ABSTRACT
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization decision-making process has been fashioned or has simply evolved over the years, to make the best of this difficult situation. There are now many routes by which decisions are reached. Because of the challenge factor built into them no one expects that any nation will ever fully meet its force goals. Thus force goals have become a means by which nations exert pressure on one another when it seems opportune, as for example, in the United States Congress every year. Another example of NATO decision-making procedures is seen in the Common Infrastructure Programme, which has an unfortunate bureaucratic resemblance to the force-planning process. The Infrastructure Programme is designed to allow a collective contribution of funds to the basing and logistic support requirements of the Alliance as a whole. These two processes — force planning and the infrastructure programme — exemplify the difficulties which lie in the path of effective decision making in NATO.
