North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

The Strategic Foresight Analysis (SFA) identified five themes: Political, Human, Technology, Economics/Resources and Environment. Under these themes 15 trends were identified that are expected to shape the future security environment out to 2030 and beyond. From these 15 trends, one trend was analysed in more depth - Demographics.

Project PREDICT (Projections and Relevant Effects of Demographic Implications, Changes, and Trends), was launched at the end of 2013 as a follow-up study to the SFA. Building on long-term cooperation between ACT and the University of Bologna (Italy), the PREDICT project also involved the active participation of the University of Warwick (UK), Sabanci University (Turkey), Johns Hopkins University – SAIS (US/Italy) and the Bruno Kessler Foundation (Italy).

SFA was designed as an iterative process and one which NATO intends to update regularly to provide NATO, national leaders and defence planners with a perspective of the challenges facing the Alliance in the decades to come. Within this framework, the PREDICT goal has been to further develop the research of the “human theme”, focusing on human demographics as the main forecasting variable employed to build different scenarios for NATO in 2035. PREDICT provides an analysis of demographic trends such as population growth, aging, and population composition all of which play a fundamental role in the current and foreseeable shifting distribution of international power. The report also provides security challenges which largely depend on the broader socio-political context in which demographic trends interact with economic, environmental, energy, health and technological trends.

The SFA builds upon the principles described in NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept as the basis for ensuring Alliance security in the future. It is based on recent national and international studies that address the timeframe out to 2030 and beyond. The SFA used previous ACT futures analyses (e.g. the Multiple Futures Project) as a starting point for its investigation. The report also captures the results of four separate ACT-led workshops that discussed political, sociological, economic, technological, scientific and environmental trends and their implications for NATO as an organisation and for Alliance members’ security as a whole.

While the US has been constantly modernizing its armed forces, NATO European states, with the partial exception of the United Kingdom (UK) and France, have lagged far behind (even if one factors in the differences in resources). When pondering on how much and on what to spend public money, European governments are invariably driven by domestic considerations – which for Europeans rarely revolve around military issues – rather than NATO commitments. As a result, a growing imbalance has ensued, with certain allies proportionally contributing to Alliance activities much more than others. While this problem is anything but new in NATO’s history, its proportions – augmented by the economic crisis, which has led to cuts in military spending in most NATO member states – have now acquired an unprecedented scale.