Dive into the .eu Academy Masterclass for a compelling keynote by Mart de Kruif on leadership in times of crisis! Learn to transform vision into plans, individuals into teams, and values into virtues. Mart discusses current developments in the Ukraine war, emphasizing the importance of defending European democracy. Discover the need for coordinated action over individual national efforts.
I was in the army for more than 40 years. I started in 1977 in the infantry at the Royal Military Academy in the Netherlands in Breda. I was commissioned in 1981 and served for 40 years all over the place. I’ve been on missions in Bosnia, in Mali, in Afghanistan.
I was educated not just in the Netherlands but also in Hamburg at the Command and General Staff College, Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr, I see German guys sitting in front. And in the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The last four and a half years of my service
I served as the Chief of Staff of the Royal Netherlands Army. And I’m going to take you on a tour through Europe, Europe and security and Europe and leadership. It is strictly my personal point of view. When I talk about leadership I’m not a John Kotter type of guy
Who writes a great book with seven sentences and if you follow these rules, you’ll be great. What I share with you is based on my own experiences and on my own mistakes. That’s it. It’s as easy as that. Serving in the army in 2007 I got a phone call
From the Chief of the Defence Staff who told me: Mart, I’m going to send you to Afghanistan. Of course, I knew Afghanistan, I’ve been there before. But he said: you’re going to serve in Afghanistan as Commander of Regional Command South in Afghanistan. The Regional Command South is the southern part of Afghanistan.
On behalf of the United Nations we sometimes tend to forget that the United Nations asked NATO to have a stabilisation operation in Afghanistan which started in 2006. The Germans were in Kunduz, Regional Command North. The Italians and the Spanish were in the Regional Command West.
The Americans were around Kabul in the Regional Command East. Why there? Because they thought that Osama bin Laden would be hiding there somewhere in the mountains. And the southern part of Afghanistan was led by a coalition which was formed by the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Canada.
And my colleague Ton van Loon started commanding RS South in 2006. Then a Brit came, then a Canadian, and then they were looking for a Dutchman who could follow up. That’s that pink area around Kandahar. It’s about seven times as big as the Netherlands. The average day temperature is 48 degrees
In the shade. You got a border of 2,050 km with Pakistan and 250 km with Iran. Politically very sensitive. And it is the heartland of the Taliban. Why? 80% of the Taliban belong to the Pashtun tribe and the Pashtun tribe lives in southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan.
It’s also the place where 80% of the heroin in the world is produced, starting with poppy because we know that the Taliban is for 80% financed by the production of poppy. A very tricky, risky area. More or less the main effort for NATO, the main effort for ISAF.
Stability in the south would mean stability throughout Afghanistan. It’s been a tough time. Leading a 24-nation coalition, you saw most of the nations, most of them were Anglo-Saxon, Canadian, Australian, 25,000 US soldiers, 2,000 Dutch, 2,000 Australians. I even started dreaming in English when I was there for one year. So intense it is.
And I’ve seen war there. I have seen war there. I wrote letters to the next of kin of soldiers who were killed in action under my command. And after one year I wrote 282 of these letters. I sent more than 700 soldiers home with a euphemism… of life-changing wounds.
Most of them were amputations of lower legs because they tripped on an improvised explosive device. But the most people I saw dying in my hands were Afghans, were civilians, especially children and women because they also tripped on IEDs and they also drove over IEDs but not in armoured cars but in a Volkswagen.
That has a completely different effect. But for me personally, I thought: you know, this is war but not in Europe, not on our home turf. We do have a vital interest here. It is important that we are here but my people back home can live in peace. And these are my parents.
My parents were war children. My mother was born in 1925, was 15 when World War II started. She worked in the resistance. She was arrested, she escaped and she survived the war. My father was taken prisoner and had to do forced labour in Germany in Großbeeren, in the Daimler factories for three years.
He was liberated by the Russians. And my mother, a couple of years ago, just before she passed away, told me: I’m so happy that most of my life I lived in a Europe of peace. Since 1945 she didn’t see war. Yes, we had the Cold War but that was far away.
