Even the European members of NATO say that they must do more to defend themselves as the war in Ukraine grinds on and the United States shifts its priorities to Asia and a rising China.
The possibility that former President Donald J. Trump will return to the White House heightens the concern, given his repeated threat to withdraw collective defense from countries that don’t pay their way in the alliance.
In fact, European member states have made considerable progress in the last few years to restore more credibility to deterrence against Russia. But they began from a low base, having cut military spending sharply after the collapse of the Soviet Union and reacting with complacency to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
There is a lot more that the Europeans should do to become less dependent on the United States, NATO officials and analysts said this week during the alliance summit in Washington. That includes committing more money to defense, building up arms manufacturing and coordinating the purchase of weapons systems that could replace those now provided solely by the Americans.
With President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia busy with Ukraine and his military degraded by the fierce fighting there, European and NATO officials believe there is a window of perhaps three to seven years before Mr. Putin might be tempted to test the NATO alliance. But will Europe use that window to rearm?
Here are four of the key gaps that the Europeans should fill if they are serious about reducing their dependency on the United States for their own defense.
Money
Nothing happens without money.
Ten years after NATO members pledged to spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on the military, two-thirds will do so by year’s end. But a third will not.
And while the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, insists that 2 percent “is a floor, not a ceiling,” a lot of planks are still missing, including Spain and Italy. The most important European allies, like Britain, France and Germany, have not firmly committed to spending at least 2 percent or more long term, while 2.5 percent or even 3 percent is what European defense really needs.
The main issue about military spending is sustainability, said Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary general. “It’s a decade-long endeavor to restore European defense,” he said. “The Europeans have done better, but there are still a lot of question marks,” including what will happen to budgets in Britain and France, as major political changes take place in the two countries. Britain’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer, arrived at the summit saying that Britain would reach 2.5 percent, but he did not say when.
Troop Numbers
European militaries shrank after the Cold War, with many nations possessing what NATO officials call “bonsai armies.” About 100,000 American troops are now in Europe, an increase after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but that number will inevitably fall, whether Mr. Trump becomes president or not.
“European armies are too small to handle even the arms that they’ve got now,” said Jim Townsend, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense now at the Center for a New American Security.
“The British and the Danes, to pick two examples, are good militaries, but they would not be able to sustain intense combat for more than a couple of weeks,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how good you are if there aren’t enough of you.”
The British Army is at its smallest since Waterloo; the German Army has been something of a joke since the Soviet Union died. Though it is making efforts to rebuild under Boris Pistorius, the defense minister, it needs 20,000 more soldiers to reach minimum readiness, and his request for a $7.25 billion increase in the 2025 defense budget was reduced to $1.3 billion. He said it did not match what “the threat situation” required.
The problem is not just the numbers in uniform, but also the imbalance between combat troops and the “back offices” of European militaries, leading to a shortage of soldiers skilled in high-tech warfare. Military salaries are comparatively low; retention of skilled soldiers is difficult; and most armies, when they cut back after the Cold War, did so in areas of so-called combat service support, including intelligence officers, medical personnel and mechanics.
“You don’t see them on parade, but you can’t fight a real war without them,” Mr. Townsend said.
NATO’s new force model, which its members agreed on two years ago, aims to make more than 300,000 troops available to respond to any contingency within 30 days (and over 100,000 in up to 10 days) to immediately reinforce the alliance’s eastern flank in the event of a crisis. But NATO officials concede that the alliance is currently considerably short of that number.
The Strategic Enablers
For Europe to defend itself with less help from America, it must fill some pretty big and expensive holes that the Pentagon now handles for NATO, said Mr. Grand, who wrote a detailed report about the problem for the European Council on Foreign Relations.
The main dependencies are what are called “strategic enablers.” They include integrated air and missile defense, long-range precision artillery and missiles, air-to-air refueling tankers, transport aircraft both for troops and for heavy equipment like tanks, airborne surveillance aircraft, sophisticated drones and intelligence satellites.
According to a study by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, European forces also have significant gaps in naval forces and ammunition, evident in their inability to supply Ukraine with basic artillery shells in the numbers needed. Fundamental elements like the number of combat battalions, in-service battle tanks, self-propelled artillery and infantry fighting vehicles have remained static or fallen since 2014, despite Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Given the deficiencies, “any major combat operation in Europe would rely on U.S. forces to make up for European shortfalls in the land, maritime and air forces required,” said a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, titled “Is NATO Ready for War?” Turning increases in spending into combat capabilities remains “an important challenge,” the center said.
NATO is ready for war, the study concluded, if it is a short one. “But the question remains whether it is ready to fight — and thereby deter — a protracted war,” the center said.
The Ukraine war has also put in sharp contrast the post-Cold War decline in Europe’s defense industry — its inability to produce enough ammunition, tanks, artillery, missiles, air defenses and sophisticated drones. While progress has been made in the past two years, and more money invested, there is a long lag between orders and delivery. And global demand for some key weapons systems is several times the existing supply.
Ukraine has not only vividly shown that weapons stockpiles “have been too small, and that the production capacity has been delinquent, but it has also demonstrated serious gaps in our interoperability,” Mr. Stoltenberg said at the summit this week. “There is no way to provide a strong defense without a strong defense industry.”
That requires better coordination between NATO and the European Union, to ensure that there is less duplication, less squabbling by countries for contracts and more interoperability.
Europeans are also overly dependent on American military production, with some 63 percent of European military purchases going to companies outside the European Union, mostly American, Mr. Grand said. “That is not the best way to create domestic European support for more military spending,” he said.
The Nuclear Umbrella
In many ways, this is the most sensitive issue. NATO, a nuclear alliance, relies on the American nuclear umbrella as the ultimate deterrent against a Russian attack. No one is suggesting that Washington intends to fold up the umbrella, but doubts inevitably arise about the willingness to use nuclear weapons to defend Europe and in what circumstances.
President Emmanuel Macron of France has said that his country’s interests have “a European dimension.” But French nuclear doctrine is strictly national, and France currently plays no part in NATO’s nuclear plans. Would France be willing to put nuclear assets outside France?
Similarly with Britain, which possesses only a submarine-based nuclear deterrent and is having trouble financing its modernization.
And then there would be serious questions for nonnuclear allies: Would they be willing to host nuclear facilities, or fly nuclear weapons on their planes or invest in more missile defense? Should there be some sort of “Eurobomb,” and who would control it?
“Let’s at least take this debate seriously,” Mr. Grand said. “Let’s talk about what France and Britain are willing to do.”
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