By Ann Roosevelt
NATO’s agency for change is the Norfolk, Va.-based Allied Command Transformation (ACT), which coordinates alliance work to counter improvised explosive devices (C-IEDs) as part of its efforts to improve alliance capabilities in current and future operations, its commander said.
“The final target will not be to guarantee an IED-free environment, because this will, in my mind, realistically never happen,” Supreme Allied Commander Transformation French Air Force Gen. Stephane Abrial said at a Washington, D.C., media roundtable yesterday.
The NATO Secretary General has described IEDs as one of the three areas in which NATO countries could pool resources and pursue multinational solutions.
This is where ACT, the only NATO headquarters outside of Europe, comes in, as it was formed to ensure the alliance nations “have the kind of forces we can deploy where and when and when we need them with the equipment and training they need and at a price we can collectively afford,” Abrial said, quoting the secretary general.
More than two-thirds of alliance casualties come because of IEDs, Abrial said.
“I think we have to do everything we can–to not to fully eradicate them because that I think would be unrealistic–but to make sure that we can identify them, that we can find the best way both to defeat them and protect our troops against them, that we can fight the system,” he said.
The system is the structure behind the actual bomb–who pays the people and buys parts, who does the planning and who emplaces the devices, and who are the local people who might know something.
“The nations really have the will to share,” he said.
Counter-IED equipment efforts by allied nations revolve around detecting IEDs, preventing them from activating, jamming, and equipment to protect troops from being wounded or killed if an IED detonates.
The first thing NATO ACT did, Abrial said, was take stock of what nations are already doing and make sure it is shared among all the players, he said. “I don’t want to duplicate existing efforts.”
Secondly, NATO ACT works to identify new capabilities, “what is existing on the market, what could we do both very short term to make sure to protect our troops better to protect the population better and also we have to invest now to come up with the best technology possible a few months a few years ahead,” he said.
This short-medium-long-term continuum ties into the command’s objective to support current and future alliance forces.
Abrial has four priorities for his tour at NATO ACT: first, to increase its role as a think tank; developing new capabilities, and developing networking among alliance nations to improve overall effectiveness. For example, the close cooperation between U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) and NATO ACT.
“My vision is to expand this close cooperation to all the JFCOMs in all nations of the alliance.
Fourth on the agenda is improving the way NATO works with its partners, particularly ahead of deployment.
In a strategic environment where operations include civilians as well as the military and are not purely military, it is NATO ACT’s job to act as a “catalyst” to help state and not-state actors achieve their missions.
This transformation is the reason Abrial was in Washington, as cohost with the National Defense University, of the fourth and final Strategic Concept Seminar commissioned by NATO’s Secretary General to provide advice on a new Strategic Concept for the alliance. NATO ACT offers military advice to the political leaders working on the new concept.
Once a new concept is in place, ACT will be heavily involved in implementing it in military terms, Abrial said.