The key, then, is interoperability?

Yes, the key is for us to share the information, data, and procedures. It’s going to require an investment on the part of all our allies to help bring our systems into alignment. At the President’s [Barack Obama’s] direction, Aegis ashore will be operational by the end of this year in Romania; and in ’18 we will it online in Poland. Combined with the ships here, we’ll provide pretty good coverage. We certainly want the allies to be part of this solution set with us.

It’s interesting that this global BMD challenge, especially here in Europe and NATO, is being addressed by the Navy. The mission is being done by sailors.

Exactly. If you’d have asked me 15 years ago about the prospect of sending Navy watch standers into Romania and Poland to operate from a land-based Aegis site, I could not have envisioned that mission. This validates the vision of the surface warfare officers who went before us who saw this threat, and then responded with the industry and the technical community to produce a solution that works. This is a solution delivered by the surface Navy for a very real problem we’re facing globally.

Do the Europeans look upon this approach that the United States is offering and is investing in as one that’s going to deliver them that sense of security that they want?

I can’t speak to that directly, but I can say that in the communications I have there is a realization that this is a threat we have to be concerned about. At the ministerial level, they’re very appreciative of this contribution by the United States. But what I see is there is a realization that this threat is for real and that nations have to make the investments in the training, people and systems to sustain this for the defense of Europe.

You have an overarching mission of achieving “maritime domain awareness.” We need to know what’s out there so that we can find the counter, the piracy events, the criminal events, the illegal migrant events, perhaps the terrorists trying to move out a returning Jihadist, it all comes under knowing that maritime domain picture and being able to share it with others so that if we need to we can act on it. Can you talk about how we’re going to achieve and improve that maritime domain awareness in your AOR?

NATO has asked us to look at crafting a strategy for the “Strategic Direction South,” also referred to in some papers as the southern flank of NATO. That’s essentially looking to the challenges in the Mediterranean that you’ve outlined: migration, violent extremist organizations, unstable states, particularly the networks that can move people, contraband, and terrorists. So the way that we’re looking at this and working through it is several-fold. One, there has to be synergy between various national intelligence collection pieces, what NATO does, and what other multilateral organizations do, such as the EU [European Union]. Since that’s where the information is, we have to figure out the methodology and the modalities in order to share that information. The second piece is that there’s an overlapping set of authorities and mandates – statutory, legal, and regulatory – within Europe that enable some and constrain other organizations from taking action. So, there’s a mechanism that we have to think through in terms of collaboration, coordination, de-confliction, and then integration and response. It may not be NATO or the United States that acts in some cases. It may be the European Union, which coordinates the EU border management policies and mechanisms. It may be a national response from Greece, Italy, Spain or France, for example. We’re still working through that. So the first piece is the collaboration in sharing information to make sure that we can legally do it within the framework and that the nations agree. Second, is about the question of how do we choose a response mechanism. NATO may not be the first responder, in many of these cases, to deal with a given situation. It may be the host nation or the EU. Also, as I think about action in the maritime domain, we generally respond at sea to the symptoms of a larger problem taking place ashore. There are usually more significant issues ashore in a failed state or in a conflict zone, and it may be another organization that has the lead for the resolution to solve the problem ashore.