Proposes a new and comprehensive military framework to help guide NATO improvements in the years ahead. This framework envisions a pyramid-like structure of future NATO forces and capabilities in 5 areas: a new NATO Special Operations Force, the NATO Response Force, high-readiness combat forces, stabilization and reconstruction forces, and assets for defense sector development. The U.S. would provide 1/3 of the forces, and Europe would be responsible for the other 2/3. If NATO succeeds in creating these forces for power projection and expeditionary missions, it will possess a broad portfolio of assets for operations against such threats as terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and cross-border aggression.

At the EU's Helsinki summit in 1999, European leaders took a decisive step toward the development of a new Common European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) aimed at giving the EU a stronger role in international affairs backed by a credible military force. This report analyzes the processes leading to the ESDP by examining why and how this new European consensus came about. It touches upon the controversies and challenges that still lie ahead. What are the national interests and driving forces behind it, and what steps need to be taken to realize Europe's ambitions to achieve a workable European crisis mgmt. capability?

This open access volume surveys the state of the field to examine whether a fifth wave of deterrence theory is emerging. Bringing together insights from world-leading experts from three continents, the volume identifies the most pressing strategic challenges, frames theoretical concepts, and describes new strategies. The use and utility of deterrence in today’s strategic environment is a topic of paramount concern to scholars, strategists and policymakers. Ours is a period of considerable strategic turbulence, which in recent years has featured a renewed emphasis on nuclear weapons used in defence postures across different theatres; a dramatic growth in the scale of military cyber capabilities and the frequency with which these are used; and rapid technological progress including the proliferation of long-range strike and unmanned systems. These military-strategic developments occur in a polarized international system, where cooperation between leading powers on arms control regimes is breaking down, states widely make use of hybrid conflict strategies, and the number of internationalized intrastate proxy conflicts has quintupled over the past two decades. Contemporary conflict actors exploit a wider gamut of coercive instruments, which they apply across a wider range of domains. The prevalence of multi-domain coercion across but also beyond traditional dimensions of armed conflict raises an important question: what does effective deterrence look like in the 21st century? Answering that question requires a re-appraisal of key theoretical concepts and dominant strategies of Western and non-Western actors in order to assess how they hold up in today’s world. Air Commodore Professor Dr. Frans Osinga is the Chair of the War Studies Department of the Netherlands Defence Academy and the Special Chair in War Studies at the University Leiden. Dr. Tim Sweijs is the Director of Research at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies and a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Military Sciences of the Netherlands Defence Academy in Breda.

With the increased dependence on digital and internet technologies, cyber security has come to be regarded as a national security issue, and the number of countries with a published cyber security strategy continues to rise. But these national cyber security strategies often run the risk of failing to address all the cyber security requirements of the many institutions within a given country, and the complex nature of the stakeholders involved and the networks formed by them means that the problem requires an interdisciplinary approach. This book presents papers from the NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) entitled “A Framework for a Military Cyber Defense Strategy”, held in Norfolk, Virginia, USA, in April 2016. The workshop focused on key priority areas for cyber defense along with NATO’s cyber defense policy implementation and brought together experts with an eclectic mix of backgrounds and specialties from a group of NATO member states and partner countries. The participants considered not only the technical implications of cyber security efforts, but also the legal, strategic, educational and organizational aspects, and the book reflects this wide view of the field and its intricacies, highlighting the complexity of cyber security and the many challenges it presents. This overview of cyber security offers state-of-the-art approaches from a multidisciplinary standpoint, and will be of interest to all those working in the field.

In this new Brookings Marshall Paper, Michael O'Hanlon argues that now is the time for Western nations to negotiate a new security architecture for neutral countries in eastern Europe to stabilize the region and reduce the risks of war with Russia. He believes NATO expansion has gone far enough. The core concept of this new security architecture would be one of permanent neutrality. The countries in question collectively make a broken-up arc, from Europe's far north to its south: Finland and Sweden; Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus; Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan; and finally Cyprus plus Serbia, as well as possibly several other Balkan states. Discussion on the new framework should begin within NATO, followed by deliberation with the neutral countries themselves, and then formal negotiations with Russia. The new security architecture would require that Russia, like NATO, commit to help uphold the security of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and other states in the region. Russia would have to withdraw its troops from those countries in a verifiable manner; after that, corresponding sanctions on Russia would be lifted. The neutral countries would retain their rights to participate in multilateral security operations on a scale comparable to what has been the case in the past, including even those operations that might be led by NATO. They could think of and describe themselves as Western states (or anything else, for that matter). If the European Union and they so wished in the future, they could join the EU. They would have complete sovereignty and self-determination in every sense of the word. But NATO would decide not to invite them into the alliance as members. Ideally, these nations would endorse and promote this concept themselves as a more practical way to ensure their security than the current situation or any other plausible alternative.