Today, a new strategic environment confronts the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its member nations. In order to address the challenges posed by this new environment, NATO developed a new strategy emphasizing political and military means to achieve Alliance objectives. While Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty remains the cornerstone of the Alliance, a new emphasis was placed on maintaining stability throughout Europe and, if necessary, conducting "out-of-area" operations aimed at enhancing European security. In order to accomplish this broad goal of European security, NATO developed several new external and internal programs. One of these new concepts is the Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF). Proposed in October 1994, the CJTF concept was viewed as a means of establishing NATO contingency capability while also providing a genuine European military capability that was "separable, but not separate" from NATO's existing military structure. In theory, this hybrid would combine the best of both coalition and alliance forces into a trained multinational force capable of rapid flexible crisis response. This monograph assesses whether the "theoretical" CJTF matches reality and can serve as a viable operational command and control (C2) structure for the achievement of NATO's political and operational goals. In order to address this question, the monograph first considers the evolving strategic and operational environment in which NATO now finds itself. This analysis highlights the change in the strategic environment that has forced NATO to focus on "out-of-area" operations and the need for the capabilities embodied within the CJTF. Subsequently, an analysis of the CJTF concept, along with U.S. joint doctrine as it pertains to combined operations, provides evaluation criteria necessary for examining the viability of the CJTF concept at the strategic and operational levels. NATO's involvement in the Balkans, particularly Operation JOINT ENDEAVOR (OJE), the only existing example of an operational NATO CJTF, serves as a case study and provides data for analysis in assessing the CJTF's potential. The subsequent analysis highlights the viability of the CJTF concept as a C2 operational structure to meet NATO's emerging contingency operation requirements. The analysis outlines the difficulties of developing the C31 structures necessary for successful multinational operations and highlights some of the obstacles in the development of an effective NATO and western European Union (WEU) CJTF command and control structure.

ADA 370298 Approved for public release; Distribution is unlimited. The opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the student-authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College or any other governmental agency. (References to these studies should include the foregoing statement.)