After decades preoccupied with counter-insurgency operations in far-flung lands, NATO’s European members are contemplating a scenario not seriously envisaged since the fall of the Soviet Union — the possibility of a full-scale land war in their own territory.
Such a campaign may need to be fought without the full firepower of the US, the indispensable ally that ensured the region’s security through the Cold War and ever since.
To many Europeans, the biggest risk to the status quo appears to come from Donald Trump. “Our allies have taken advantage of us more so than our enemies,” the former US president said in an interview with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait at the Economic Club of Chicago on Oct. 15. “It’s not sustainable.” Trump has gone so far as to suggest that, if he were reelected, America would only come to the aid of allies that meet NATO’s military spending target, a stance that calls into question the alliance’s Article 5 collective defense commitment.
Yet Trump’s provocative comments reflect a current of thinking that transcends Washington’s political divide and may prevail whoever wins the US presidential election in November: that European governments should build their own powerful militaries instead of keeping defense budgets slim, safe in the knowledge that their Soviet-era mutual defense pact with America will protect them from invaders.
Those who argue for strengthening European defense are motivated by pragmatism as well as fairness. The rise of China as a military power, with its designs on the contested island of Taiwan, has US officials wargaming a scenario in which they are forced to divert long-range weaponry from the North Atlantic to fight a war in East Asia.
This could leave Europe perilously exposed. The war in Ukraine, the deadliest conflict on the continent since 1945, has demonstrated the resolve of Russian President Vladimir Putin to carve out a greater sphere of influence for Moscow in the former Soviet space. Putin said in 2005 that the collapse of the Soviet Union “was the greatest political catastrophe of the century.” If an eastern NATO member became his next target, its allies would be obliged to rush to its aid.
German forces train with Lithuanian troops in the NATO exercise Griffin Storm, in June 2023. Photographer: Kay Nietfeld/Getty Images
Most of the European military community has no experience in planning or commanding large-scale combined-force operations involving several nations. It’s made up of separate national armies that, for the purposes of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, lean on America for leadership and coordination.
NATO nations have cut back on troops and military hardware since the Cold War. But Europe has cut far deeper than the US. Defense budgets have become a pot that could be raided to fund more pressing priorities, such as treating and caring for aging populations. As a result, much of Europe’s military has become, in the view of some US defense experts, a “Potemkin army” that is ill-prepared to wage and win a prolonged war.
Shrinking Militaries
Europe’s military cutbacks were far more drastic than those of the US
Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies
Note: Other NATO countries includes European NATO members only.
The reductions shown above don’t even tell the full story. True capability requires troops to be well-equipped and trained. An armored combat vehicle that’s poorly maintained, a weapon that’s degraded, a brigade short of the ammunition and supply lines to fight a sustained war, a missile that fails because it’s not been battle tested — all deplete the effectiveness of an army in ways that are often beyond public view.
Russia also slashed its military in the 1990s, partly because its economy was in a state of collapse and much of the equipment was obsolete. In 2008, a war with Georgia exposed the dilapidated state of Russia’s armed forces, and Putin embarked on a wide-ranging modernization of the country’s military hardware, from ships and submarines to aircraft and nuclear weapons; he expanded troop numbers and tried to shift away from a conscript model to expand the ranks of professional soldiers. With Russia’s efforts to absorb Ukraine again revealing the limitations of its military and resulting in heavy casualties, Putin has said he would expand the country’s armed forces to 1.5 million, which would make it the second-biggest military in the world behind China.
Without the full might of the US armed forces by their side, NATO’s European members may struggle to confront such a powerful invader — not to mention deter it in the first place.
This diagram shows the number of vehicles and vessels the US, European countries and Russia currently have in their arsenals.
Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies
Armored Fighting Vehicles
Combat Aircraft
Surface Warships
Submarines
European governments have begun to commit more spending to defense. A lot of that money will be needed simply to rebuild and reinforce the assets they already have. They will still rely on the US in critical areas such as air and missile defense and the advanced computer systems needed to conduct a modern war.
“Europe must become a political and military power if we want to feel safe on our continent,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in April.
Here’s a breakdown of the state of Europe’s armed forces, and the gaps that need to be filled to restore their credibility, based on data gathered from defense ministries and the views of military experts.
