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Tom Bonney |
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1980-81 I work in the International Security division of the Policy Staff in the Ministry of Defence, where I am deputy director for NATO policy. Part of the job is to issue instructions to our delegation at NATO HQ in Brussels on the national line on whatever aspect of NATO operations, policy or spending happens to be up for discussion in the North Atlantic Council or its myriad sub-committees. As rather a bureaucratic organisation with 26 members operating by consensus, this can be tortuous!. The other part of the job, which tends to be rather more interesting, is to help formulate and present the UK's defence policy on NATO. This can range from the day-to-day nitty-gritty stuff - e.g. whether NATO should spend some money repairing an airfield in Afghanistan or how / if NATO should get involved in the Darfur crisis in Sudan - to longer term thinking - on how NATO adjusts from seeing collective defence as primarily a territorial defence issue to a more global threat prevention issue, or how NATO should work with the EU. I find this quite fun and it is a good excuse to talk to academics and institutes, but the nitty-gritty stuff takes up much more of our time. All key decisions need to be approved by the Defence Secretary and cleared by the service chiefs and, often most gruelling of all, by those with the purse strings. Though the job can be interesting, both MoD and NATO are such big and complex organisations that I find it nearly impossible to tell whether I have made any impact on anything!... Such is the lot of the faceless bureaucrat, I'm afraid! |
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