NATO Chiefs of Defence meet in Norway for Annual Conference

Oslo, 15-17 September 2023

At the invitation of General Eirik Kristoffersen, Chief of the Norwegian Armed Forces, the NATO Chiefs of Defence will gather in Oslo from 15 to 17 September 2023 for their annual Military Committee Conference. The agenda will focus on strengthening the Alliance’s deterrence and defence posture.

The NATO and Invitee Chiefs of Defence will take forward the decisions taken by the Allied Heads of State and Government at the Vilnius Summit in July 2023. In Vilnius, NATO leaders took major steps to strengthen NATO’s defence and deterrence for the long term, across all domains and against all threats and challenges.

Key to this are the Regional Plans – geographically specific plans – that are designed to deter and defend against the two threats described in the Strategic Concept and the NATO Military Strategy: Russia and terrorist groups. This is part of NATO’s evolution from an Alliance optimised for out-of-area contingency operations to an Alliance fit for the purpose of large-scale operations to defend every inch of allied territory.

In Oslo, the Chiefs of Defence will address how to make these plans fully executable, including with:

• More troops on higher readiness;
• Capability building and development;
• Adaptation of NATO’s command and control structures;
• More enablement (logistics, host nation support, maintenance, replenishment and prepositioning of stocks, military mobility);
• More collective defence training and exercising.

The Military Committee meets in Chiefs of Defence Session twice a year at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, and once a year a Conference is held by an Allied member state. The Military Committee convenes to discuss NATO operations, missions and activities and to provide the North Atlantic Council with unfettered, consensus-based military advice on how the Alliance can best address global security challenges. On a day-to-day basis, its work is carried out by the permanent Military Representatives at the NATO Headquarters in Brussels.