By Laura Donnelly-Smith
Speaking candidly about the security threats the world is facing and NATO’s strategies to address them, Admiral James G. Stavridis, NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe and the commander of European Command, addressed GW students and faculty at the College of Professional Studies’ quarterly Safety and Security Leadership Seminar Tuesday.
The event, part of CPS’s Security and Safety Leadership program, focused on leadership and interagency cooperation. Dr. Stavridis is responsible for the development of defense plans for Europe, determination of force requirements and deployment and exercise of forces, according to NATO’s website.
President Steven Knapp welcomed attendees to the event. “We’re in a pretty strategic location, it’s fair to say,” he said, explaining GW’s mission to educate citizen leaders in the nation’s capital. He also highlighted the 600 student veterans enrolled at GW, including the 350 in the Yellow Ribbon program, which serves students with significant deployment experience.
“Twenty-first century security isn’t about building walls. It’s about building bridges,” Dr. Stavridis said. He noted that NATO is both a temporal bridge, connecting Cold War paths with 21st-century security concerns, as well as a cultural bridge, connecting 28 NATO partners. “The days of unilateral activity have passed,” he said.
Today, NATO nations have a combined GDP of about $32 trillion and 3 million men and women in arms, representing about a billion people. And the issues facing the alliance are widely varied.
Security, including humanitarian issues, in both Afghanistan and Libya continue to occupy much of NATO’s energy. “It’s been a challenging six months for NATO in Libya. We didn’t see it coming,” Dr. Stavridis said. But he’s fairly confident, he said, that Moammar Gadhafi will be captured or killed in the next few weeks.
Other concerns include ballistic missiles from Iran, which could reach 12 European capitals, and terrorism, including such incidents as the bombing and shooting in Norway in July. Human trafficking—often related to the flow of heroin—is a humanitarian issue as well as a security issue, Dr. Stavridis said, and often goes hand in hand with addiction and prostitution.
Piracy, natural disasters and cyber issues are also at the forefront of NATO’s concerns. Cyber-related issues are especially pertinent, he said. “[Cyber] represents the greatest mismatch between what could go wrong and our level of preparation.”
What’s common to all these issues, Dr. Stavridis said, is that fixing them requires cooperation.
“Challenges like these are not fixed with high-performance aircraft, but with interagency activity,” he said. One of the big steps NATO is taking to address these challenges is increasing language training. “To connect and build bridges, it’s powerful to be able speak others’ languages. In the U.S. Department of Defense, we are frankly inadequate in this area. Only 8 percent of people in the DoD speak another language, and that’s unacceptable.”
In addition, creating security isn’t just about training people to fight, Dr. Stavridis said. In Afghanistan, for example, NATO has taught 120,000 Afghan soldiers to read at about a third-grade level—a significant accomplishment in a country with an 85 percent illiteracy rate. The goal is to teach all 300,000 soldiers to read by 2014. “That’s profoundly, profoundly important. It’s an example of turning the cube on how you create security,” he said. “I would argue that, over time, this might be one of the most important things we do in Afghanistan.”
A comprehensive problem-solving approach requires tapping international, interagency and public-private partnerships. These partnerships can work on everything from developing naval defense systems that can intercept ballistic missiles to stopping Somali pirates, Dr. Stavridis said. NATO’s Cyber Center in Tallinn, Estonia, for example, brings together European nations and the United States to address cybersecurity shortcomings and match up threats to capabilities.
“Security, like life, isn’t an on-off switch,” Dr. Stavridis said. “It’s about turning the dial. Sometimes we have to apply force. NATO can operate effectively in combat, but it’s not just about that. It’s neither hard power nor soft power—it’s smart power.”
Dr. Stavridis concluded by talking about Wikipedia, which he said he consults daily.
“It’s a wonderful example of a very simple idea. [Wikipedia] is not created by getting 35 brilliant people together in a room. It’s created by everybody together, tens of thousands of people, inputting information and ideas,” he said. “It’s a perfect example of how no one of us is as smart as of us all of us together—no one person, no one nation, no one alliance. In the turbulent 21st century, we need a Wikipedia approach to security.”
GW associate professor Frederic Lemieux, who is director of GW’s master’s program in security and safety leadership, said that the students in the audience benefited from hearing directly from NATO’s supreme allied commander.
“I think that the speech was an eye-opener for our graduate students. They clearly understood the importance of multilateral approaches to address the growing array of global threats and international security issues, especially in this time of economic turmoil.”