NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said current estimates show that military spending in Canada and the alliance’s other member states in Europe has increased by 1.5 percent, or more than $3 billion, DoD News reported Tuesday.
Jim Garamone writes Stoltenberg highlighted spending trends across the alliance on the eve of the group’s two-day defense ministers forum in Brussels.
“This is real progress,” he said Monday, according to the report.
“After many years of going in the wrong direction, we are starting to go into the right direction.”
He also noted that NATO has tripled the number of its Response Force troops to around 40,000 and assembled a Spearhead Force of roughly 5,000 troops the alliance plans to deploy in Poland and the Baltic States, Garamone reports.
The Wall Street Journal reported that NATO ministers acknowledged cyberspace as a new domain in warfare during their meeting Tuesday.
Stoltenberg said the alliance will prioritize efforts to develop technologies that would help member nations to identify actors in cyber intrusions and attacks, according to the story by WSJ’s Julian Barnes.
“This is about developing our abilities and capabilities to protect NATO cyber networks but also to help and assist nations in defending their cyber networks,” he told the newspaper.
