Dev Diary #35: Campaigns: Military Mobility and Women in NATO

Hello all!

Today I wanted to give a bit more of a look into two of our campaigns that we are running: Military Mobility and Women in NATO.

With Atlantic Forum we have a nice little advantange as independent NGOs compared to official institutions, we get to be a bit cheeky when we want to do so. While organizations and ministeries might be bound to higher level of commands, our authority largely comes from bottom up and from the steering committee. In short this means we can pick up on any activity proposed by patrons (such as with the incubator projects), but don't need to go through lines of red tape and bureacracy.

This "philosophy" we also apply to our Social Media campaigns. The #Memetic Warfare is one such example we launched last year - which really come bottom up from the memes patrons come up with. In the beginning of 2020 we wanted to kick off with two more structured campaigns, coordinated by our steering committee and the community manager.

Why these campaigns?

While Military Mobility and a focus on Gender may look apart, they share one feature in common. We feel that official organizations are not spending enough time on them!

Military Mobility is one major crux in NATOs defensive posture. A major trying out (lost knowledge about) Military Mobility are the US Army led #Defender series. Currently US Army Europe leads the effort in informing the public about the event, and recently NATO has started publishing more about it as well - national governments, in particular the governments of countries affected by the largest mobility exercise since the end of the 20th century, however are lacking behind. With our Defender Lecture in the Hague, the focus on amplifying USAREUR on social media, and a dedicated Atlantica publication on Military Mobility we aim trigger others to start communicating about it, and subsequently to do "our share of the task".

We feel that simiarly Gender, NATO1325 and the focus on Woman in NATO also does not live well enough among national ministries and official organizations, save for March 8 (International Woman Day) there is often little intention. Among NATO the list of "leading examples" is growing, and we want to show to our (young female) patrons what can be achieved. As such every saturday for nearly three months we will highlight one such an example as #SaturdayInspiration, addtitionally the March Atlantica publication will be dedicated to Woman in NATO and highlight two of our inspirations with a full profile, interviewed by a young female patron.