NATO’s Maritime Strategy and the Libya Crisis as Seen from the Sea

The following is a paper from the NATO Defense College Rome, published in March, 2013.
From the report:
In case you did not know, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has an Alliance Maritime Strategy (AMS). The document, approved on 05 January 2011, was the first of its kind in over a quarter of a century. In spite of this post-Cold War milestone, however, the strategy was endor- sed by the member states with little fanfare. Since its declassification in March of the same year, it has been quietly buried in the NATO official website, largely out of sight from the popular media and (by extension) from the European and North American populace whose security and prosperity it is ostensibly designed to safeguard.2 The average person on the street (or, perhaps more aptly expressed in this context, on the sea- front) should therefore be forgiven if he or she has never heard of, let alone read, a dedicated maritime strategy for the Atlantic Alliance in the 21st century. But exist it does.