Eight security officers stand around the silver Mercedes S Class. An American four-star general slowly emerges from the vehicle. He is wearing a blue-and-yellow jogging suit emblazoned with the words "U.S. Navy," with which this American marine feels he has a special bond.

Jones is a Marine, and his appearance is entirely that of one of the famous/infamous leatherneck. When this soldier, who stands almost six-and-a-half feet tall, enters a room everyone is suddenly quiet. Until 2004, Jones was the senior commander of the Marines, who enjoy the reputation of being the US military's door-kickers. He is now the face of the new NATO, which, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact, remained behind as an unwieldy battle horse, one that had lost its purpose, its goal and, most importantly, its enemy.

However, this has changed since the attacks of September 11th and the creation of the dire threat posed by Osama Bin Laden, especially in the opinion of the Americans dominating the alliance.

It is 7:30 a.m., and the air over NATO's Shape headquarters in the southern Belgian city of Mons is humid and warm. Jones jogs along the curving asphalt streets, passing the apartment buildings where his senior officers live, toward the command center. The parking lots slowly begin to fill up. Half an hour later, showered and wearing his khaki-colored US uniform, he sits in his 600 square foot office on the high-security, carpeted level of the NATO command center. A massive bronze eagle bearing the US flag stands watch at the door.

"What exactly is our mission in Iraq? What is it costing us? Who is not giving us their political support?," asks NATO's highest-ranking soldier in Europe, addressing a six-member group of American, British and German officers. He speaks quietly, but forcefully.

US Colonel David Mercer is waiting outside. Mercer is on edge. The boss' office manager senses that this will be a tense work day. He also senses that his schedule is about to be turned upside-down.

The diplomatic wires in Brussels have been buzzing ever since the transitional government in Baghdad requested NATO's assistance in the training of its security forces. Interim President Ijad Alawi told the NATO commander that the training of Iraqi police and military forces should begin "as soon as possible, preferably immediately."

But France opposes the move, refusing to accept the Iraqis' demands for greater involvement on the part of the alliance. "We are allies, not subordinates," emphasized French President Jacques Chirac at the NATO summit in Istanbul. Other countries also hesitated to support the effort. However, Jones needed a unanimous resolution by all 26 member states. Now things are happening the way Colonel Mercer expected them to happen: The "Boss" is changing everything. His weekly meeting with his key advisors is cancelled. Instead, Jones wants to see the chairman of the NATO military committee, German four-star general Harald Kujat, immediately. He expects Kujat to toe the line and give the NATO council the correct recommendations for Iraq. The lunch break is converted into a crisis meeting. Instead of smoked salmon with Riesling sauce, Jones asks for steak, and he wants it nice and rare.

More than 35 years ago, Jones, a young lieutenant, waded "legs covered in leeches, through the jungles and rice fields of Vietnam." In 1991, he led an expeditionary unit into northern Iraq. That was his world, he says. "In an ideal situation, you say, 'Follow me, men,' and everyone says 'Aye, Sir' and follows you." According to Jones, things don't work that way with allies – unfortunately.

There is one sentence that journalists and security experts keep repeating, and Jones is tired of hearing it: "NATO is dead." Jones has responded to it dozens of times, always using the same words when talking, patiently, to hundreds of soldiers in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Kosovo: "I didn't come here to turn off the light. The new NATO means saying goodbye to history. It's the future."

Two years ago, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally selected Jones for this job. Perhaps he appointed the then 59-year-old political scientist because he grew up in France, which gives him an edge in dealing with obstinate Europeans. Or perhaps because one of the character traits of this proven doer is a fundamental American optimism, and because he pursues his objectives persistently, but amiably.

It's clear what Rumsfeld wants the Europeans to do. He wants them to modernize their outdated, enormous Cold War military forces, even if this comes at the expense of prosperity and social harmony. Instead of constantly criticizing the United States from a moral perspective, Rumsfeld believes that they should assume a larger share of the costs of wartime and peacetime military deployment, so as to remove some of the burden from Washington. After all, the Americans spend well over 400 billion dollars on defense, more than three times as much, on a per capita basis, than the Germans.

In fact, the technological divide between the highly well-armed US military and its European NATO partners is dramatic. Old Europe lacks the most fundamental elements needed to conduct operations worldwide, even lacking the type of aircraft it would need to deploy its troops to remote regions. For this reason, not even the most unwieldy Europeans, including the combative French, could survive independently from the superpower.

