October 10, 2003	Friday	Sha’aban 13, 1424

COLORADO SPRINGS, Oct 9: Defense ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) on Wednesday tested their readiness for crisis, debating steps the Cold War alliance must take to send a new combat force anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice.

The unprecedented study seminar at Schriever Air Force Base on the edge of the Rocky Mountains kicked off a two-day meeting of ministers and military chiefs from the 19 Nato nations and the seven Eastern European states that join their ranks next year.

Details of the four-hour “Dynamic Response ‘07” exercise were kept under wraps to preserve the element of surprise for ministers, but officials said it involved a terrorism and weapons of mass destruction scenario set in a fictional country somewhere in the Mediterranean or Middle East.

The action takes place in 2007, a year after Nato’s planned rapid reaction force of up to 20,000 troops for intense combat is scheduled to be fully activated.

The $7 million exercise was an advance test of Nato’s ability to overcome likely political and military differences when a crisis breaks and deploy lethal troops outside its historic European territory within five to 30 days.

“This is an exceptional opportunity to reflect on the future of the alliance,” Nato Secretary-General George Robertson told the ministers as their seminar got under way. “It looks at new ways we might have to organize our capabilities.”

The exercise was held at the US military’s Joint National Integration Center, a high-tech missile defense and space warfare facility 16kms east of Colorado Springs.

The high-tech war-gaming base is so secret that the military refuses to post photographs of it on the Internet.

The ministers sat in a circle in a specially erected tent with large video screens and military chiefs from the 26 nations observed from a building nearby. Footage of the opening of the exercise, relayed to a media center, showed Harrier fighter jets taking off from an aircraft carrier and an explosion on land.

The remainder of the informal meeting will take place at the posh Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs. The ministers will consider an expansion of Nato’s peacekeeping force in Afghanistan and on Thursday they meet with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov.

Officials said the Pentagon had originally envisaged including an element of preemptive action in the seminar scenario, but backed away from this in light of what one diplomat said would have been an “inevitable train wreck.”

The alliance held a crisis management exercise last year in which a Middle Eastern country was ready to attack Turkey with biological and chemical weapons. Facing the reluctance of other allies to agree, the US and Turkey declared themselves ready to take action, with or without the participation of others.

Preemption is a key element of the Bush administration’s security strategy following the 2001 hijacked airliner attacks on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But diplomats said Washington is treading carefully with its Nato allies after an acrimonious split over bolstering Turkey’s defenses ahead of the US-led Iraq war, which triggered one of the deepest crises in Nato’s 54-year history.

The Nato Response Force plan is one of several initiatives launched to transform the Cold War alliance, which was sidelined by Washington after the 2001 attacks.

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, host of the Colorado meeting, told reporters on Tuesday that the alliance’s “phone will ring” if it can be prepared for post-Cold War threats. —Reuters