ACT Young Professionals Day (YP Day) is an annual, solutions-oriented exercise hosted by NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT) alongside the NATO Transformation Seminar (NTS). This year’s event was hosted in partnership with the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, and built on the success of the previous three YP Day events by convening sixty rising leaders, aged thirty-five and under, from across the NATO Alliance. The goal of YP Day 2015 was to engage the next generation of leaders in the process of producing creative and practical solutions to key NATO challenges.

To facilitate the development of innovative solutions, the Atlantic...

This group focused on NATO’s strategic perspective regarding rising challenges on its eastern flank. They were encouraged to consider the strategic context in which NATO operates, the political and military implications for the Alliance, and its broader strategic concept and political guidance.

Discussion centered largely on Ukraine and Russia and focused simultaneously on ensuring NATO’s collective security, defending the values of NATO countries, and attempting to avoid military escalation. Significant debate centered on NATO’s inherent mission and how its response to the Ukraine crisis should depend on whether NATO is a values-based organization or merely a collective security alliance. After...

Over the course of the event, a number of common themes emerged from every group’s discussions and suggestions. These themes were often developed or explained relative to each group’s specific topic, but they all shared similar sentiments. The most prominent recurring themes are listed below.

One extremely common theme that arose in every group was a desire for greater cooperation between NATO member nations. While NATO has worked toward such a sentiment for its entire lifespan, the delegates felt that it should focus on a few specific areas. The first and most frequently mentioned was increased efforts for joint procurement,...