Jens Stoltenberg assured, this Monday, June 27, that he wanted to set up “the most ambitious collective defense and deterrence reform since the Cold War”. According CNBC, the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) wishes to increase the number of soldiers taking part in the reinforced reaction force, a multinational force capable of emergency intervention both on land, air and sea on special forces operations. The American channel adds:
“The military alliance is on the verge of increasing the strength of its high-readiness forces to more than 300,000 troops.”
“This commitment would result in an increase of some 650%, knowing that NATO’s reinforced reaction force currently field around 40,000 soldiers”, contextualise-t-elle.
With this in mind, Jens Stoltenberg spoke out in favor of additional investments dedicated to the organization. The members of the Atlantic Alliance have undertaken to devote 2% of their GDP to defence, but this threshold must be “increasingly seen as a minimum, not a maximum”.
Strategic summit in Madrid
Pour CNBCthe timing of these announcements seems calculated. “[Stoltenberg] made the comments as NATO leaders prepare to meet this week in Madrid, Spain, to discuss what is known as the Strategic Concept, the alliance’s most important document of thirty members, explains the Englewood Cliffs media.
Updated approximately every ten years, this text serves as a “guide” to the members of the Atlantic Alliance, who use it to define the main lines of their defense policies and highlight the major challenges they face.
NATO, said Stoltenberg, should on this occasion again denounce the actions of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. According to him, the country constitutes “the biggest and most direct threat” for the organization, in the context of the war in Ukraine.