NATO Secretary General Lord George Robertson brought his farewell tour to Germany on Monday. He met with the German Defense Minister Peter Struck before catching up with Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.

The weekend before his visit, Robertson ruffled a few feathers in Germany, when he stated -- as he has done many times before -- that Germany needs to do more to update its military forces to meet it obligations as a NATO ally. Before stepping down in mid-December, Robertson is making one last round of visits and one last bid to finish the work he began when he took office four years ago: to transform NATO from a Cold War collective defense relic into an effective international actor in a world of ever-evolving threats, including global terrorism and rogue states.

In Berlin, Robertson called again for European states to professionalize their armed forces. "Most of our allies have decided to professionalize their armies to make them easier to redeploy and more effective," he said.

More military reform

Robertson has been critical of the governing red-green coalition's efforts (or lack thereof) at military reform. In an interview with the German newspaper, Welt am Sonntag, which appeared the Sunday before the his arrival, Robertson said that Germany belonged to the group of countries that, despite recent progress, needed to do more to improve and modernize its military. Otherwise, he suggested, NATO, U.N. and EU missions would fail.

Robertson pointed out that the NATO members -- currently numbered at 19 -- have 1.5 million soldiers between them, yet "we still have trouble pulling together and maintaining a multinational field force of 55,000 soldiers."

Some critics, Robertson among them, think Germany should undertake a massive military reform, doing away with conscription and transforming its military into a smaller-streamlined professional army better able to handle peacekeeping and peace-enforcing missions, like the one in Afghanistan. This was one of the issues on the agenda at the annual Berlin security conference the "Federal Armed Forces and Society" Forum, which Robertson, Struck and Fischer attended on Monday.

Robertson restated his position, at the conference. He said that in an insecure world, it would be a "historical mistake" to disappoint those who were counting on the leadership capacity of NATO.

Re-inventing NATO after the Cold War

Robertson took over as the secretary general of NATO at a watershed time. At the time many critics wondered if the institution -- founded as a collective defense organization at the height of the Cold War -- was still relevant in a changed world. Robertson worked hard to transform the organization and made several key changes. All the while, he argued for the continued importance of NATO.

Last January, when announcing his intention to leave the post, Robertson said he was confident that the work he started four years ago was well underway. "A lot of the changes, the transformation of NATO -- new members, new relationships, and new rules -- are already in place… I would not leave if I was not content with the fact that the transformation is now a permanent transformation and that NATO is going to be as important in the future as it was in the past," he said.

Robertson oversaw the expansion of NATO to include seven new members, including many former Soviet states. He also guided the creation of a 20,000-strong multinational "rapid reaction force," which will go into operation next year. And at a time of prickly transatlantic relations, Robertson played a key role in defining the terms of future relations between the EU and the United States. One of Robertson's goals has been to push European governments to update their military capabilities and balance out the so-called capabilities gap between them and the United States -- hence his criticism of Germany.

"I am personally extremely gratified by the considerable progress that I know has already been achieved, both in NATO capitals and here at NATO," Robertson said at a meeting of NATO member defense ministers at the organization's headquarters in Brussels in June. "Clearly more needs to be done. Yet my mantra of 'capabilities, capabilities, capabilities' is no longer a solo effort, but a harmony of 19 nations meeting their commitments and delivering substantial capability improvements," he said.

He may think the German government is still singing slightly off-key, and part of the point of this most recent -- and final -- visit is to bring them in tune.

Robertson will be replaced by Dutch Foreign Minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer in December. The Scotsman became the 10th secretary general of the alliance in October 1999. He previously served as British Prime Minister Tony Blair's defense minister.