Europe Begins to Rethink Cuts to Military Spending

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/27/world/europe/europe-begins-to-rethink-cuts.html

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LONDON — President Obama spent Wednesday in Brussels talking up the importance of the security relationship between Europe and the United States, but it is considered unlikely that Russia’s seizure of Crimea will prompt increased European military spending at a time of economic anemia and budget cuts.

NATO and the European Union regard the Russian move in Ukraine as a wake-up call, a reminder that hard power can easily trump 21st-century assumptions about Europe as a sphere of trade, international law and cooperation.

Despite the newly militant tone, NATO members will continue to spend paltry amounts on defense, experts say. But there is likely to be a slowdown in cuts and a renewed debate on how that money is spent. That debate has already started in Britain.

Richard Dannatt, the former chief of staff of the British armed forces, made a public plea this week that the British government should reverse its plans to reduce regular army troops to their lowest number since the Battle of Waterloo, to roughly 82,000 by 2018, and to withdraw all its 20,000 troops stationed in Germany. Mr. Dannatt said that Britain should keep 3,000 troops in Germany as a “statement that greater military capability must underpin our diplomacy.”

Mr. Dannatt said that “with a resurgent Russia, this is a poor moment for the U.S.-led West to be weak in resolve and muscle.” Diplomacy and sanctions may be the right response for now, he said, but President Vladimir V. Putin “will look beyond those things to see where the real check on his actions might come from.”

Even the Obama administration announced plans in February to reduce the United States Army to its smallest force since 1940, citing budget constraints and a changed global environment.

But on Sunday, the American commander of NATO forces in Europe, Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, told a German Marshall Fund conference in Brussels that the alliance must reconsider the positioning and readiness of its forces because of Russian threats to Ukraine and Moldova. “Russia is acting much more like an adversary than a partner,” he said.

NATO has refrained from deploying substantial numbers of troops in member states bordering Russia — “a unilateral promise made to Moscow in 1997, when Russia was behaving more cooperatively,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a former American ambassador to NATO. He urged “sound plans, forward deployment of real capabilities and demonstrable will.”

And the NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said Russia’s moves were a “game-changer” for the alliance. “We live in a different world than we did less than a month ago,” he said. “I am the first to stress that Europe must do more.”

NATO has agreed that member countries should spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense and should cooperate more to reduce expensive overlaps. But the economic crisis has hit Europe hard, making budget cuts necessary and military budgets among the easiest areas to cut politically.

Last year, only a handful of NATO countries met the target, according to NATO figures, including the United States, at 4.1 percent, and Britain, at 2.4 percent. Estonia was at 2 percent, and debt-saddled Greece still spent 2.3 percent. France was at 1.9 percent and Turkey and Poland were at 1.8 percent, while Italy spent just 1.2 percent of its G.D.P.

Spain and Hungary, along with the apparently vulnerable Baltic countries Latvia and Lithuania, were spending less than 1 percent. Even Germany, which is relatively wealthy, was spending only 1.3 percent. Over all, European members of NATO were at 1.6 percent.

Despite the rhetoric, Crimea “won’t make much difference for defense spending, but it might make a difference in how spending is allocated,” said Xenia Dormandy, a former American diplomat at Chatham House, a research institute in London. “It’s still very difficult for governments to sell the idea that social spending on health and education is less important than defense, especially in Western Europe.”

Given that roughly half of military spending goes to personnel, she said, “even with Ukraine there is a feeling that we have too many people.” The problem in Europe, as in the United States, she said, is less the amount of money available than the political difficulties involved in deciding how to spend it.

In Europe, too, Ms. Dormandy said, there are domestic demands for military spending in local constituencies, as opposed to troop deployments abroad.

Jonathan Eyal, director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute, said that an irredentist Russia meant that “defense is coming home — we’re back to more emphasis on land forces and equipment in Europe and territorial defense, stuff that defense planners had thought were unfashionable.”

Debates in NATO, which has a summit meeting in Wales scheduled for September, will no longer emphasize “how do we send troops around the world to do good, stabilize countries and fight pirates,” Mr. Eyal said. “Subjects like tanks and soldiers will be back to the fore, and more troops will be available for training and stationing in Eastern Europe and fewer for deployments farther abroad.”

But Mr. Eyal thought there would be changes. The members of NATO nearest Russia have let military spending slip. “If we’re there to defend them, they should put their money where their mouths are,” he said. With Estonia the exception, Romania, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and the other Baltic States “should lead by example” and increase their military spending, he said.

Other NATO members are likely to at least freeze their military budgets. “It would be astonishing for a government to cut defense expenditure in the current situation,” Mr. Eyal said.

Nick Witney, a former chief executive of the European Defense Agency, said, “The answer is not to worry about spending more, but to spend it more wisely and stop wasting so many defense resources on duplicative and incompatible programs.”

Mr. Witney, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that allied statements about cooperation on naval operations and drones would be more impressive were they not so similar to pledges made a decade ago. “The issue is whether they mean it any more than they did,” he said.

John Baron, a former army officer and a Conservative member of the British Parliament, said that for Britain and NATO, operations in Iraq and Afghanistan had distracted officials from growing threats from Russia and China. “The Chinese and Russians are reaching the point where they can deploy forces in a very professional manner, while we are cutting and cutting again,” he said. “We are forgetting the age-old adage that there is no substitute for boots on the ground.”

This month, a British parliamentary committee criticized the government’s planned military cuts, saying that they had been “designed to fit a financial envelope.” After cuts to the regular army, it was unlikely that Britain could recruit 30,000 reservists, the committee said, potentially leaving the army “short of personnel in key supporting capabilities.”

A former United States defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, caused a fuss in January when he warned that the cuts would harm Britain’s “ability to be a full partner” for Washington. The British government responded acerbically at the time, saying that as the eighth-largest economy in the world, Britain had the fourth-largest military budget.

But that argument disguises the expense of modernizing and retaining Britain’s nuclear deterrent. Some senior American officials have criticized Britain for hollowing out its conventional forces, especially its ground troops and its navy, in order to maintain a nuclear deterrent that the country may not need. British officials have responded that they can afford both.