In the same year as Daalder's article appeared Kurt Volker, then Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and two years later U.S. ambassador to NATO, said in February and May, respectively, that "NATO currently has partnership relationships with 30 countries in Eurasia and another 22 countries in the broader Middle East, and it is looking at other relationships" [5] and in 2005 had been "engaged in eight simultaneous operations on four continents with the help of 20 partners in Eurasia, seven in the Mediterranean, four in the Persian Gulf, and a handful of capable contributors on our periphery." [6]
To bring matters up to date, this September 14 the Pentagon's website paraphrased Michele Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for policy, as maintaining that "NATO's roadmap for a new world and its mission in Afghanistan will be the main topics of discussion when the alliance's leaders gather in Lisbon...." Describing NATO's global objectives within the context of the upcoming summit, she said in her own words: "The first will be revitalizing the alliance for the 21st century and the second will be succeeding as an alliance in Afghanistan....NATO has now had more than a decade of experience in the requirements to do expeditionary operations to actually have your command structure actually be able to deploy and employ forces in real-world contingencies."
She also mentioned a third, critically important, aspect of 21st century global NATO: Participating in the belated realization of the Ronald Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative, so-called Star Wars.
The same Defense Department article quoted from above stated, "Missile defense is another priority for NATO in Lisbon, Flournoy said, and the United States hopes the alliance will embrace missile defense as a mission." [7]
A day after returning from a meeting with President Barack Obama in Washington, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen described to Britain's Daily Telegraph plans in which "an anti-ballistic missile 'shield' would be extended across Nato's territory, coordinated by a new command and control system that would 'knit together' existing radar and other sensor systems, with new SM-3 missiles based on land."
Rasmussen also asserted that he has "full American backing for a proposed $200 million ( 165 million) defensive 'shield', which he hopes will be agreed in November at a summit of members in Lisbon." [8]
Three days earlier he was cited claiming that "an alliance-wide territorial missile defense system would cost about à "š ¬200 million ($245 million) over the next 10 years.
"This is above the à "š ¬800 million ($1.2 billion) investment already required to field theater missile defenses designed to protect deployed troops." [9]
That is, almost a billion and a half American dollars for a layered, integrated interceptor missile system expanding from theater to regional to continental range and ultimately linking up with Pentagon plans for a worldwide network even reaching into space.
The founding of NATO in the last century allowed the U.S. to station nuclear weapons in Europe, where hundreds of them remain, and in the new century NATO will assist Washington in placing all of Europe under an American missile shield, one that is being extended into the South Caucasus and the Middle East. [10]
NATO has also provided the Pentagon with the mechanism for penetrating almost all of Europe, gaining new bases and other military facilities in the east of the continent - Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Kosovo and Poland - and integrating the armed forces of all but three countries - Russia, Belarus and Cyprus - for interoperability for missions in Europe and around the world.
Perhaps not a day passes that U.S. military personnel are not leading exercises in Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia in some manner linked with NATO, especially with its Partnership for Peace program.
This month alone U.S. European Command ran Combined Endeavor 2010 at the Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany from September 2-16, "the world's largest military communications and information systems exercise," a purpose of which was to build "interoperability between NATO and Partnership for Peace (PfP) nations." [11] Other nations participating included Austria, Afghanistan, Armenia, Albania, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Britain, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Finland, Germany, Georgia, Hungary, Italy, Iraq, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Spain, Serbia, Turkey and Ukraine.
On September 13 the latest Northern Coasts military exercise was begun in Finland, the first time in that NATO partner state, with "50 warships and 4,000 naval personnel from 13 countries including Finland, Germany, France, Great Britain, the United States, Sweden, Denmark and Norway" in what is "the largest military exercise ever staged in Finland's territorial waters." [12]
Five days before over 300 U.S. and local troops "kicked off a military exercise...dubbed Medical Central and Eastern Europe Exercise 2010 (MEDCEUR 2010)," in Montenegro - the world's newest nation - a NATO Partnership for Peace initiative and "the biggest military exercise held in Montenegro so far." [13]
Last month Canada conducted the largest of regular military exercises in the Arctic started in 2007 after Russia renewed its territorial claims in the region. Operation Nanook 2010 was not only the biggest such exercise, but for the first time included military forces from other nations: NATO allies the United States and Denmark. [14]
In early 2009 NATO held a two-day conference in Iceland called Security Prospects in the High North which was attended by its secretary general, its two top military commanders and the chairman of its Military Committee. [15]
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