Henrik Østergaard Breitenbauch

NATO’s leaving Afghanistan represents an immediate and discomforting challenge for NATO’s partners. Throughout the ISAF era, partners were able to maintain and increase their standing in relation to the Alliance as such and in strategically important bilateral relationships (such as to the United States) by contributing to Allied operations. Without ISAF, the strategic ‘stock value’ of traditional partnership mechanisms increases abruptly because they not only give access to NATO best practices but also enables the development of long-term security relationships. Professional Military Education is one very promising dimension for increasing traditional partnership cooperation.

European NATO nations need better staff officers. Operation Unified Protector exposed a widespread deficiency in the professional knowledge of field-grade European officers. Professional military education (PME) is where corrective Alliance action must focus. The Nordic countries—Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland—have conducted joint training courses for decades and are considering ways to facilitate cooperation in the education of the field-grade officers that would populate the staff of any future NATO-led expeditionary operation. We suggest three alternative paths that increased cooperation in PME at the level of the command and staff course could take: a Nordic Defence College, standardized national command and staff courses, and a core curriculum of common courses for common purposes. We conclude with a discussion of how the Alliance can facilitate clusters of cooperation between strategically proximate groups of Allies to improve their number of knowledgeable and skilled staff officers.