Military Spending
NATO’s members agreed in 2014 that they would each be spending at least 2% of their gross domestic product on defense by 2024. About 23 out of 32 allies are expected to hit the target — up from just 10 countries last year. Even if the European members collectively reached the US level of around 3.5% of GDP, their spending would still trail that of their superpower ally because Europe’s economy has been on a path of decline relative to the US since the global financial crisis of the late 2000s.
Cuts and More Cuts
Percent change in defense budgets as a share of overall government spending
Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
Just as important as how much will be spent is how. Europe’s past performance when it comes to buying military equipment is poor. Nations have often placed the emphasis on buying expensive, high-tech systems that embellish their prestige instead of properly maintaining or replacing what they already had.
The war in Ukraine has shown that, even in modern warfare, the ability to supply large quantities of old-fashioned guns, ammunition and other basics remains as important as it did a century ago. Russia was on track to produce nearly 3 million artillery shells this year — almost three times the combined output of the US and Europe — according to NATO intelligence estimates cited by CNN in March.
As they’ve dispatched military equipment to support Ukraine’s defense, European governments have agonized over how much to send, partly for fear of depleting their own, limited arsenals.
When deciding what to buy, and from whom, national defense establishments in Europe have traditionally focused on boosting domestic economies and job creation. That makes it harder to coordinate procurement so that the region gets the equipment it needs at the lowest possible price. It also leads to dysfunction on the battlefield. Because of subtle design differences, the 155-mm artillery shells produced by some NATO members are incompatible with other allies’ systems. Some German troops have been using unencrypted radios from the 1980s that cannot communicate with allies, according to a report published in March by the parliamentary commissioner for Germany’s armed forces.
German paratroopers train at Campia Turzii, Romania during the NATO exercise Swift Response, in May 2024. Photographer: Andrei Pungovschi/Bloomberg
Troops
The UK and France are Europe’s preeminent military powers, but both have slashed troop numbers since the Cold War. France’s active armed forces shrank by 56% between 1990 and 2024, to 203,850. The UK is still cutting: A 2023 Defence Command Paper states that the British army will be reduced to 73,000 soldiers by 2025 — the lowest level since the Napoleonic wars of 1803–1815. Germany could possibly deploy one brigade — numbering a few thousand soldiers — to the Baltics and that “would be considered an accomplishment,” said Max Bergmann, director for Europe, Russia and Eurasia at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
France could mobilize 20,000 soldiers in 30 days, according to the joint chief of command of its land army, General Pierre Schill. The UK could at a best effort muster one division of between 20,000 and 30,000 soldiers, though this would probably take more than a month, said Matthew Savill of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a London-based defense and security think tank. “Ukraine’s losses against Russia of 31,000 troops would be the fighting strength of the British army gone,” he said. “You could aim to muster a second division that you might augment and build — only it wouldn’t have many vehicles.”
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American special forces alone number around 70,000, and the US has some 80,000 military service personnel stationed just in Europe.
NATO is trying to make the most of what remains of Europe’s fighting forces as the region shifts to a “pre-war” from a “post-war” state, in the words of Grant Shapps, who was the UK’s defense secretary until July.
Some 90,000 NATO troops spent the first five months of 2024 collaborating on Steadfast Defender, their largest military exercise since the Cold War.
NATO’s Forward Presence
In November 2022, NATO enhanced its forward presence by adding troops to Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.
Sources: NATO, Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project
The alliance is establishing what it calls a new force model meant to better face the threat from Russia on its eastern flank, which stretches from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. This has involved placing more than 300,000 troops on higher readiness to deploy at shorter notice. NATO has been shifting troops around to expand its so-called forward presence — adding more multinational forces in the places it would likely need to defend first in a conflict. Germany plans to establish a permanent brigade of as many as 5,000 troops in Lithuania by the end of 2027.
Thinning Ranks
Change in active personnel
Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies
Some European generals are calling for the reintroduction of mass-conscription, though the resulting wave of recruits would be no replacement for the kind of professional, highly trained soldiers needed in modern warfare.
The recent induction of Sweden and Finland into NATO brings a welcome infusion of well-trained and highly-disciplined soldiers. More broadly, however, European military recruitment is in a crisis — hobbled by poor impressions of life in service. The dwindling of Europe’s armed forces is, to an extent, self-perpetuating as their diminishing profile in civilian society means that many young people don’t even consider the possibility of a military career.
