NATO Transformation

<p>The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been the most important and successful alliance of all time but today faces many challenges; search for relevancy with the end of the cold war growing military capabilities gap compared to the US requirements of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) new Bush doctrine of preemption expansion of NATO members and creation of the NATO Response Force (NRF). Meeting these challenges has been made more difficult by the friction created by the war in Iraq and the division between the NATO allies. During the Prague summit in November of 2002 NATO invited 7 new countries to join the alliance and laid out plans for transforming. This transformation is aimed at giving the alliance the capability (forces command and control structure) to be relevant but does not address the more important issue of NATO's role in today's security environment. My contention is that while the Prague initiatives are excellent assuming they can be implemented they will be meaningless unless the member states address the strategic future of the alliance in the 21st century and its role in the global war on terrorism. The author surveyed studies and papers from think tanks and from NATO and EU attended numerous panel discussions with subject experts and questioned NATO EU and US representatives and military leaders.</p><p>This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore you will see the original copyright references library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world) and other notations in the work.</p><p>This work is in the public domain in the United States of America and possibly other nations. Within the United States you may freely copy and distribute this work as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.</p><p>As a reproduction of a historical artifact this work may contain missing or blurred pages poor pictures errant marks etc. Scholars believe and we concur that this work is important enough to be preserved reproduced and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.</p>