Europe Needs To Assume It's On Its Own And Plan Accordingly

Yet the deeper problem is not one of American pressure but of American disruption.

During all its long and successful life, NATO has been based on shared long-term planning, shared work to ensure that members' forces can operate easily together, and a shared system of command-and-control.

The United States has sought to direct all those three aspects, partly because it has the largest and most technologically advanced armed forces, but mainly because it is the most powerful country in the world and does not feel it needs to follow anyone else's lead.

European NATO members lack some important military capabilities, including in satellite communications, missile defense and heavy-lift transport, not simply because they have spent too little money on defense but because America chose to provide those capabilities itself.

Abrupt changes of policy in Washington, such as last week's announcement that a planned deployment of long-range Tomahawk missiles to Germany was being canceled, make a nonsense of supposedly shared planning and raise doubts about the reliability of other capabilities provided by the United States.

NATO's secretary-general, the former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, likes to shake up the organization's European members by warning them not to fantasize about operating without the Americans: Their annual defense budgets will have to increase not just to 5% of GDP, as is now planned, but to 10%, he says, if Europe is to replace what America currently provides.

No one, except perhaps the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, would be willing or able to make the sacrifices necessary in other public spending to make budgets of 10% of GDP affordable.

Yet Europe would not really need to spend 10% of its GDP on defense to be able to defend itself without American help, at least not in the foreseeable future.

The European members of NATO, which include the United Kingdom and Norway, face just one serious military threat, namely Russia. And Ukraine, which is not a member of NATO, has shown during its four years of war how Russia can be resisted.

In early June the length of Russia's war in Ukraine, which Vladimir Putin claimed was“a special military operation” that would last just three or four days, will have surpassed the 1,569 days of the First World War from 1914-18.

Europe's military forces are already more capable than Ukraine's military was in February 2022. What they lack is the three aspects that NATO has provided: shared planning, full inter-operability and shared command-and-control.

But they have an embryonic organization that could provide those key ingredients: the Joint Expeditionary Force, which was set up independently of NATO in 2014 by the United Kingdom, the three Baltic States, the Netherlands and five Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden), in anticipation of a growing Russian threat to northern Europe.

At present, the Joint Expeditionary Force is a rather hollow, empty organization, albeit one with a command headquarters in the UK. But it could become more real quite quickly, especially if it were to start holding regular military exercises and if this operational structure could be tied together with new entities geared to the joint funding of defense procurement, notably the “SAFE” fund (Security Action for Europe ) being set up by the European Commission.

The most important way to transform the Joint Expeditionary Force from theory into reality would be to widen its membership to include Europe's most successful military, Ukraine, as well as its two biggest militaries, in Germany and Poland.

A danger with defense planning is that a beautiful long-term program of defense procurement and reorganization can become disconnected from immediate and real threats.