He went on --We have the spectacle of an air operations centre designed to handle more than 300 sorties a day struggling to launch about 150. Further-more, the mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country -- yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the U.S., once more, to make up the difference."
The notion of costs and contributions, highlighted by the European failure in Kosovo to match its budgets with its ambitions, is the root of the current problem. Europe, despite its elaborate plans for a European Defence Force, has refused or been unable to pay for the maintenance of a supra-national military. Defence spending has dropped from an already low level by around 15% in the last ten years. This general statement masks the fact that the biggest cuts have been in the provision of transport aircraft, leaving most transport of military personnel to be done by the US. Left on their own, the Europeans would have to walk, paddle or catch cabs to the frontline.
This is not to say that the Europeans, especially those in the Common Market/EU didn't make arrangements for a European Force. In the early 1950s, France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries made an attempt to integrate the militaries of mainland Western Europe, through the treaty establishing the European Defence Community (EDC). This scheme was vetoed by the French Gaullists and the French Communist Party. The Europeans tried again in 1954, with an amendment to the Treaty of Brussels. They succeeded in replacing the failed EDC by the political Western European Union (WEU) out of the earlier established military Western Union Defence Organization. Out of the 27 EU member states, 21 were also members of NATO. In 1996, the Western European Union (WEU) agreed to create and implement a European Security and Defence Identity within NATO. After the passage of the Lisbon Treaty these functions were passed to the EU.
On 20 February 2009, the European Parliament voted in favor of the creation of Synchronized Armed Forces Europe (SAFE), directed by an EU directorate, with its own training standards and operational doctrine. The EU is pushing for a unified European Defence Force, notionally within NATO but separate in terms of action. That is a polite way of saying the Europeans want an autonomous defence force but that the US should contribute two-thirds of the cost. In fact, the US is now paying 74% of these costs.
The US operates over a thousand military bases around the world at a cost, not including Iraq and Afghanistan, over $102 billion a year. The US has 227 bases in Germany alone which cost a great deal to maintain - money paid largely to the German hosts. These include Army, Air Force and Marine bases and the AFRICOM Headquarters in Stuttgart.
Until very recently. there has been only a decline in European self-defence capabilities. In a recent study (February 2016) "Alliance at Risk: Strengthening European Defense in an Age of Turbulence and Competition" a detailed study of the European failings and shortfalls were highlighted. [ii] Europe's leading armed forces are so hollowed out they are incapable of conducting major rapid-response operations. The US spends 3.6 per cent of its economic output on defence; Germany spends a pitiful 1.2 per cent. And what little Germany does have tends not to work. When Angela Merkel made the grand gesture of sending weapons to Kurdish rebels fighting ISIL, her cargo planes couldn't get off the ground. At the time, the German military confessed that just half of its Transall transport aircraft were fit to fly. Of its 190 helicopters, just 41 were ready to be deployed. Of its 406 Marder tanks, 280 were out of use. [iii] Last year it emerged that fewer than half of Germany's 66 Tornado aircraft were airworthy
Not only is the budget below German's security needs, it is being spent primarily on personnel, not equipment or repairs. This has resulted in an army that can only fight for 41 hours a week and not on the weekend. German soldiers taking part in a four-week NATO exercise in Norway earlier this year had to leave after just twelve days because they had gone over their overtime limits. However, the troops are comfortable. The German Defence Minister, Ursula von der Leyen, has used the military budget to introduce creches for children on the bases, along with flat-screen TVs. Postings are limited to match school term dates.
She has been accused of prioritizing the wrong issues at a time when the military is facing equipment shortages that have seen soldiers training with broomsticks instead of guns. Under the latest reforms, in force since January, the military working week has been reduced to 41 hours and troops can no longer be paid for working overtime. Instead they must be compensated with alternate time off. The new rules forced training camps to close at 4.30pm and left soldiers stranded on base. [iv]
[This is not a new phenomenon for European armies. In 1969, while visiting the national union center in Holland, I met the leaders of the Dutch Army trade union. They were about to go on strike to secure hairnets for soldiers who didn't want to spend their free weekends with Army-cut short hair].
The French military has overrun its military budget on numerous occasions, although it has many troops stationed in Africa, maintaining African despots in power. It's budget, too is well below the NATO limit of 2%. Even when it does make investments in equip-ment, the process has, at times, been an elaborate charade. The best example, perhaps, is the pride of the French Navy, the nuclear aircraft carrier Charles DeGaulle.
During its construction, the ship ran into huge cost overruns. Work on it was stopped four times. By the time it was completed, the rules for radiation shielding had changed and it had to be retrofitted with radiation shielding to protect the crew. Moreover, the ship's flight deck had to be extended by about fourteen feet to accommodate the Hawkeye as the type of plane the carrier would carry had changed over the long time of construction. The propulsion system was even worse. When it went to sea it vibrated so heavily that the propellers snapped.
When they went to repair it they found that the blueprints for the propellers had been lost in a fire, which meant that the ship had to be refitted with hand-me down screws from the Foch and Clemenceau. That cut her speed down from twenty-seven knots to about twenty-four knots--which was unfortunate since she is already considerably slower than her predeces-sors which steamed at thirty-two knots. She went for a refit in 2007. In 2010 when she set out for the Medi-terranean, it took only one day out of port for there to be an electrical fault and tugboats had to put her in position. She is now mainly functional. [v]
The list of European military frailties is long and serious. However, it's not only a matter of budget, it's also the value of what is being bought with the budget. The nature of modern warfare is much more sophisti-cated than tin soldiers with guns arrayed on a battlefield shooting at each other. In the last decade, there have been significant developments in military technology which have revolutionized the military capabilities of and the manner in which developed nations conduct their military affairs. The very nature of military warfare has changed and there are a dwindling number of states with the capability of conducting modern warfare. The sophistication of the weapon systems brought into service has been so dramatic that very few nations have access to the last two or three generations and have shown neither the will, the cash nor the wit to produce their own.
With the massive expansion of the U.S. military budget substantial investments improved weapons and their delivery systems; both in terms of their lethality and the sophistication of their command and control systems. An important result has been the ability of these systems to reduce the dangers to the armed forces engaged in pursuing their military assignments while also augmenting their battlefield lethality. The future of high-tech military involvements will see a falling away of the hands-on human component and a switch towards battlefield robots and remotely con-trolled weapons systems using network-centric sys-tems.
Humans on the ground, in the air or on the sea with guns in their hands are gradually becoming a Third World business. Modern warfare is increasingly being conducted by machines or devices on the battlefields, in the air, beneath the waves and in space. This roboti-sation of military capability has reduced the need for people killers on the ground, but has generated a growing need for engineers, technicians, mechanics and cyber specialists, often operating far from the sphere of conflict. Increasingly warfare involves air and sea drones of increasing sophistication, electro-magnetic pulse weapons, targeted laser heat rays, cyber warfare with killer viruses and a growing ability to use satellites for military purposes, sustained by an exponential growth in the military utilisation of solar power.
This new technology has created a need for developing secure defensive cyber-control programs to protect the security of the command and control systems, integrated with sophisticated electronic weapons of war. Being able to protect the cyber communications and to secure command and control networks from external penetration is now one of the most crucial aspects of modern military operations.
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