Taking the battle upstream
One of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) goals is to ensure that its member states collectively have the capabilities required to apply decisive force whenever the alliance's political leaders decide to achieve certain effects around the world. Yet the history of NATO's influence on actual defense capabilities is a checkered one at best. The bulk of this paper is written as a primer in defense benchmarking. Benchmarking remains a relative unknown in the defense arena, despite that fact that it is a technique that is increasingly used in both the private and the public sectors to improve organizational performance through learning from others. To be truly effective, defense benchmarking is in need of a higher-level catalyst, a strategic engine. NATO -- and particularly its Allied Command Transformation, the Alliance's leading agent for change -- is ideally placed for such a role. It has the mandate, the authority, and the resources to build up a more systematic benchmarking facility within the Alliance. The knowledge base such a facility would produce could be put at the benefit of national defense planners, thus taking the battle for better capabilities upstream. In this way, defense benchmarking could become a new tool in a richer and "smarter" strategic defense management toolbox in line with what NATO's new push for "smart defense" is trying to achieve.
