NATO rapid-reaction force gets final green light

RIGA, Nov 29 (Reuters) NATO declared today its long-awaited rapid-reaction force was fully ready to take on missions ranging from high-end combat in far-off troublespots to humanitarian relief.

The NATO Response Force (NRF), brainchild of former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, will field troops from a pool of up to 25,000 troops at a few days' notice and is the flagship of NATO efforts to revamp itself after the Cold War.

The force, announced at a NATO summit in Latvia, will start with troop commitments ''very close'' to the 25,000 target after last-minute offers of soldiers, helicopters and other equipment from Turkey, the United States, France, Spain and Germany.

''This ... ends the uncertainty that has prevailed for some months and shows that the nations are committed to the concept of a flexible, deployable, interoperable and sustainable force,'' NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Gen. James Jones said.

Allies also agreed to share the cost of the expensive air transport needed for troops and equipment in NRF missions.

Current NATO rules stipulate that any nation taking part in a mission must foot the bill for its own deployment, something which had discouraged smaller nations from taking part.

The NRF has already helped in humanitarian operations in Pakistan and conducted exercises in the Atlantic Ocean island of Cape Verde this year in which it simulated a mission to quell a full-blown ethnic conflict.

The NRF launch was one of a number of decisions taken at the Riga summit aimed at transforming NATO from the monolith that protected Europe during the Cold War to a nimble provider of security around the world.

GLOBAL NATO They included plans for national special operations forces to train together, the launch of an intelligence-sharing centre and a move by a consortium of 15 NATO nations plus Sweden to jointly buy three large C-17 transport plans from Boeing.

In a further step the alliance rubber-stamped a new policy paper identifying global terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction and threats to energy infrastructure as among the main risks the alliance must address over the next decade.

The summit declaration ''encouraged nations whose defence spending is declining to halt that decline and to aim to increase spending in real terms''.

But it omitted a specific reference to the NATO target of maintaining defence spending at or above 2 per cent of national income, something only six or seven of the 26 allies achieve.

Polish Defence Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said his country would however reach that goal by next year on its way to creating a fully professional army by 2012.

Leaders also agreed to ''increase the operational relevance of relations with non-NATO countries'' as part of a US-backed plan to boost ties with countries from Asia to Scandinavia that have contributed troops to alliance operations.

But there was no mention of plans to create any new partnership arrangements with such countries.

Allies led by France have said NATO should not try and set itself up as a ''mini-United Nations'' while possible candidates such as Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea remained sceptical of the value of formal ties.

REUTERS PDM HT2010