ADAPTING NATO'S INTEGRATED AIR AND MISSILE DEFENSE TO MULTI-DOMAIN OPERATIONS
ADAPTING NATO'S INTEGRATED AIR AND MISSILE DEFENSE TO MULTI-DOMAIN OPERATIONS

Author(s): Tatian DUMITRESCU
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, Social Sciences, Economy
Published by: Carol I National Defence University Publishing House
Keywords: integrated air and missile defense; IAMD; multi-domain operations; MDO; ballistic missile defense; BMD; cross-domain; distributed defense; offense-defense integration; kill-web.
Summary/Abstract: NATO Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) is the defensive component of the Alliance’s Joint Air Power, which aims to secure NATO’s airspace, to deter and defend against any air and missile threats. This mission is implemented through Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) and Air Policing (AP) activities during peace time and ultimately will deliver air and missile defense during crisis and conflict. Today’s NATO IAMD mission is challenging since is considered susceptible to suppression by emerging threats, due to system stove piping, limited technical integration, reduced capacity, increased costs, and a BMD heavy focus, and require revision and adaptation to new doctrine developments; this is the case of Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) concept, that comes to bring more comprehensiveness to the Joint organizations. This paper focused on the IAMD and MDO concepts analysis in order to determine how should NATO IAMD evolve in order to be ready for MDO. Following a top-down approach, the article investigated MDO literature to establish its r/evolutionary character, the status of MDO development across military organizations, and explored relevant documentation to reveal ideas related to IAMD evolution like the cross-domain integration (to include cyber, space, electromagnetic domains, and synchronization with non-military actors), distributed defense concept and the offense-defense integration. Finally, using the identified solutions, the study proposed some steps to be taken by NATO to build an IAMD cross-domain version deemed for an MDO environment, ready to adopt a more offensive mindset. This article recognizes the need for network centric air and missile defense capabilities to function into a kill-web system, while the IAMD forces interoperability, interconnectivity and integration should become paramount. These requirements can only be met if the Alliance and Allies will enable the pooling of IAMD resources, national functional specialization, and the integration under a comprehensive NATO system.

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