NATO's defence and foreign ministers met Thursday for a rare joint meeting designed to draw up a new strategy for the alliance in the shadow of threatened budget cuts in many states, DPA reported.
NATO is currently debating a new "strategic concept" to define what it should do and what tools it will need to do it over the next 10 years. The debate comes as many NATO members are under extreme pressure to cut defence spending in response to the economic crisis.
The new strategy must therefore "guide the transformation of NATO through and beyond this period of austerity," NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said as he opened talks with defence ministers.
NATO's last strategic concept dates back to 1999, and is now chiefly remarkable for the low priority it assigns to questions of terrorism, ballistic-missile defence and internet warfare, three questions likely to dominate Thursday's meeting.
"The world has changed fundamentally in many ways, and many new points have arisen against which we have to defend ourselves and which NATO has to grasp on a conceptual level," German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg said.
Rasmussen has already drawn up a first draft of the new strategy. Ministers are due to debate it on Thursday, with NATO leaders set to approve a final version at a summit in Lisbon on November 19-20.
Rasmussen has already made it clear that he wants the concept to re-affirm NATO's main mission of defending member states' territory, but to expand its operations to cover new areas, especially missile defence and cyber warfare.
The threat of a missile attack "is clear, the capability (to defend against it) exists and the costs are manageable," he said.
Defence ministers are also set to discuss how they should go about making NATO's own bureaucracy more efficient, including by firing some of its approximately 13,000 headquarters staff and closing down some of its bases.
The debate serves "as a way of shaping NATO and making sure that what we do should be cost-effective," Danish Defence Minister Gitte Lillelund Bech said.
Defence and foreign ministers in a joint session are to discuss missile defence, while foreign ministers in an evening session are set to discuss relations with foreign powers, especially Russia.