Logistics Airlift Capacity
Number of heavy transport planes
Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies
There’s no point in training up a fighting unit if you can’t move it fast and give it the resources for a sustained fight. The US army can duplicate supply lines for fuel, food and ammunition across multiple armored brigades. Europe’s logistical resources are fewer, less flexible and less tested. During the Cold War, NATO members had a dedicated fuel pipeline system to supply allied forces stationed across central Europe. When the Soviet Union collapsed and NATO expanded eastward, no comparable, standardized infrastructure was put in place — partly because alliance members had shifted their focus to planning operations on other continents, in places such as Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Pakistan.
Since the Ukraine wake-up call, the alliance has been systematically testing its ability to move troops and heavy equipment across wide areas via road and rail, and asking questions not posed since the Cold War: What happens if Poland’s airports are bombed? Can bridges on key routes up to the Baltic states withstand the weight of hundreds of tanks without collapsing? One focus of the 2024 Steadfast Defender exercises was getting troops and equipment quickly to the most likely future conflict zones.
Naval Power
Ships are crucial in a modern ground war. Air forces need runways and armies move slowly. Navies quickly deploy the kind of long-range weaponry that can destroy significant amounts of enemy equipment on land and sea.
So it proved in Libya in 2011. European nations wanted to lead the naval effort to destroy Muammar Gaddafi’s war machine. In the end, only the US had Tomahawk cruise missiles in sufficient numbers to obliterate Libyan air defenses so that European combat jets could fly over Libya safely. (At least one of the UK’s Tomahawks got stuck in the tube.)
Aircraft Carriers by Country
Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies
Some US submarines carry more Tomahawks than the entire UK Royal Navy probably has in its stocks, according to RUSI calculations.
France has one remaining full-scale aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, typically carrying around 30 Rafale fighter jets. The UK has two such vessels, which together have the capacity to host 48 F-35 combat jets in addition to helicopters. But it’s expected to have only 37 of the fighter planes by the end of 2024. (The F-35’s predecessor, the Harrier, was retired more than a decade ago.) A single US Nimitz-class carrier, of which there are 10, has an air wing of up to 69 aircraft.
Threadbare budgets have delayed the arrival of a new generation of Royal Navy warships and the submarines that carry Britain’s nuclear weapons. As a result, much of the current fleet is operating beyond its designated lifespan and more prone to maintenance issues. In April, only one-fifth of the Royal Navy’s major surface combat vessels were active or immediately deployable, according to a snapshot compiled by UK Defence Journal.
In January, in a rare criticism of a staunch ally, US Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro called upon Britain to reinforce the size of its armed forces to deal with threats from Russia and China.
Some European nations are taking steps to rebuild their naval strength and add more weaponry to those vessels they have on order. But ships have some of the longest construction lead times of any military hardware. And meanwhile, the region’s navies are struggling to find sailors to fill the ships they already have. In early 2024, the British government said it was decommissioning two of its 11 Royal Navy frigates; the Telegraph newspaper reported it was due to a lack of manpower.
Air Power
The bulk of NATO’s long-range cruise and ballistic missiles, which in combat would be propelled over hundreds of miles from mobile batteries and warships, are provided by the US. And Europe doesn’t have Patriot-style anti-missile systems in numbers that would constitute an effective defense against incoming projectiles.
The Ukraine conflict has shown that it’s hard to gain the upper hand in a modern land war without dominance of the air. Ukrainian forces have successfully employed drones to knock out tanks, kill enemy soldiers, destroy ammunition stores, and damage airfields and oil refineries. But Russia’s well-established air defenses make it difficult for the Ukrainian air force to fly in and significantly degrade the Russian weapon systems that have pummeled Ukrainian cities and vital infrastructure.
The same challenge would likely arise if Russia were to invade a NATO member.
“In a ground fight with Russia, NATO success would be heavily reliant on achieving air superiority,” said Savill at RUSI. “You cannot achieve that if Russia’s air defenses are still shooting down your jets and helicopters. If you do achieve it, you can then devastate Russian ground forces.”
Currently, only the US could carry out effective suppression and destruction of modern Russian air defenses. Specialized aircraft locate the source of radar transmissions from enemy missile defense systems. This forces the enemy to turn off the equipment to prevent it from being destroyed by anti-radiation missiles, creating a window to attack the enemy’s assets on the ground.