She didn’t see any war. There was no threat. There was no sense of threat. There was no war. Yes, there was something in the Balkans and we all know that. But the real war was far away and was kept away from Europe. And they both extremely liked
That they could take their Volkswagen and drive from the Netherlands to Italy without showing anyone their passport. Just try to imagine for these people, what is so normal for us, how important Europe is. We sometimes tend to forget this. We tend to forget this. This generation
Has a different view of Europe than we have. For us, it is a given. For them, it was a win. And my father said one thing just before he passed away: Son, never forget that reconciliation and forgiveness are crucial for our future so never make the mistake
To blame this generation, or in this case Germans. Never blame them for the mistakes their parents or grandparents made during the war. Because if we are stuck in hate we will never have a future. It is about forgiveness. It is about reconciliation. And he said: Don’t forget forgiveness starts with the victim.
Like Mandela always said, forgiveness starts with the victim. And this is, of course, the example of forgiveness. We had three horrific wars between France and Germany in 1870, which led to the Treaty of Versailles in 1871, which had a tremendous influence on the starting of World War I.
And the peace treaty at the end of World War I in Versailles had a big influence on World War II. But these people showed how important forgiveness can be. Mitterrand and Kohl. Their family, by the way, fought in Verdun. They were celebrating in 1984 remembering Verdun. Spontaneously, they took their hands and said:
Never again. Nie wieder. 600,000 French and German soldiers were killed in action in Verdun. Never again. And now we’re here. Since the start of the war on 24 February 2022, approximately 600,000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers were killed in action, taken prisoner, missing in action or wounded. 600,000. Try to imagine the numbers.
In 20 years of war the United States lost 55,000 soldiers in Vietnam, which still has a tremendous influence on US society. Try to imagine what this means for our generation and the generations to come. This is the end of 70 years of peace in Europe. We’re entering a new time.
And one of the Dutch ministers said: We need to realise that 24 February 2022 will probably influence our world more than 9/11 did. And I think he’s right. We have a war again. An asymmetric conflict between the traditional army and insurgents. And you all know the effects. We can see them every day
With information, misinformation, civilian casualties, hostages suffering. So the world is on fire. And that means something for Europe. Again we see trenches. We thought we would never see them again in Europe. We are fighting in tunnels like in World War I. That would never happen again. We see people, civilian casualties
As victims of the use of weapons. We see people taken hostage and we will see refugees coming to us like the Ukrainian people came to us to shelter. And again we see the symbols of democracy being attacked like in the 1930s. The question is: What’s new?
What’s new and how do we in Europe cope with it? So… I’m going to tell you some personal impressions and thoughts on how we can cope with this but first I have to explain why we are here. From my point of view. We all saw this coming.
There were 12 reports in the Netherlands alone that clearly stated after 2014 that Putin is not going to stop. There were reports by NATO, there were reports by the European Union that Putin was not going to stop. And we collectively in Europe looked the other way. We didn’t want to see it coming.
By the way, the book on his desk is called Invasion by Dummies. I’m not going to talk about the military aspects of the invasion. And peace in the Middle East. We’ve seen war in the Middle East since 1948. Even if you go back for centuries, you’ll see war.
And the irony, of course, is that we knew that after the Oslo treaty 30 years ago where Yitzhak Rabin said there’s going to be no peace without the Palestinians. Two years later, he was killed. There was this increasing pressure which would lead to an effect somewhere, somehow. We all knew it.
We didn’t know how and where and when but we all knew this was coming. So we have a problem. From a philosophical point of view, we have a problem because fear is back again. And it’s amazing that we started a podcast in the Netherlands and a theatre tour,
And we got more than 500,000 listeners. 500,000 listeners for a podcast. We feel the fear of young people in theatres who say: There is a war. What does it mean for us? Is Putin going to use nuclear weapons? Our world of certainty, our world of peacefulness,
Our world of security is shattered for most people. And besides that, it is not easy to make a decision today because there are so many factors influencing us that we all have a dilemma. Do I make a decision once I have all the information needed? And then you’re probably too late.
