Page 23 - North Atlantic and Nordic Defense

North European and North Atlantic Defense: The Challenges Return

Keith Eikenes: From a Norwegian perspective, a strong and stable Europe is crucial to our continued security
and prosperity.

One of the things that we really need to try to avoid is supporting a narrative now of how Europe is sort of
falling apart.

What we need to do is to shape a narrative and way ahead to pursue the next phase of European
development within which defense and security are clearly important drivers as well.
An important goal here will be to strengthen the European pillar of the transatlantic security framework, and
ensuring a more equitable burden-sharing.

Information War and Hybrid Threats: Finland Launches a New Center to

Focus on the Challenge

2017-10-06 Information war and hybrid threats have been honed to a 21st century art form by the Russians
under President Putin.

But these are really early days for shaping ways to deal with the IW/hybrid threat challenge and to deal
more generally with the use of military power for limited political objectives, short of war.

Clearly, in Northern Europe, a broader zone of security is evolving from the Arctic through to the Baltics and
includes the UK, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and various other NATO allies.

A key challenge will be to shape effective crisis management tools and approaches to deal with this targeted
threat which is designed to obtain political and strategic objectives without the use of overwhelming military
force.

The liberal democracies are shaping a new set of military capabilities and concepts of operations which
can be used in such an effort; but the civil side of the effort needs to be developed and evolved in order
to do so.

The broad fault line between the liberal democracies versus the illiberal powers is defining the nature of
conflict in the decade ahead to go along with the continuing challenges associated with terrorist organizations
like ISIS.

The Government of Finland has stood up a new Centre designed in part to shape better understanding
which can in turn help the member states develop the tool sets for better crisis management.

This is how the Finnish government put it with regard to the new center in its press release dated October 1,
2017.

The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats has reached initial operational
capability on 1 September 2017. The Act on the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid
Threats entered into force on 1 July 2017, following which Matti Saarelainen, Doctor of Social Science,
was appointed Director of the Centre. The Centre has now acquired premises in Helsinki, established a
secretariat consisting of seven experts and made the operational plans for this year.

"Hybrid threats have become a permanent part of the Finnish and European security environment, and
the establishment of the Centre responds well to this current challenge. Since early July, rapid progress

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