Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe government offered Camp Casteau, a 2 km² Belgian Army summer training camp near Mons, which was an area in serious need of additional economic investment. In September 1966, NATO agreed that Belgium should host SHAPE at Casteau. SHAPE closed its facility at Rocquencourt near Paris on 30 March 1967, and the next day held a ceremony to mark the opening of the new headquarters at Casteau. The drawdown of the British Mediterranean Fleet, the military difficulties of the politically decided command structure, and the withdrawal of the French from the military command structure forced a rearrangement of the command arrangements
Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe ACO as it became had more and more activities related to the NATO Response Force. Yet after Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined the alliance, and especially after the 2008 Georgia-Russia war, more attention began to be paid to NATO's core Article 5 defence obligations. The three Baltic states' worries were specifically focused on a potential Russian threat. Thus while some exercises were ostentially run to prepare the NRF, sometimes they also included Article 5 aspects. Among these dual-purpose exercises was 'Steadfast Jazz', part of the NATO Exercise Steadfast series, which was run in November 2013 across a number of NATO