NATO"S COMBINED JOINT TASK FORCE FOR COLLECTIVE SECURITY

During the Cold War period, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization played a vital role in ensuring Western European security. In the wake of the end of the Cold War in 1989, the European security environment has been strikingly transformed. As a result, today"s European security challenges are highly varied and all too real. Ethnic and religious tensions abound, the continuing tragedy in the Balkans underscores the reality of regional instabilities and the potential for even more serious conflicts. This complex and dangerous state of affairs demands that NATO refocus itself. Since the London Declaration of 1990, NATO has steadily and, often, audaciously reshaped itself into a new NATO. In particular, NATO"s new Strategic Concept, agreed to at the Rome Summit in 1991, outlined the overall dimensions of this reshaping. During this process, the importance of a collective security role emerged and the Combined Joint Task Force(CJTF) was established to play a new role. With CJTF, NATO has found a means with which to enable military planning across the spectrum of operations from collective security to traditional missions. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it seeks to discuss NATO"s restructuring in accordance with the new Strategic Concept, adopted at the Rome Summit in 1991. Second, it tries to critically examine how three variables: the nature of public goods of collective security, asymmetry of power projection capability among NATO"s members, and difference of strategic cultures between America and Western Europe, have affected the role of CJTFs collective securit