Or do I make a decision without knowing what a 2nd, 3rd or 4th echelon effect may be? And do I make a decision in uncertainty? This is a tremendous problem from a military and political point of view. We don’t know all the effects. Secondly, I think based on technology
And the fact that we lived 70 years in peace, we think we can control everything. Everything. And it is quite funny because there are great surveys and studies by Harvard and they all tell you people make mistakes but they do not make mistakes because they are not controlled
But because they don’t feel committed to the cause. They don’t have the assets, the responsibilities and the freedom of action to do what they want to do. But we control. One third of the people working in banks is working on compliance. Compliance. Try to imagine what it means.
One third of the people working in banks works in compliance. But also from a philosophical point of view, if we see a war that doesn’t fit in our view of ‘we control the world’, it doesn’t match. And last but not least, based on the tremendous tempo of decision making, politics, strategy, social media,
We focus hard on which decision we should take today and tomorrow. Are we doing things right? And we tend to lose focus of: ‘Are we still doing the right things?’ Doesn’t sound good, does it? But we have a problem and we need to act and we will get there.
Before I enter the optimistic phase of my presentation: this is strategy. This is a strategic review of Europe. We are in big shit. We do have a tremendous existential problem in Europe, putting it mildly. The US is focusing on China. And of course, the US is politically insecure.
We don’t know what will happen with the elections next year, which will have a tremendous influence on Europe. A tremendous influence. 90% of the strategic assets of NATO is American. When the Americans said: we are going to leave Kabul. We, the Europeans, were forced to leave because we didn’t have the assets
To stay any longer. 90% of NATO assets – American. Secondly, we don’t have a common foreign policy, which should be the basis for a common security policy. We do not speak with one voice. We only have a few raw materials. And the access we had to raw materials, for instance in Afghanistan,
Didn’t play any role in the discussion of whether we should continue our stay there. Or what are our strategic interests in central Africa, in Mali? And we see China day by day having access and increasing access to the vital resources we need, like lithium. We have a limited manufacturing capacity. We promised
To deliver within one year 1 million grenades to Ukraine. And we stopped at 300,000 because we just don’t have the capacity. Stopping the industry, that’s easy. Turn the power off. You send people home and you’re ready. But gearing up your industry, starting an industry to produce is extremely difficult.
And again we depend on the US for this nearly completely. And last but not least, the unity is under construction. And it’s not just the expansion of the Union but also, of course, Brexit, it is the elections in Slovakia, Poland, Romania, the Netherlands, elections coming up. Tremendous focus on Europe …
So we are not there yet. It is a work in progress. So what we need to do is to contemplate. We need to think deeply where we want to go to. And from a military point of view we always see power as consisting of three elements:
A conceptual component, a physical component and a moral component. But the same is true for a football team. Louis van Gaal uses exactly the same. It’s quite easy. The physical components are his players. The conceptual component is do I play 5-3-2, 4-4-2 or 4-3-3?
And the moral component is the team, the cohesion of the team and leadership. It’s as easy as that. And the interesting thing is: what are game changers in Ukraine? What do we see as game changers in Ukraine? The moral component? Okay, great. I wish it was. I hope you’re right
Because most of the game changers were physical. Jets, artillery pieces, tanks. We saw physical things as game changers but you’re absolutely right. If you’re not in balance, if you only focus on the physical element and you neglect the moral component you might lose this war. It’s much more than money and hardware.
It’s about concepts and morality. Thank you. I’m not going to talk about the physical component. That is too much military hardware stuff. So I’ll just focus on the conceptual and moral component, which might help you. The first is we definitely need vision. Where do we want to go? And everybody needs vision.
In the Netherlands, we have a prime minister who says he doesn’t need any vision but that’s a different issue. We need a vision. And these people had vision. Any idea who these people are or were? Adenauer, Monnet, Schuman and Marshall, who is not in this picture.
These were the people who said after 1945: we had three wars. We have nuclear weapons. We cannot afford a third world war in Europe which is partly based on the tremendous gap between France and Germany. We need to bridge that gap, we need to unite.
