With the receipt of the invitation to join the NATO alliance as a full member Croatia has still not completed its road to full membership, quite the opposite. The invitation means that Croatia will from now on be in the particular focus of NATO officials, the demands put to Croatia ahead of its full membership in the spring of 2009 will be precise, concrete and have a set time frame. There will be no more room for improvisation, delays in modernisation, a lack of transparency in acquisitions, personnel decisions with generals lacking a military education and the holders of bogus decorations. Few have discussed the fact that with its accession to NATO Croatia will finally have to bring its defence system in order, as the same standards that apply to the rest of the alliance will apply to Croatia.

Regardless of everything Croatia will gain from accession to NATO, it also has an obligation towards the alliance to respect all of the standards that are implemented in modern Western armies. After having received the invitation Croatia first must initiate accession talks with NATO that should be wrapped up by the end of this summer, Nacional has learned. Two meeting are to be held during the accession negotiations at which there will be discussion in detail on all of the current achievements of Croatian reforms key to accession to membership, but also concerning what will still have to be done by the accession date, expected to be in the spring of 2009.

As soon as June of this year Brussels will be the scene of a meeting between NATO officials and Croatian negotiators, with political and military reforms topping the agenda, i.e. the level that has been achieved in their implementation and what remains to be done prior to accession to full membership. When it comes to political issues NATO officials expect clear and concrete answers concerning the reform of the judiciary, the war on corruption and the respect of minority rights, especially those of the Serbian minority in Croatia, and the discussion on military reforms will centre on the defence budget and its structure, how much is to be earmarked for wages, how much into development and modernisation programs, and projections of the costs of peacekeeping missions. Also on the table will be the Long Term Armed Forces Development Plan, adopted in 2005, i.e. if the time frame laid out for the modernisation and restructuring of the Armed Forces is being met, and the preparation of units for NATO missions. NATO officials expect concrete answers on the process of professionalizing the army and the volunteer reserve, which is a dead letter, the unorganised military personnel career management system, where army personnel only learn a day ahead of an appointment what they will be doing in the future, while Western army officers know this years in advance.

That means that in the future Croatian defence ministry officials and high ranking officers at the Croatian Army Supreme Command will have to do everything much faster and more efficiently than they did while Croatia was still in candidate status as a result of the obligations that arise from full membership and more frequent military inspections from the alliance's headquarters. The second meeting, which is to be held a few months later, but no later than August of 2008, security and legal issues will be under discussion and how much Croatia will pay to the joint NATO budget. According to the calculations made at the defence ministry Croatia is set to contribute 5 million euro a year to cover the costs of the two joint NATO funds, and it is estimated that it will cost a further 5 million euro to sent hundreds of military and civilian personnel to the individual NATO command centres. Added to that, of course, are the approximately 20 million euro a year it will cost for Croatian soldiers to participate in NATO military missions.

With the completion go accession negotiations by the end of the summer of 2008 Croatia will send a letter to NATO headquarters officially confirming it accepts the obligations that arise from the Washington Treaty that created NATO, and that letter will be accompanied a time frame for the completion of necessary reforms that will be discussed at the cited meetings with NATO officials. A letter of intent is to be submitted to NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer by current foreign minister Gordan Jandrokovic. After that NATO will draft a protocol to the Washington Treaty in the form of an amendment and which will, after ratification, become an integral part of the Membership Agreement. The signing of the protocol will be followed by the ratification procedure in all NATO member countries. Once the ratification procedure is completed the member countries will inform the US State Department, the depository of the Washington Treaty, to that effect, and only then will the NATO Secretary General invite Croatia to accede to the North Atlantic Alliance.

This is a process that starts with ratification in all of the member states in the autumn of 2008 and should finish by the end of the spring of 2009, when a meeting of NATO members is to be held in France and Germany on the alliance's 60th anniversary, where Croatia will be invited for the first time to sit at the table as a full member with decisions making powers equal to all other members of the alliance. It should be pointed out that Croatian representatives will already by allowed to enter NATO working bodies, its committees and sub-committees during this transition period from today to the spring of 2009 and participate in discussions and put forth positions on an equal footing, but not to vote on them until the moment Croatia becomes a full member.

And it is in fact the departure of the cited hundred or so of the most qualified military personnel to the command centres and various NATO committees that will leave a significant vacuum in the defence sector. The Croatian Army faces large and technologically demanding Armed Forces modernisation programs, the introduction of new IT systems, intensive learning of the English language, and departures for international military command centres where personnel with two or more university degrees work. It could have been expected that because of these demands the top people and project heads at the defence ministry and armed forces would be of exceptional quality, educated and technologically proficient experts, or that there would be a program to attract them to the Armed Forces at all costs.

But the trend is quite the opposite, the few such experts that remain at the defence ministry are fully loaded and are working under pressure on several projects, and they leave the Armed Forces for the first good opportunity they are offered, and nobody new comes in their place because they are not, as experts, offered anything of quality. That will also be one of the topics under discussion when Croatian negotiators meet with NATO officials during the accession talks, as will be the issue of the professionalization of the Armed Forces. The situation with the complement of military units with newly arrived conscripts was so poor that a decision had to adopted on abolishing mandatory military service and the creation of a professional army. Mandatory military service was entirely demotivating for anyone that might have aspired to take up a military career.

The Armed Forces, limited by their budget, did not succeed in coming up with quality and interesting training programs for conscripts. Calls to military exercises are something only the parents of today's conscripts can remember while they served in the JNA (Yugoslav People's Army), while only a single round of ammunition is fired off now during mandatory military service, and everything else boils down to municipal services and help in clearing the snow of football pitches, guard duty at facilities of no value, and the psychological drill of superior officers concerning whether the bed is properly made up or the latrine cleaned.