Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on February 20

Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on February 20, 2002:

General Joseph W. Ralston
United States Armed Forces, Supreme Allied Commander Europe

U.S. Security and the European Theater

Let me tell you how very pleased I am to spend a few moments talking to you about your military and NATO, your Alliance, and some of the things that we have ongoing and then what I really want to do is get to your questions.

The NATO Alliance is a very busy place right now, and sometimes we don’t read that much about it on the front page of the papers, but the fact that we have numerous combat operations ongoing, the fact that we have invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, post 11 September, and if I can go back at the beginning, let’s go back to August of last year when all of Europe was on vacation, if I had stood up and made a speech that within 30 days NATO would have invoked Article 5, I probably would have been hauled away. But just to show you how terribly inept as people we are in predicting the future, that’s exactly what happened. On the 12^th of September, NATO for the first time in its history, invoked Article 5. Now, to further show how inept we are at predicting the future, for fifty-two years everyone accepted as an article of faith that if NATO ever invoked Article 5, then American forces would flow to Europe to defend Europe. Well, just to show you what happened, it was NATO AWACS that deployed to the United States from Europe to defend the skies and the cities of North America and the United States. And today, as we speak, we have seven AWACS with crews from twelve nations of the Alliance that are flying twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, protecting the cities of the United States.

Sometimes people ask the question, “Why didn’t NATO do more?” NATO did everything that the United States asked NATO to do. The United States asked for about eight things: they asked for overflight rights, they asked for basing, they asked for port calls, they asked for intelligence sharing, they asked for the AWACS. We have the standing Naval Forces Mediterranean as we speak, a flotilla of NATO ships that are actively patrolling the Mediterranean, tracking ships with terrorist connections. We have boarded four ships in the past three weeks. That is the same type of ship that the Israeli forces captured not long ago, the Karine. A, with all of the arms that were on board, exactly the same type of operations ongoing.

The combat operations: we have in the EUCOM theater five active combat operations ongoing today. It’s my job to try to keep those off the front page of the papers so that Washington can deal with other matters, but they are very serious nonetheless. One operation we have is called “Operation Northern Watch.” This is where we are, every day, flying over Northern Iraq enforcing the no-fly zone. We’ve been doing this for eleven years, and every time we do that our pilots are fired at. It is an active combat operation. Last year we flew over 6,000 sorties, and this is a coalition effort between the United Kingdom, Turkey and the United States.

We have the operation in Bosnia. Sometimes we need to go back and look at how far we have come in Bosnia to keep it in perspective. Six years ago this past December, NATO deployed into Bosnia with 60,000 troops; 20,000 of those were Americans. Americans were 33 percent of the effort. Every six months we take a look at the situation on the ground and we adjust our force levels. We don’t want one more soldier in Bosnia than we need, but we don’t want one less than we have to have. And today, as we speak, we have less than 17,000 total troops in Bosnia, we have 3,100 Americans, we are less than 20 percent of the effort. Two months from now we’ll have 2,500 Americans, and by this fall my recommendation to the Council, and I believe it will be accepted, is that we will have about 12,000 total and about 1,800 Americans. Eighteen hundred American will be less than ten percent of what we started with, and that is a reflection of the improvement of the situation on the ground. Now things are not perfect in Bosnia. I don’t want you to leave here thinking that they are. There is still much ethnic conflict, there’s still much that needs to be done on the civil side, the economic side, and the rule of law, but there has been enormous progress.

In Kosovo: we have about 39,000 troops there, from 34 nations, including Russia. Every day and every night NATO forces and Russian forces are on joint patrols together, trusting each other. That is a remarkable accomplishment, I believe, and it is one of the real strengths of the relationship between the United States and Russia. Things have improved dramatically. Every time I go to Kosovo and I come back I come back more optimistic than the time before. The people have a real energy, they are hardworking people, they’re in the fields, they’re in the markets, they’re not always doing things in the markets that we approve of or we like but there is a great energy there. They have rebuilt their homes and are trying to form a much better life.