We need to completely change our perception of our future in order to have a future for our children and grandchildren. Just try to imagine how difficult this was for these people because their enemy was either France or Germany. From the day they were born they were educated, influenced
By their parents, by their schools, by the environment, that the enemy is on the other side of the border. And they had the guts and the moral courage to change and say: we need to unite. And these people, of course, laid the cornerstone for the European Union
And they heavily influenced the start of NATO. It is possible. It is possible if you find people, politicians who do not focus on what the people want to hear but what you need to say to the people for a better future. That you sometimes need to invest a couple of years
To make a better future for the next generations to come instead of promising and be bound for failure and disappointment in a couple of years. Every presentation of military needs a quote by Sun Tzu. So here it is. You need a plan.
You definitely need a plan in Europe on all the lines of operation. Don’t try to read this plan because this is a plan for the reconstruction of Afghanistan so you have to read it from right to left. But the thing is: do you cover all the bases? Information, misinformation, infrastructure, climate change.
Have we covered all the bases in Europe with an outline of plans that we need to make now? And last but not least: we – I’m now speaking from a personal point of view in the Netherlands – we are great in identifying lessons learned. We do pretty badly in implementing lessons learned
Because there it gets tricky. People are involved, mistakes are involved, things like that. Europe. For Europe, it’s crucial that you close this circle, that you not just restrict yourself to identifying lessons learned but implement lessons learned. And last but not least, we need to make a plan in Europe for
How we’re going to let Ukraine survive this war. Because the real decision whether Ukraine is going to stay alive as an independent nation is not made in Washington anymore. It’s made in Brussels, London, Paris and Berlin. Putin thinks that the centre of gravity of Ukraine is the European support to Ukraine.
And he thinks that time is on his side. Elections coming up in the United States and Europe not being the big unity and the united entity that we want it to be. The decision, the future of Ukraine, is with us. But it’s not just the future of Ukraine
Because the next question people will ask you, especially when you live in the Baltic states: is NATO going to start a third world war defending us? That’s the first question you get when you land there. We’re not there yet. So… That’s conceptual. Let’s focus now on the moral component. We need courage.
We need politicians who lead the way, who guide the way and who try to tell us: this is the way we need to go. It is not about the past. It is not about our differences. It is about the future of our children and grandchildren. We need a common European vision there.
And it is relatively easy. Management gurus would say: Think out of the box but boldly go where no one has been before. And just to give you one example: the complete Dutch warfare capability on land, three brigades, is completely integrated in the German … . Completely. In ten years from now
You won’t see any difference between the German Bundeswehr and the Dutch army. Only the flag. Only the flag. If we cannot unite Europe top-down, we will unite Europe from the grass level up. Why? Because politicians ask me how to deal with national interests. Can anybody tell me what the difference is
Between the national interest of Germany and the national interest of Holland? There is none. There is none. There are two major challenges: climate change and security. And they don’t stop at the border, they don’t stop at Arnhem bridge when you go to Düsseldorf. It’s exactly the same. And it’s mission command.
Who knows the word ‘Blitzkrieg’? You can skip it from your hard disc. Never existed. Fake information, fake news, never existed. It was an excuse the French and the British used to explain their defeat in the May days of 1940 against the Germans. It was ‘Auftragstaktik’, we call it mission command.
And the Germans analysed why all the big offensives in World War I failed. Everyone failed. You all know Captain Blackadder – but they all failed. And why? Because they were very centralised by planning and in execution. So you tell people what to do, why to do it but also how to do it.
So if you blow the whistle you can proceed 50 yards then you have to stop, and then wait a minute and then again you can proceed 50 yards. It didn’t work. It didn’t work with the French, the Brits or the Germans. And the Germans said: we’re going to change our style of leadership.
Completely. We’re going to tell people what to do and why to do it but never again how to do it. We give complete freedom of action to the ones who have to execute the operation. If they know what the goal is and know why they have to do it,
If the circumstances change, they’ll find a way. They’ll find a way. And I think the future of Europe is also based on Auftragstaktik. Tell the nations what to do, tell the nations why to do it but leave space for them to decide how to do it. Then you’re much more effective.
You win agility, you win flexibility and last but not least you win credibility. But it’s not easy. Why is this not easy? What do you need for this? What do you need for mission command? Trust. Trust from the top to the bottom but especially trust bottom-up. What else do you need? Responsibility.
