the Americans deplore the French armed forces’ absence from the Iraqi theater and when France plans to establish in Lille, even if this could compete with NATO, a command capable to manage a rapid reaction corps based on the model—although much broader—of what has been done in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Ivory Coast. Gen. Jones’ statements, suggesting that the French armed forces’ capability to deploy beyond Europe is equal or even superior to that of the British armed forces, are surprising. A report made public last September by the Defense Economic Observatory (ECODEF), which reports to the French Defense Ministry, shows the opposite. ‘Britain’s defense effort is superior to ours,’ says the report, adding that the gap which separates us from our British partner remains too important and saying that changes resulting from the adoption of a new military program law could not be interpreted as a reversal of that trend.”

OTHER NEWS

• According to The Independent, a study has found that military exercises involving blasts of underwater sound could be the reason why whales and dolphins become stranded on beaches. The blasts from active sonar, used to detect submarines, may cause dolphins and whales to suffer a form of decompression sickness similar to “the bends” suffered by deep-sea divers, the study reportedly said. The newspaper further reports that scientists believe they have found evidence to explain why many strandings of whales and dolphins appear to coincide with naval exercises involving active sonar. Marine mammologists discovered signs of decompression sickness during post-mortem examinations of whales which beached themselves in the Canary Islands four hours after the start of a Spanish naval exercise in September 2002, where active sonar was used, adds the newspaper.