Columbia International Affairs Online: Policy Briefs

CIAO DATE: 08/2014

NATO Agency Reform, Done Right

Marshall Billingslea, Gary Winterberger

December 2011

Atlantic Council

Abstract

Marshall Billingslea, director with Deloitte Consulting, LPP and member of the Atlantic Council's Strategic Advisors Group, and Major General Gary Winterberger, USAF (Ret.), former commander of the NATO Airborne Early Warning and Control (NAEW&C) Force Command and consultant with the NATO team at IBM, authored an issue brief on NATO reform.

The publication was released during the event "Transforming Towards a Smarter Alliance: NATO Reform in the Age of Austerity," part of the Council’s Smarter Alliance Initiative in partnership with IBM.

NATO’s forthcoming 2012 Summit in Chicago gives the Alliance’s senior decision-makers the opportunity to assess the health of transatlantic relations and to tackle a set of overdue internal issues that have been long postponed due to more pressing operational issues in Afghanistan, Iraq, and then Libya. Chief among these issues is the matter of reforming NATO’s own headquarters and its many and varied agencies. A careful reform effort, with a special focus on shared services, restructuring and integration, NATO’s human capital, and the procurement and capabilities development structure and process, could pay significant dividends for the Alliance and ensure the more efficient use of already limited resources. While not a panacea, this would go a long way towards preparing the Alliance for future challenges.