At the 2012 NATO Summit in Chicago, Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen's 'smart defence' initiative will be a core agenda item. Rasmussen has argued that Allies need to cooperate more, and more flexibly, to prevent a deterioration in NATO's collective capability in the face of the three-pronged challenge of budget austerity, ongoing operational challenges, and a security environment characterised by deep strategic uncertainty. As he put it at the 2012 Munich Security Conference, the political initiative would amount to 'a new way for NATO and Allies to do business ... this is about doing more by doing it together'.1 In Chicago, the Alliance was expected to agree on a political declaration providing the conceptual basis for smart defence, and to present some two-dozen multinational projects to mark the start of the initiative.
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