You can’t delegate responsibility. And that is what makes leaders very reluctant to have full mission command. And they tend to start with a huge control organisation in order not to be responsible if something goes wrong. But at the end of the day the irony is things still go wrong. But that’s difficult, philosophical.
It’s far from easy. But a united Europe doesn’t mean that Europe needs to be the same in every nation. And these were my 24 nations in Afghanistan. What I learned there the hard way, because you make decisions about life and death in Afghanistan, is: diversity does matter.
And diversity is much more than just gender. It is culture, it is character, it is age. But the more different people you get, the more different angles you can include in your decision making, the better it is. The better it is. Even if you have to make a decision within 10 minutes,
Diversity is the way to go. Therefore the expansion of Europe, if Europe grows bigger, that’s an opportunity. It’s not a threat, it’s an opportunity. And last but not least: do I have any fans of professional cycling in the room? Yes, okay. Which team is this? Any idea? Any idea? Yes, Jumbo-Visma.
With the army we did team buildings for six years for the Jumbo-Visma team starting as the Belkin team. And some people think team building is writing on a whiteboard, drinking beer and having a good time. And please do it but that’s not team building. Team building is irrational.
Why is it strange to do? Because these riders are all individuals. All. And why should they trade some of their interests, some of their power, some of their effort? Why should they hand it over to the team and hope that they get something back out of it? Why? It doesn’t make any sense.
Why should you as a rider ride in front of the peloton for 250 km in Milan-San Remo so the breakaway doesn’t build a 20 minute lead? So you keep the breakaway inside and then you’re completely done. You finish 30 minutes after the winner and you have nothing. Why should you do so?
What is the logic behind team building? It took years, again and again and again and again to convince them that if you’re willing and able to trade some of your personal interests with the team, what you will get back is someone that no other team will have, that no other team will have.
Because it’s not about you, it is about the team. Wout van Aert, Tour de France last year, was in the yellow jersey. Vingegaard was riding over the cobblestones in northern France, had a flat tyre, the wrong bike. Great panic. Wout van Aert stopped his bike, he waited for Vingegaard
And brought him back to the front of the race. In the yellow jersey. The strength of a team is not measured if you have success. The strength of a team is measured when you’re in shit. And that was the first sign that the whole team completely understood the essence of having a team.
And therefore if we go to the nations, please tell them that Europe will not… We need to invest in Europe. It is not: Europe is there, take whatever you want from Europe and bring it to you. Europe, you have to pay a price to be part of Europe.
You have to invest in Europe. You have to trade one of your interests, your national, personal interests with Europe. And it might not pay back, not in a month, not in a year. But for the generations to come it’s the only way to go. Last but not least, values. We all have values.
Are they important, values? Rhetorical question. Are they important? No, they’re not. They’re worthless if you don’t do anything with them. There’s a great study from a philosopher in the Netherlands and he tells us… he checked all the different values in the European Union nations,
Our personal values and for 85% they are exactly the same. And why are they the same? Because values are brought to us by media, family, school, education, things like that. So they are all the same. It is what society brings to us. What society implements in our soul and in our brain.
Easy, isn’t it? But the real question is: based on these values, what do we give back to society? How do your values contribute towards a better society? And that’s a virtue. And what’s the difference? He used a typical Dutch example for this. There is a car lying in the canal
And there are about 100 bystanders, watching the car lying in the canal. 98 people think this is a bad situation. That’s a value. How many people jump in the water to rescue the people in the car? That’s a virtue. That’s the difference. So if we talk about values, that’s great.
But if we fail to implement values into virtues, we have a problem. And it’s in our everyday life. If parents start yelling at a referee at a soccer game and we don’t interfere, values become worthless. It’s as easy as that. It’s about virtues. And leadership is always lead by example.
It’s not the pull from the rear but a push from the front. But at the end of the day, it is: do we believe in Europe? Do we believe in Europe? That’s the fundamental question. And I believe, having seen war in Afghanistan, having seen war in Mali, coming back to Europe,
Visiting all different kinds of nations and seeing who we are, what we do, how we act and what our potential is, I am a firm believer that NATO is the future and that Europe is the essence for a better future for our children who hopefully can live in peace, security and prosperity.
Thank you very much.