NATO plans its future look

BRUSSELS, July 10 (UPI) -- NATO has begun working on a new strategic concept to heave the military alliance into the 21st century.

Military, political and academic experts at a seminar this week in Brussels began shaping the new strategy, Defensenews.com reports. NATO wants to finalize the strategy by late 2010 or early 2011 at a summit in Lisbon. It would replace one from 1999 that does not adequately address new security issues such as cyber terrorism, piracy, energy security, nuclear proliferation, food security or the race for resources in the arctic.

"We need an in-depth examination of NATO's strengths and weaknesses," outgoing NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said at the seminar in Brussels. "NATO cannot evolve without a new strategic concept."

NATO was created to safeguard the West against the Soviet Union, but today's asymmetrical threats require a different military approach. Modern warfare is about lighter and more mobile units and equipment, and not so much about large tanks and bombers.

"It is quite clear that our 1999 strategic concept belongs to the previous century," Scheffer said.

But NATO has been in somewhat of an identity crisis recently.

Critics say NATO is outdated because its Cold War counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, is defunct. Russia has certainly been angered by the alliance's eastward expansion.

NATO-Russia relations also suffered because of last summer's Russian-Georgian war.

Scheffer advocated a mature relationship with the Kremlin.

"We need to get beyond the on-again, off-again character of our relations, define NATO's essential interests and objectives with respect to Russia, and unify our thinking in order to maximize our impact," he said.