Book Description

In the future NATO will have to adapt to the realities of decreasing defense budgets and to changing and expanding the areas of responsibility brought on by German unification and the growing linkages with the former Warsaw Pact nations. NATO will need to have forces ready to manifest its new strategy of reaction to uncertainty. This new requirement for rapid reaction will greatly impact the nature of future NATO military organizations, especially those that will be needed to plan, deploy, and employ air forces across its regions-and-beyond. This research is focused on the concepts for these future organizations. To provide a basis for this work, we examined two major scenarios that would stress NATO to the extreme: (1) an attack by Russia on Poland, which would require NATO forces to deploy out of NATO's central region. From the scenarios, concepts of operations were developed for the employment of air forces that included basing, command, control, and communications (C3), and logistics. Requirements for air organization were derived fro these and were used as a basis for alternative organization concepts.