Standing Joint Force Commander Major General Olly Brown addressed the International Sea Power Conference in Norway.
The Joint Expeditionary Force: Securing What Connects Us
Major General Olly Brown explains how the Joint Expeditionary Force helps participating nations understand hybrid activity, develop scalable response options, rehearse collective action and integrate with NATO.
“Because what connects us is also what makes us strong.”
Speech:
For much of the post-Cold War period, it was possible to think about security in relatively discrete terms. National borders defined areas of responsibility, military activity could often be separated from economic activity, and events in one part of the Euro-Atlantic and Arctic could be considered in isolation from those elsewhere.
That is no longer the case. Today, security in the Euro-Atlantic and Arctic is increasingly indivisible. Activity in the High North affects the Baltic. Events at sea and beneath the seabed have consequences ashore. Cyber-attacks, disinformation, economic coercion, sabotage and military signalling combine to deliver a common strategic effect. And crucially, what may appear to be separate incidents are likely part of a single campaign.
This is not an abstract future threat. JEF Participant Nations are already dealing with suspicious maritime activity around critical infrastructure, cyber activity, information operations, interference with navigation and the use of ostensibly civilian or commercial actors to create ambiguity over attribution
and intent.
Our principal competitor understands the value of that ambiguity.
Russia views the region not as a collection of nations and discrete domains, but as a contiguous operational theatre stretching from the High North, across the Baltic and North Atlantic, through cyberspace and the information environment, and into the critical infrastructure upon which our
societies depend.
The maritime geography that links JEF nations together therefore creates shared interests, opportunities and vulnerabilities. If Russia understands the region as an interconnected system, we must do the same.
That is why the Joint Expeditionary Force matters.
The JEF is often described as a grouping of ten like-minded Euro-Atlantic and Arctic NATO Allies. While true, that understates its strategic significance. Its distinctive value lies in a collaborative effort to understand and respond collectively to coercion, hybrid activity and attacks on critical infrastructure
below the threshold of collective defence.
In that sense, the JEF is fundamentally an Article 3 proposition: strengthening our individual and collective capacity to resist attack through resilience, mutual aid, understanding, interoperability and the ability to act before an adversary imposes its own tempo.
A series of actions are required for the JEF to fulfil its endorsed security and deterrence ambition. The first action is to understand the environment better.
Those things that connect the JEF nations also create the terrain over which competition increasingly takes place: maritime routes, ports and sea lines of communication through which trade, energy and reinforcement flow; seabed infrastructure carrying our data; digital and energy networks; and the alliances and partnerships upon which our security depends.
The JEF’s utility lies in bringing national perspectives together to develop a common understanding of threats to that system.
But we need to go further.
We are exploring how the JEF can develop a more persistent operational picture of hybrid activity: a form of “counter-hybrid stare” that helps ten nations detect emerging patterns earlier, connect apparently isolated events and consider coordinated responses. Work with NATO SOFCOM and Defence Intelligence is already exploring how such an approach might be developed.
Hybrid activity succeeds when individual incidents remain below the threshold of attention, attribution or response.
Our task is to connect the dots more quickly than our adversaries expect.
But understanding alone is insufficient.
The second action is to turn that understanding into choice.
This is where JEF Response Options become fundamental.
JROs offer a menu of options through which shared understanding can be translated into strategic choice. Managed by the JEF Operational Headquarters, they provide governments with practical responses across the competition, crisis and conflict continuum.
The Response Options range from enhanced information sharing and strategic communications through reassurance measures, protection of critical and seabed infrastructure, counter-shadow fleet activity and maritime security operations, to more substantial multinational military activity.
Hybrid threats rarely fit neatly within a response that could be framed by singular geographic area, domain or military activity. Several JROs may therefore be required in combination to present a scalable response package, bringing military, informational and wider governmental activity together
around a specific problem.
This approach gives governments choice: over scale, timing, participation, and escalation management to determine how political resolve is translated into practical operational effect.
But options have little value if they remain on paper.
So the third action is to rehearse them.
The LION series of exercises provides the mechanism through which JROs can be exercised, challenged and refined. Through strategic dialogue, headquarters deployment, planning and multinational activity, it allows nations to test assumptions, identify friction and understand how those
options would actually be delivered and integrated with both National Defence Plans and NATO’s Regional Plans.
During LION PROTECTOR, for example, the JEF Operational Headquarters deployed to the High North, itself a JRO rehearsal, and examined how a scalable response package could address a strategically significant High North scenario.
That exposed the connections between maritime access, critical infrastructure, sovereignty, reinforcement, information activity and political decision-making, while testing how the JEF could integrate with National Defence Plans and amplify national effect.
Political decision-making matters as much as exercising forces. Through the LION series, political leaders, senior officials and commanders can become familiar with the choices, dependencies and consequences they may face before confronting them in crisis.
The objective is not simply to validate a plan. It is to create confidence in our ability to act.
And that brings me to the fourth action: integration.
The threats we face do not respect institutional or military boundaries, so our responses cannot remain trapped within them. Protecting critical infrastructure, maritime supply chains, energy networks, communications and public confidence requires armed forces, intelligence agencies, civil authorities, infrastructure operators and industry to share understanding and act coherently.
The same principle applies across the military. Whether we consider the Royal Navy’s Hybrid Navy and Maritime Fighting Web concepts, or the Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative construct, the underlying principle is integration. Future advantage will increasingly come from connecting people, systems, sensors, decision-makers and effects rather than simply accumulating individual platforms.
And that integration must extend to NATO.
NATO remains the cornerstone of collective defence and the indispensable foundation of Euro-Atlantic security. The JEF complements the Alliance by strengthening resilience, interoperability and regional understanding, reinforcing Article 3 and the foundations upon which collective defence ultimately rests.
Through the LION series, JEF activity is increasingly aligned with NATO vigilance and exercise activity, while rehearsing how forces and activity could transition into NATO structures as a crisis develops.
The same imperative applies to learning and adaptation. The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that advantage increasingly belongs to those who learn and adapt fastest. The JEF-Ukraine Enhanced Partnership allows us not simply to learn from Ukraine, but to learn alongside Ukraine and translate
operational experience into practical change.
Ultimately, our competitors increasingly perceive the Euro-Atlantic and Arctic as a single operational theatre. Our task is to understand it with the same coherence, while acting with greater legitimacy, greater unity and greater agility.
That is where the JEF contributes.
It helps us understand hybrid activity earlier.
It gives governments choice through focused and scalable Response Options.
It allows us to rehearse those choices through the LION series.
And it integrates nations, domains, institutions and partners so that we can generate collective effect before a competitor seizes the initiative.
That is Article 3 in action. It is the essence of deterrence.
Deterrence rests not simply upon the capabilities we possess, but upon our adversary’s understanding of our intent: recognition that we see what they are doing, and that we can decide together and act at the speed required to frustrate their ambitions.
The true strength of the JEF is therefore not simply that it connects nations.
It is that it enables nations and institutions to act upon those connections.
Because what connects us is also what makes us strong.
By securing those connections, we strengthen deterrence, reinforce collective security and preserve the stability, security and prosperity upon which our nations depend.
That is the purpose of the Joint Expeditionary Force.
And that is why securing what connects us matters.
