Military Gulf Separates U.S. and European Allies
By STEVEN ERLANGER
nytimes.com
KLIETZ, Germany — In live-fire exercises here, the German heavy infantry
battalion, the 421st Panzergrenadiers, look terrific, scooting out of Marder
armored personnel carriers with new G-36 rifles, while the gunner clobbers a tank
on the horizon with 20-millimeter shells.
But even the tank-heavy, conscript German Army knows that the collapse of Soviet
Communism and high technology have changed warfare irrevocably.
Some European countries — notably Britain and France — have worked to
modernize their armies and make them more mobile; Germany, too, is finally
engaged in reform, even as 10,000 German troops help keep the peace in the
Balkans and Afghanistan.
But the real problem is that only 1.5 percent of Germany's gross domestic product
goes to the military, half the proportion allotted by the United States. "The German
military knows what has to be done," said Margarita Mathiopoulos, executive
director of the Potsdam Center for Transatlantic Security and Military Affairs. "But
they don't have enough cash to do it."
With the war in Afghanistan exposing the disparities between the United States
Army and those of the other NATO allies, Europe's perennial unwillingness to
spend more for defense has undermined its credibility with the United States and
damaged NATO as a military alliance, senior American and European officials
say.
America's global responsibilities, matched with sizable
and growing investments in high-technology warfare, from
satellite communications to Predator drones, are leaving
even NATO's most gung-ho European members farther
behind. Even after the 1999 Kosovo war, when America's
superior power was powerfully on display, Britain and
France found they could not jump-start their effort to build
a more effective European rapid reaction force.
European governments sense that they are increasingly
becoming second-rank powers, unable to affect American
foreign policy goals because they can bring too few
military assets to the table.
Even NATO's secretary general, Lord Robertson, warns
the Europeans of a choice between "modernization or
marginalization." The American ambassador to NATO, Nicholas Burns, said
recently, "Without dramatic action to close the capabilities gap, we face the real
prospect of a two-tiered alliance." There is a risk, he said, that the alliance "is so
unbalanced that we may no longer have the ability to fight together in the future."
Kori Schake, a professor at the Institute for National Security Studies, part of the
National Defense University in Washington, says the gap between the Americans
and the Europeans is reaching a critical point.
After Sept. 11, she said, "American defense spending will increase dramatically,
the changes in American forces will accelerate, and U.S. interest in and support for
crisis management missions will decline further."
The Europeans, everyone agrees, must concentrate on some obvious improvements.
They need to be able to move troops quickly by air, refuel planes in flight, deploy
precision- guided munitions and operate with battlefield radar from the sky.
Their inability to do so now stems at least in part from an increasingly diverging
view, compared with Washington's, of what is needed to combat the threats and
poverty of the developing world.
Devastated by military conflict in the 20th century, Europe prefers to spend its
money on social welfare at home and aid to poor countries abroad. The European
Union provides 56 percent of the world's aid and 36 percent of the budget of the
United Nations.
Britain and France are serious military and nuclear powers, but the United States is
about to move into warp speed. President Bush wants to increase the Pentagon
budget by $120 billion over the next five years, including a $48 billion increase
next year, which would bring the military budget to $379 billion. That figure
exceeds the total military budgets of the world's next 14 biggest defense spenders
put together.
Even more troubling to some, there is an implicit division of labor within NATO
— the Americans fight, and the Europeans clean up and keep the peace — that is
eroding the ideal of a collective alliance.
The European effort to develop its own forces that can operate with NATO's aid
but outside NATO is progressing only slowly. "Sept. 11 was not good, either for
NATO or for the European defense project," a senior French official said. "When
American security was at stake, Europeans expected to be called on to help, but the
phone didn't ring."
In Kosovo but even more now in Afghanistan, European offers of military aid were
largely spurned by the Americans as of little benefit. "It's all about capabilities," a
senior European Union foreign policy official said. "The United States has to
balance the aggravation of military partnership with its benefits, and if the benefits
aren't very sizable, why bother with the aggravation?"
A senior American official said: "The reality is that we don't need the Europeans to
do all that we do. We want a couple of crack divisions that can fight with us in
nasty places if necessary. And they can do that by focusing their money and
spending it better."
Lord Robertson, the secretary general, said in an interview that there was a need
for a serious European rapid reaction force, better special forces, better
communication and encryption. In particular, he said, the Europeans need strategic
lift and precision-guided weapons like cruise missiles and smart bombs, "which
are the only things you can now use to satisfy international law and international
public opinion."
The problem can be as basic as transportation. A country as rich as Germany is
still unable to deliver more than a third of the troops it promised for peacekeeping
in Kabul on schedule because it must rent Russian or Ukrainian transport planes on
the commercial market. One country, which NATO officials refused to identify,
discussed moving troops to Kabul by railroad.
Yet a European troop transport plane, the A-400 M, a variant of the
European-owned Airbus, is stuck in a financing dispute in Germany. Even worse,
the plane will take 8 to 10 years to deliver.
Europe spends about $140 billion a year on the military, but on average only about
$7,000 per soldier — compared with $28,000 per American soldier — on
research and development.
Some fixes would be simple and not terribly expensive, officials and other experts
say. To create a smart bomb out of a dumb one involves slapping on an $18,000
guidance package, said William Schneider Jr., chairman of the Defense Science
Board, a Pentagon advisory panel, and providing sophisticated data links that have
already been developed. "There is no technology transfer needed in this case," he
said. "People just need to do it."
European aircraft would then be able to benefit from American airborne battlefield
surveillance. Soldiers could easily have better gear able to communicate with
American satellites or Predators.
A Rand Corporation study suggests that the Europeans can do enough to fight
effectively alongside the Americans by spending some $25 billion to $56 billion
more in the next decade, a senior French official said.
Javier Solana, the European Union's chief of foreign and security policy and before
that NATO secretary general, said the Europeans could restore and maintain
political credibility only by living up to their promises of increased military
strength. "We do not set out to rival the United States as a military power, but
where we decide to set goals, we must realize them," he said.
Now, in a phrase that has become almost a cliché, the United States is the power
that fights, the United Nations feeds and the European Union finances, while
European soldiers, as in Afghanistan and the Balkans, keep the peace. "This kind of
complementarity is fine in the short term," the senior French official said. "But
George Robertson is right. It must be a partnership or it's not stable in the long
run.."
Lord Robertson complains with some bitterness that Germany is the only European
country that has increased its military spending at all — $780 million from a
special tax to fight terrorism — since Sept. 11. Yet he remains convinced that, in
the end, "the European allies will do it — they know they have to do it."
The German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, also seems to recognize that the
Europeans must pool more power to remain relevant for America. "We don't have
too much America," Mr. Schröder recently told the newspaper Die Zeit. "We have
too little Europe." |
