At the Lider conference Women in Business, held on Thursday at Lauba in Zagreb, in a one-on-one conversation with RTL’s host, Borko Brunović, a truly unique woman, Vlasta Zekulić, head of the Department for Strategic Issues and Relations at NATO’s Allied Command Transformation, was a guest.
Her presentation of her life path elicited a wave of laughter among around 500 participants, who mostly listened to what the most powerful and successful women in Croatian business had to say about the position of women, whose core presentations revolved around soft skills, which in today’s crisis times make a crucial difference between the leadership of men and women. However, Zekulić had a slightly different perspective: – Since I was a child, my absolute love has been the military. Uniforms, discipline, weapons, strength of character is something that has always interested me. It was something beautiful – said Zekulić.
She briefly recounted her life story, how she could not enroll in the Military Academy during the war due to its absence, so she enrolled in the Police High School and then criminology.
– It’s not the military, but it has guns – Zekulić recalled.
No one teaches you how to be a woman
Her inclinations and talents were quickly recognized, and she went to military training in the United States. Her first unit in the Croatian army was in the military police, before soon going to the battlefield in Afghanistan and returning to infantry.
– No one teaches you how to be a woman in the military. There are skills of warfare, but not for women. So, in the role of a commander, in a military world and a unit with 40 men who ‘weigh 200 kilos of muscle’, getting men to stop looking at you and start listening is not an easy job. In such situations, it is not about military command but about breaking male culture. I agree that soft skills are great, but when you are surrounded by warriors, you need physical dominance, until someone vomits from the effort – Zekulić vividly recounted.
– Then everything is as it should be. You also learn psychological manipulation, in which men do not exactly excel, and that’s it. The point is to gain their trust, so they know that you will be with them even when things get tough. In Afghanistan, we had a baptism of fire, when we arrived at a location where a car bomb exploded, causing many casualties; the soldiers watched how I would behave. Would I cry, command, and what my reaction would be in a crisis. When they saw that I knew what I was doing, that I didn’t get lost, they began to trust me and follow me in everything I did, regardless of the crisis – Zekulić recounted.
After 20 years in the armed forces, Zekulić moved her workplace to Brussels, where she witnessed firsthand how NATO solves problems ‘behind the scenes’.
– Then you see the political side of security crises and how actually 30 different nations view a particular problem. That side of NATO is politics, and I must admit that I do not like it very much. However, every nation has the right to choose what its interest is. It is extremely difficult to reconcile the interests of countries and their interests, but the ability to negotiate, for 30 countries to agree on the same issues, is an incredible adrenaline rush of success – Zekulić added.
Everything has changed
The conversation also touched on NATO’s expansion, to which Zekulić responded that, for example, Finland and Sweden are strong allies and already have an integrated system, and that with them NATO will undoubtedly be a stronger alliance.
She also reflected on the war’s consequences and the possibility of a third world war:
– In the new strategic document, NATO states that we do not live in peacetime. We will do everything to prevent a global war, but there is something called ‘strike for strike’, or death by thousands of ‘small stabs’. Today, you no longer need to have a war for the situation to push you financially, socially, and politically from the side before the war starts. It is difficult today to say whether it is better to enter an open war or a hybrid one like we are in now – Zekulić stated.
Europe is paying the price of fighting for its values in the Russia-Ukraine war, but locally we personally suffer from having given up Russian gas.
– Someone raised an important question: ‘How many Ukrainian children can we love more than our own? How much are we willing to suffer to stand behind Ukraine? And the longer the war lasts, the louder that question becomes. We are losing the war without having fought. For NATO, there is no option where Russia can win, but how long it will last and when it will lose is hard to say. There has been a lot of anger over the inadequate armament system in Europe; however, the reason for that was that there were no concrete plans on what the money would be spent on, there was nothing to invest in. In the last six months, everything has changed. Europe has armed itself, and the economy is changing. For the first time, military plans of Europe have been activated – concluded Zekulić.
Zekulić graduated from the Military College of South Carolina with two majors: Computer Science and Management of Information Systems. She has a total of three master’s degrees, one in London for ‘NATO executives’, one in Rome for ‘Strategic Leadership and Digital Transformation’, and one in Political Science, where she also obtained her doctorate. She spent 15 years in the Armed Forces of the Republic of Croatia and was in Afghanistan twice. Her last rank is colonel. In 2017, she joined NATO, and in 2021, she was promoted to the ranks of managers.