In the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, a lot of lack of understanding, I guess, is the situation there. We have a very volatile situation in that two-thirds of the population of the country is Macedonian-Slavic, one-third is Albanian-Muslim. The majority has not treated the minority the way that they should over the years, and a year ago we were on the verge of a very bloody civil war in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia. Here is a case where I believe NATO got it right. You don’t hear much about it, but we have 700 NATO troops deployed that are there for support of the European Union, who has monitors, as well as the OSCE monitors, to see that as the Macedonian police go back into the Albanian villages violence doesn’t occur on either side. Americans are part of that effort, and we, for the last year, have been very successful in defusing a very, very tense situation. We’re not out of the woods yet. Right now there’s about five feet of snow on the ground in the mountains and in the villages, and in this case snow is our friend. As we get to the spring and the snow melts, people always get a little more feisty, so we’ll see what happens as we get to the spring. But I’m very hopeful that we will be able to bring a political solution. There is no military solution to this problem. We have to buy time to allow the political forces to come up with a solution and, ultimately, for the economic recovery to take place. That’s four operations.

The fifth operation: the global war on terrorism. This is something that’s much, much greater than military operations because the vast majority of it, quite frankly, falls on the civil side. It is the intelligence-sharing, it is the domestic law enforcement, it is the disruption of financial networks, it is the condemnation by leaders of nations and editorial writers and religious leaders in condemning terrorism for what it is – mass murder. That is far more important than the military piece, but the military does have a role to play.

We’ve gone through and tried to list the terrorist networks that are in Europe, and they are extensive, and then what we can do working with our civil authorities and military. The EUCOM domestic law enforcement have arrested over 1,500 terrorists in the last three months – 1,500 – that’s a lot, and while that’s not advertised, it is a very, very important part of that effort. We have a variety of countries that all have their unique problems. Bosnia, for example. Bosnia did have more terrorist networks than they should have. Much of that was a result of the wars that happened in the early 1990s where the Mujahadin came in to fight and then stayed after the end of the war, married locals, but they are still there. It was an ideal place to plan terrorist acts, even if you weren’t going to commit the terrorist act in Bosnia, because of the lack of rule of law it was a wide-open place to do that. Thus far, we have rolled up over twenty terrorists there. Some of them are in Quantanamo Bay at this point.

You have countries in the European theatre that are trying very hard to work the terrorist problem. Algeria, for example, cooperating very well, but the problem is the Algerian government is not in control of all the areas in their country. Same is true of Georgia. Same is true of Lebanon. We’ve got to work with these countries as best we can to see how we can help them to get control of the parts of their countries that are ungoverned, but it’s a very busy time in NATO in that regard.

Let me talk about another subject of NATO: enlargement. There will be a NATO heads of state summit in November of this year in Prague, where the heads of state of the nineteen nations will come to a decision on what nations should be offered membership into the Alliance. Now, we have nine nations that are called “aspirant” nations, they aspire to NATO membership. In no particular order, but from north to south, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania.

Now, whenever I go to any of the aspirant countries I’m always asked the question, “when is Country X going to be offered membership in NATO?” My answer is always the same, “when Country X is offered membership in NATO is a political decision, not a military one.” Now, I say that with all due respect to the political process, because that’s the way it should be. I try very hard to keep those of us in uniform focused on the objective military criteria of Country X. How are they doing in the reform of their military? What does their geography mean? What’s their interoperability like? What’s their training like? But at the end of the day, Country X could have maxed the course on every one of the objective military criteria, and there may be a very good and valid political reason as to why you would not want them as a member of the Alliance. And conversely, Country Y may not be exactly where we want them to be in terms of reform of the military. By the way, I can say that about the United States’ military. This is a continuous process. We need to reform, but there may be an overwhelming political reason as to why you would need County Y as a member of the alliance. So, I will be providing the best advice I can to the political authorities at the appropriate time as we run up to Prague, but it is a very, very serious issue, very important issue. I will testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the 28^th of this month on NATO enlargement. So the debate will start in Washington as I think is proper, and we will see where that goes by the time that we get to November.

Maybe that’s a good place for me to stop and see what’s on your mind and what question you have