When NATO heads of state meet in Warsaw next month, they are expected to recommit to the alliance’s original collective-defense mission, but the forces and equipment necessary to perform that role and which nations will pay for it are questions that need answering, according to a recent study by European defense analysts.
“What we can assume in the run-up to the meeting is that the summit will signal the renewal of NATO as a military alliance or at least remind us of its primary task – territorial defense,” Kinga Redłowska, Director of the International Cooperation Department at the Institute for Eastern Studies, writes in the preface to “NATO: Rethink, Realign, React; Tackling Security Challenges Together.”
The report, released last week on Capitol Hill in partnership with NATO, several Washington, D.C.-based think tanks and universities, points out that the United States spends more of its gross domestic product on defense than any of the other NATO members and continues to carry 70-75 percent of NATO’s budget. The other European member states spend an average 1.7 percent of their GDPs on defense but have pledged to increase the rate to 2 percent by the end of the decade.
European NATO allies made that pledge at the last NATO summit in September 2014, including the caveat that 20 percent of that go directly to military equipment. As of now, only 5 of the 28 members have met the 2 percent target, according to François Lafond, senior member of the Institute of European Democrats in Brussels and associate professor at Sciences Po Paris.
Photo: General Dynamics
On its eastern flank, NATO is facing a resurgent Russia that has rearmed in earnest over the past decade. Russia now dedicates 4 percent of its GDP to defense, according to Przemysław Żurawski vel Grajewski, coordinator of the Security & Defense Section of the Polish National Council of Development and an adviser to the Polish minister of foreign affairs.
“Since 2011 the country’s expenditures on land forces have tripled, from slightly more than 94 billion rubles to over 285 billion,” he says in the report. “Since February 2013, its army has been exercising intensively and remains at a high level of combat readiness. Provocations by Russian aircraft and submarines violating the airspace and territorial waters of both NATO states and the neutral Scandinavian countries are on the increase. There is a growing Russian military presence in the Arctic and the Middle East. Since 2009, Russian military maneuvers have been organized on the assumption of carrying out aggression in the Baltic Sea, up to and including a ‘de-escalating’ nuclear strike.”
Having invaded Ukraine with moderate success and annexed Crimea, Russia’s sights are thought to now be on the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland. With the exception of Poland, NATO has few defenses against a Russian invasion aimed at capturing the state capitals and needs more troops than the four brigades headed there to provide a credible deterrent, says Potomac Foundation President Phillip Karber.
The armed forces of the Baltic States have not one main battle tank among them, Karber says. Moreover, Ukraine has lost more tanks fighting the Russians than the German army has in service, he says.
The push for an increase in defense spending and the pooling of that funding in NATO-led military capabilities should lead to greater interoperability among the many alliance member militaries, says Tim H. Stuchtey, executive director of the newly-founded Brandenburg Institute for Society and Security (BIGS) in Potsdam.
“By procuring a larger number of a single weapons system within NATO, the average cost per unit will drop,” he says in the report. “Looking beyond an individual country’s industrial base when procuring military equipment potentially provides greater variety and a higher quality of supply – simply put, more bang per euro.”
After years of decline, defense spending in Europe increased in 2015 in nominal terms in most countries, Stuchtey says. European defense budgets are being spent not on weapons or future technologies but on personnel and domestic base maintenance, he says.
“They are not being invested into the capabilities Europe needs,” Stuchtey says. “Thus, European countries will have fewer assets, and the European defense industry is shrinking.”
Compared to the U.S., Europe deploys six times as many different weapons systems, though it spends only 40 percent as much on them and has twice as many competitors in 40 percent of all defense sub-sectors, Stuchtey says.
European nations are buying equipment in an effort to support their individual indigenous manufacturers, which undercuts the drive to pool resources and is “resulting in European military capabilities that are duplicated, fragmented, and excessively costly with members unable to use an ally’s equipment, parts, or ammunition,” he says. “European states need to identify the key technologies and products of their national defense industries for which their innovation cluster is sufficiently favorable to be internationally competitive.”