Spanish paratroopers descend during the military exercise Swift Response at Campia Turzii, Romania. Photographer: Andrei Pungovschi/Bloomberg
Today’s Russian air defenses are harder than ever to defeat as they combine long, medium and short-range missile-defense arrays. This is meant to ensure that when one node in the system is forced to go dark, the other layers continue to provide protection. What’s more, the missile batteries and associated ground station units are constantly on the move to foil an attack.
The US military has a shot at defeating these so-called integrated air defense systems because it has large numbers of highly-trained pilots flying stealthy combat jets such as F-35s, which work in tandem with imaging satellites and long-range reconnaissance aircraft to pinpoint multiple targets quickly and accurately. The US also has large, readily available stocks of long-range “standoff” munitions that can be fired from outside the danger zone to destroy those targets.
This diagram shows the capabilities of Russian air defenses and how US and NATO forces would attempt to counter them.
Sources: Royal United Services Institute, Bloomberg reporting
Note: Distances not to scale.
Europe’s lack of homegrown capability for these complex missions is the most serious shortfall identified by NATO Air Command, according to Justin Bronk, an airpower and technology specialist at RUSI in London.
The Outlook
So far, the rebuilding of Europe’s military capabilities has been piecemeal and of limited scope.
Positive developments include German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s announcement of a €100 billion fund to modernize the country’s defenses; a significant expansion of Poland’s armed forces to make it the third-largest in NATO, with a heavy focus on ground troops; a Dutch plan to restore tank forces that the country got rid of in 2011; and the arrival of new Apache helicopters and Archer howitzer guns for the British army.
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The region’s governments agree that coordinating their efforts would improve the return on their investments. That means shifting away from a notion of “sovereign capability” to a new approach in which they compare their respective military assets, identify the gaps in their collective arsenals, and agree on which member nations will fill them.
A subgroup of members — Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark — have moved in that direction by creating a Nordic air-defense alliance to combine command and control; share facilities, information and situational awareness; and improve interoperability. The group plans to have almost 250 modern combat aircraft by the end of the decade, of which at least half will probably be F-35s.
Joint forces of the Swedish, Finnish, Italian and French armies demonstrate an amphibious assault during the Nordic Response exercise in March 2024 above the Arctic Circle near Sorstraumen, Norway. Photgrapher: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images
Simply deciding who will oversee Europe’s defense revival has become a source of tension. The European Union’s executive, the European Commission, is keen to spearhead the effort, even naming Andrius Kubilius, a former prime minister of Lithuania, its first “defense and space commissioner” on Sept. 17. The bloc has taken a lead in coordinating Europe’s response to the Ukraine crisis. It’s also taken considerable credit for a rapid increase in European production of artillery shells — expected to reach 2 million by the end of 2025 from 1 million in early 2024.
However, NATO command has long opposed the EU taking a dominant role in the region’s defense, saying it could duplicate effort and divert resources. In his final public address as secretary general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg warned the EU against building a competing alternative to the alliance.
Whoever might take the lead, rebuilding Europe’s defenses would require a lot of money that may not materialize. Some security officials say European military spending may need to rise to as much as 4% of national budgets — levels not seen since the end of the Soviet era — to ensure NATO can deal with the emerging threats.
For some alliance members, this would require either significant spending cuts in other areas, tax increases or taking on extra debt that they can barely afford. So for now, there’s little momentum in NATO for revising the 2% goal higher. Instead, the alliance is debating whether members should be allowed to include military aid to Ukraine as part of their minimum spending.
A previous version of this story was corrected to fix vessel type in paragraph 32.
With assistance from: Natalia Drozdiak Samy Adghirni Andrea Palasciano Christoph Rauwald Steph Davidson Editors: Lisa Beyer Alex Tribou Opening illustration: Chris Nosenzo
Note: For classifying military vehicle types, armored fighting vehicles do not include reconnaissance vehicles, combat aircraft do not include helicopters or unmanned aerial vehicles, and surface warships do not include amphibious vessels. For classifying troops, the US Navy includes Marine Corps. Details of SEAD/DEAD operations and process were provided by Justin Bronk of the Royal United Services Institute.
Source link : https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-nato-armed-forces/
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Publish date : 2024-10-15 07:00:00
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