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On NATO
My column in the World Politics Review this week is full of depressing observations on NATO:
[The] Libya intervention demonstrated that the militaries of non-U.S. NATO nations have not invested in an appropriate amount of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms or in in-flight refueling capabilities. Virtually all of the targeting and air tasking orders were provided by the United States, which also had to provide much of the ammunition once the allies simply ran out. In addition, a recent report by the Royal United Services Institute notes that up to 85 percent of the fuel for the air campaign in Libya was provided by the U.S. Air Force.
Read more here.
Link leads to firewalled
Link leads to firewalled page. Post the whole thing?
Same problem; can't see all
Same problem; can't see all of it. Can you post the entire thing here (at least for this article)?
And all of this was obvious
And all of this was obvious years before you puffed ISAF up as just one aspect of your awfully foolish pro-surge commentary.
Ah, but you're august
Ah, but you're august company. I remember it well, 2003, when NATO collectively decided it was going to sweep in and save the day as ISAF extended its full mandate to take responsibility for all of Afghanistan.
We're led by children playing Bismark.
I sympathize with the worries
I sympathize with the worries of Polish officers whose unenviable task it is to defend the territory amidst an alliance that sounds, in Exum's article, increasingly indifferent.
At the risk of sounding cold and inhumane, however, I have to wonder whether theirs is a common dilemma in Polish military history. My understanding of history [which could be wrong, since I'm neither a historian nor a military man] is that a Poland both united in territory and free of political or military domination by one of its neighbors has been a pretty rare thing in the last 500 years. Whether it's been under Soviet oppression, or split up into pieces between any one of several combinations--Russia, Austria, Germany/Prussia, Sweden, maybe some others I'm forgetting--the bottom line is that the Polish nation is currently in an exceptional period of peace, prosperity and independence.
I bring this up because in some sense Poland's fate is the same as NATO's. For centuries Russia was barred from Central and Western Europe (or occasionally invited in) by the countries I listed above plus a few others like England, France and Turkey. Until NATO came about though, this was less about protecting Europe from the Russian Bear than about fighting each other. A state of affairs in which Poles and other Eastern Europeans need only worry about the threat on their eastern frontier can only have come about in a Europe at peace with itself--in other words, a Europe that's actually learned the horrifying lessons of the World Wars and resolved not to fall back into its violent past. Seems to me that for those officers who do indeed think that Europe (and our military presence there) is a "tertiary concern", they should remember that today's Europe--peaceful, relatively prosperous, politically stable--is, like Polish independence, a historical anomaly, not a reversion to good old times.
Main problem isn't the
Main problem isn't the firewall but the fact that the first sentence contains two typos. Stopped reading. Get a copy-editor, WPR. Typos fine. First-sentence typos, not fine.
Doesn't this come back to the
Doesn't this come back to the debate about whether NATO should exist to defend Europe, the US, and Canada, or to send expeditions all over the world? Inside each country there are powerful people who support each view, but the expeditionary approach seems much more attractive in the US than in continental Europe. Those two assumptions about what one's armed forces are for will give different answers to the question "how much should we spend, and how should we spend it?"
As long as both sides have influence, a lot of decisions will look muddled (even before all the other factors that influence defense budgets and warmaking are considered).
I'd like to disagree with the
I'd like to disagree with the above commenter. The true decline of Poland did not start until late 17th century, before and during the Great Northern War. For most of the 18th century, Polish government was under Russian dominion, but Poland lost its independence only in the 1790's, regaining it in 1919.
However, from 11th century to 17th century, Poland was one of the great powers of Europe.
Lurker: I'll take it on faith
Lurker:
I'll take it on faith that you are correct--I don't know much about Polish history at all. But if indeed Poland was one of the strongest states in Europe during the Middle Ages, one must ask: Might it be that Germany, Austria and Russia were just too weak back then?
And if Poland's decline coincided more or less with the peace of Westfalia in the 17th c. [the one bit of Euro hist that I do remember], again you need to ask yourself why this is. My guess would be that it's because a formerly powerful country found itself surrounded by others who had a more favorable geographical situation.
You've corrected my history--for which I am grateful by the way--but I think my point still holds: In a Europe without NATO, which is to say a Europe without a US presence, Poland and also countries like the Czech republic would be tragic pawns in a great-power chess game.
1. Europe has had a free ride
1. Europe has had a free ride on defense for the best part of 70 years.
2. Strong Bundeswehr in the 70's and 80's? Manned by 19 year olds doing their 15 month national service?
3. Serving in the Army, late sixties, early seventies, thought we were unprofessional.
4. Back in, later seventies and eighties, got to serve with several NATO forces. Found that my sad Vietnam Army was better than any of our allies. And we had become more professional.
5. Stories from Gulf War One, various interventions and the Global War on Terror only provide reinforcement.
6. To wit: airfield denial mission, Gulf War I; Brits in Basra around and about Operation Knights Assault; the US Marines relieving some Brit forces in Helmand Province (kindest thing any of the Marines had to say was that the Brits made good targets); the Typhoon debacle upon arrival at Vincenza during the Libyan intervention.
7. Full of good feeling about NATO's fulsome support of Georgia in 2008.
8. To the extent any of our European allies believe they are making a serious contribution to their defense, they are kidding themselves. And have been for a bunch of years.
9. It can be argued that existential threats to modern nation states are a thing of the past.
10. That's been said a few times in recent history and holds true until the next major threat rears its ugly head.
11. If I were Polish, I would be concerned about NATO. And depressed.
12. My thoughts are not particularly PC in that they could hurt the feelings of our allies. Sorry, guys. I assure you that they reflect the opinions of our active duty military.
V/R JWest
Your a true internet warrior
Your a true internet warrior JWest.
The capabilities gap in NATO
The capabilities gap in NATO is neither new nor a big problem.
1. The U.S. has historically accounted for between two thirds and three quarters of defense spending the capability within the Alliance, from 1949 right up to the present. This is a persistent state of affairs. Observations about the capabilities gap in Libya or Afghanistan exemplify continuity rather than change for NATO. This is not a new issue.
2. Exum is right to say that Germany and other wealthy European NATO members could spend more on defense but choose not to. Presumably NATO members do not spend more because they do not feel that there is a sufficient threat to justify more spending. Even Poland, referenced in the article as remaining concerned about Russia, decreased defense spending from 1.92 to 1.77% of GDP between 2008-2010. (The U.S., by contrast, increased spending from 4.31 to 4.77% over the same period [IISS Military Balance 2012].)
3. Too much comentary on NATO stresses military capabilities while ignoring NATO's political value. The U.S. has always provided the bulk of the military muscle in NATO. The chief reason why NATO is thought of as one of the 'most successful Alliances in history' is not because there's been an equitable distribution of military resources, but because the Alliance kept so many countries around the same table for so long. More articles in the North Atlantic Treaty deal with political consultation than with territorial integrity. NATO is the main institutional link between North America and Europe, and the most developed institution for coordinating any cooperative security effort.
4. NATO is a forum around which all kinds of mutually reinforcing projects can contribute to shared transatlantic values and inclinations to cooperation. Consider, for example, that in the lead-up to NATO's Chicago Summit, initiatives like the Atlantic Council's Young Atlanticist Working Group are bringing together people mostly from outside the Alliance's formal organization into a discussion about its future. These kinds of activities are low-cost, but high-payoff in terms of relationships and habits formed, and contribute to the liklihood that NATO will continue to be the forum in which European and North American security interests are discussed.
I'm doing research on US
I'm doing research on US policy towards NATO, I was just wondering if anyone knew any potential policy changes that have been/are being discussed.
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