HELSINKI, Finland. This week NATO’s first Allied Foresight Conference was held in Helsinki, Finland. It served to establish and facilitate dialogue among Allied and Partner nation experts in the fields of predictive futures analysis, including the policy planning, defence planning and warfare development communities as well as academia and industry.
The conference also offered a marketplace to present key challenges and opportunities and it signalled an important milestone in further solidifying NATO’s strategic foresight and future thinking community. The event was jointly organized by the Supreme Allied Commander Transformation and the Minister of Defence of Finland.
The conference also marks a high point of a journey, which started two years ago, when General Phillippe Lavigne prioritized foresight research within NATO Allied Command Transformation`s strategic analysis framework. Since then, NATO’s security environment has been gravely altered by systemic shocks and disruptive changes. The increasing frequency and impact of multiple crises and fragmentation of the rules based international order has necessitated re-vitalization of the strategic foresight function at NATO Allied Command Transformation.
In this increasingly complex, congested, commercialized and contested environment, dialogue on future trajectories, challenges and opportunities amongst Allies and Partners is more important than ever before. The re-vitalized strategic foresight process signals the intent of NATO’s strategic warfare development command, NATO Allied Command Transformation, to address future challenges in a systemic manner, and as a collective research community. This will assist the Alliance with exploring, analyzing and most importantly, embracing changes as the security environment evolves.
The Strategic Foresight Analysis 2023, published last year, represents a significant milestone for Allied Command Transformation and was developed through nine workshops with over eight hundred participants. It represents a shared futures baseline for the Allied foresight community and informs multiple work strands in concept development, warfare development and defence planning. Based on this context, the Future Operating Environment 2024 is addressing the military problem sets for Allied Warfare Development and will also serve as a baseline for further conceptual and strategic thinking. The renewed foresight cycle, consisting of Strategic Foresight Analysis 2023, Future Operating Environment 2024 combined with Allied Command Transformation’s deployable foresight analytics capacities, will facilitate collective futures thinking within the Alliance, as well as augment an individual Ally’s foresight capabilities.
As a fundamental aspect to this effort, the Allied foresight community has been re-established and the community is growing. An increasing number of Allied states, as well as stakeholders within the NATO enterprise, are choosing to allocate resources into long-term futures thinking.
It is therefore paramount that NATO Allied Command Transformation continues to provide a platform for the Allied foresight and futures experts to share their views and establish common understanding on long-term trends, threats and challenges.