In addition to Central Asia, the Middle East and the Balkans, the US defense secretary has set his sights on Africa as a field of operations for the new NATO. In his view, countries are falling apart and hotbeds for radical groups are forming in Africa. Rumsfeld's front man, Jones, argues that "we must get to the danger spots before the dangers get to us."

When Jones says "we," he is referring to the new NATO Response Force (NRF), his alliance's future advance operations force. The high-tech unit, which is also intended to undermine the Europeans' ambitious plans for a combat force of their own, is expected to include 21,000 elite troops by 2006. The unit is likely to include at least 6,000 Germans, and its troops could be sent into combat anywhere in the world within five days. When swearing in the rapid response force' troops last fall, the first NRF commander, Briton Jack Deverell, said that the NATO troops would be called upon to hunt down "monsters" and advance into regions of the world that cartographers of the Middle Ages once described as being "inhabited by dragons."

By now it is 2 p.m. at NATO's Shape headquarters. Every seat in the movie theater at the NATO base is taken when Jones steps up to the podium to give his semiannual address. "It's easy to stand up from the negotiating table and feel good about yourself because you're sending NATO into a crisis region," says the Supreme Commander, openly criticizing the European heads of state who approved a mission in Istanbul, but since then have failed to provide the necessary funds.

Jones seems to find it difficult to keep himself from departing from the narrow framework of constructive criticism. These days, Jones spends his time traveling from defense ministry to defense ministry, begging for funds to support the alliance's missions in the Balkans and Afghanistan, to obtain sufficient numbers of troops and helicopters, and now the same applies to Iraq.

Even the deployment of the new miracle force, the NRF, is a long way from being a sure thing. Because of the need to obtain parliamentary approval, for example, the Germans cannot guarantee that the lower house of the German parliament will in fact approve the deployment of German troops within five days.

Nevertheless, more and more operations are being conducted under the NATO flag. Recently, the alliance even provided security at the European Cup in Portugal and at Spain's royal wedding, and currently has troops deployed at the Olympics in Athens. However, Jones complains, the European members' budgets have been stagnating for a long time: "This will not work out in the long term." A Norwegian officer sitting in a back row dares to ask the decisive question: "In that case, General, why do you never criticize the finance ministers?" "Because we are planning a covert operation against them," Jones responds, "and it starts at 6 a.m. on August 30." Everyone laughs. It's real laughter, not polite laughter. Jones is a master of the art of making friends.

Jones holds archaic views on the soldier's profession. He likes to quote the Spartan King Leonidas before he went to battle against the vastly superior forces of the Persians. According to legend, before he and his men were about to be slaughtered at Thermopylae, a selfless act that saved Hellas and Europe, Leonidas said: "The most noble achievement is freedom. This is what we have chosen, and we will pay for it."

When he speaks to US soldiers facing attacks in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, where he himself served 13 years ago, he begins to sound a lot like the Spartans: "I envy you. You can tell your children that you did something special." But then he sounds a bit like George W. Bush himself: "You can be proud of yourselves, you soldiers of the world's greatest army."

Two years ago, the US president asked Jones whether he was in favor of the Iraq war. At the time, his response was: "Yes, Sir." Today, 950 deaths later, Jones prefers to evade the question: "There are missions where how they are executed is very important." But that's about as far as he is willing go in carefully distancing himself from the President. Jones, in his capacity as Supreme Commander of all US troops stationed in Europe, continues to prepare the majority of Iraq-bound troops in Germany for their mission. And he takes care of their affairs when they return from Iraq, injured or dead.

Later in the afternoon, almost the entire NATO leadership has come together at the organization's political headquarters in Brussels: Dutch General Secretary Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Jones, Germany's General Kujat and, from America, Admiral Edmund Giambastiani, who is directing the reshaping of NATO from its base in Norfolk, Virginia. Once again, the discussion focuses on the expansion of the ISAF mission in Afghanistan, the transfer of command in Bosnia to the European Union, the Olympics and, of course, Iraq.

It has been a 14-hour day, and the hallways in the NATO building are long since deserted. Jones takes a few minutes to write a short e-mail message to his 29-year-old son, who is currently serving in Iraq, near Baghdad. Like his father and his grandfather before him, he too is a Marine. If Jones junior were not to return from this mission alive, "it would very tough," says the father.