Home - NATO Transformation - NATO Capabilities - NATO LibGuides at NATO Multimedia Library

Keywords

When searching for information on this topic, potentially useful keywords to use include :

NATO transformation
military transformation
NATO capabilities
Smart Defence
pooling and sharing of defence capabilities
capablility gap

Notes

This LibGuide includes links to content found on the web (e.g. websites, news & blogs, reports, etc.) as well as a select number of articles and books available from the NATO Multimedia Library.

Please note that this is not a comprehensive collection of material on this topic. The selection criteria for the websites and documents included was based on each item's currency and relevancy to this topic.

Furthermore, quick search boxes for online databases subscribed by the Library (available to staff working at NATO HQ) as well as links to the library catalog are available for you to locate additional resources.

Welcome!

From the Improving NATO capabilities topic page:

NATO has been engaged in continuous and systematic transformation for many years to ensure that it has the policies, capabilities, and structures required, in the changing international security environment, to deal with current and future challenges, including of course the collective defence of its members. With Allied forces engaged in operations and missions across several continents, the Alliance needs to ensure that its armed forces remain modern, deployable and sustainable.

The Alliance’s 2010 Strategic Concept sets out NATO’s strategic priorities and defines the Organization’s vision of Euro-Atlantic security for the next decade. It provides an analysis of the strategic environment and a framework for all Alliance capability development planning disciplines and intelligence, identifying the kinds of operations the Alliance must be able to perform and setting the context for in which capability development takes place.

Please see the full topic page for more information on improving NATO capabilities, including: "Meeting immediate and long-term challenges", "Understanding the procedures", "The bodies involved in decision-making", and "The development of capabilities over time".

This LibGuide is intended to provide a few starting points to assist you with your research on issues related to NATO transformation - NATO capabilities. In addition to resources on the subjects at hand, this LibGuide also includes information that touches upon related issues such as defence spending -- or more precisely, better spending -- during a time of financial crisis, which the Secretary General terms as Smart Defence:

“I know that in an age of austerity, we cannot spend more. But neither should we spend less. So the answer is to spend better. And to get better value for money. To help nations to preserve capabilities and to deliver new ones. This means we must prioritise, we must specialise, and we must seek multinational solutions. Taken together, this is what I call Smart Defence.”

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen
30 September 2011

Good places to start your research include :

the NATO Topic pages on

Improving NATO's capabilities
Improving NATO’s strategic air- and sealift capabilities
Smart Defence
Comprehensive Political Guidance ("The Comprehensive Political Guidance is a major policy document that sets out the framework and priorities for all Alliance capability issues, planning disciplines and intelligence for the next 10 to 15 years.")
NATO Response Force ("The NRF has the overarching purpose of being able to provide a rapid military response to an emerging crisis, whether for collective defence purposes or for other crisis response operations.The force gives NATO the means to respond swiftly to various types of crises anywhere in the world. It is also a driving engine of NATO’s military transformation.")

NATO Review's editions on

World financial crisis: what it means for security (July 2009)
NATO's continuing transformation (Autumn 2006)

TRANSNET, the ACT Transformation Network Portal
The NATO Communications and Information (NCI) Agency website ("The NATO Communications and Information (NCI) Agency was established on 1 July as a result of the merger of the NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A), the NATO ACCS Management Agency (NACMA), the NATO Communications and Information System Services Agency (NCSA), the ALTBMD Programme and elements of NATO HQ.The establishment of the Agency is part of a broader NATO reform.The new NCI Agency "connects forces, NATO and Nations"- it is NATO's IT and C4ISR provider, including cyber and missile defence.")