Christoph Harig

AS NATO and its member states are reviving their focus on territorial and collective defence, there is a growing awareness of the need for effective co-operation with non-military actors. Flagship documents such as the NATO

Warfighting Capstone Concept explicitly mention the need for “better day-zero integration” that requires partnerships with “non-governmental organisations, civilian actors and industry”.1 NATO’s current conceptual definition of multi-domain operations equally highlights the crucial requirement to integrate nonmilitary actors into military operations, particularly in the cyber and space domain, where private actors’ capabilities often surpass those of the military. Hence, the Alliance and its member states are facing the challenge of re-designing their engagement with non-military actors to make it suitable for the contemporary security environment. When looking at the current existing toolkit, the joint function of Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) appears as the obvious way of working together with non-military actors. However, CIMIC suffers from an image problem within military institutions across the Alliance. It remains associated with the expeditionary phase of operations after the end of the Cold War, and many still equate CIMIC with digging wells and its contributions to winning

over the ‘hearts and minds’ of local populations in foreign countries. However, tasks for CIMIC have always been much broader than this narrative would reflect and are likely to expand even further. While still widely misunderstood and under appreciated by large parts of NATO militaries, CIMIC as a joint function has the potential to help meet the demands of situations that require close cooperation with nonmilitary actors. This requires appropriate preparation of military personnel that should be able to flexibly use CIMIC in various aspects of planning and executing operations.