On 21 May 2023 at NATO HQ in Brussels, the Joint Intelligence and Security Division (JISD) hosted an annual meeting with NATO's 12 intelligence and security-related Centres of Excellence (COEs). The centres form a vibrant expert community of interest alongside NATO's intelligence and security stakeholders. They meet routinely to discuss areas of common interest and how they can support and learn from each other.
Projecting a strong signal of unity and purpose, representatives of the COEs, JISD and Allies attended this fifth annual meeting of the community of interest. The work within the COEs is essential to NATO's understanding of a rapidly changing security environment. Through their tailored subject matter expertise, the COEs offer a set of unique tools to support NATO's efforts. They are critical actors when it comes to bridging the current and future posture of the Alliance.
World events have shown that, it is more important than ever for NATO to leverage the unique expertise within the COEs. They act as capacity multipliers, providing consolidated expertise across their four main pillars of work: education and training; exercise and evaluation; analysis and lessons learned; doctrine development and standardisation; and concept development and experimentation. They play a crucial role in promoting innovation and improving interoperability between Allies and Partners.
This successful meeting focused on specific updates from the COEs on ongoing work strands, such as important contributions to NATO's requests for intelligence support and optimising training opportunities for the broader NATO intelligence and security enterprise. They identified initiatives where the enterprise could provide enhanced support to the COEs. Continuous improvement is a hallmark of the COEs and they discussed how to better access intelligence tools and information for maximum impact. Broadening engagement in the community of interest to more fully include the bi-strategic commands was identified as an opportunity for improvement as was focusing attention on better aligning initiatives and determining the scope of joint ventures to generate efficiencies.
Ongoing efforts to improve the NATO intelligence enterprise in the context of the NATO 2030 Agenda and the NATO Warfighting Capstone Concept will continue to fuel cooperation between and with the centres. The COEs' role as hubs of innovation and expertise contributes to ensuring that we out-think and out-pace our adversaries. The COEs continue to be significant parts of the overall effort to ensure that intelligence remains a core enabler of NATO's political-military decision making and that security is robustly and consistently applied.
