Stardate 20020525.1355

(Captain's log): I've known Andrew for years. He lives in Berlin. I'm glad he doesn't let our political differences stand in the way of our friendship. He writes to me as follows:

I was thinking about how much countries spend for their military and your comment that the UK spends enough while France and Germany should spend more, so I looked it up (CIA World Factbook 1995, exchange rate conversion).

Germany: $40 billion, 1.8% of GNP
United Kingdom: $35.1 billion, 3.1% of GDP
France: $47.1 billion, 3.1% of GDP
Italy: $21.5 billion, 2% of GDP
Spain: $8 billion, 1.6% of GDP
USA: $284.4 billion, 4.2% of GDP

It seems to me that Germany could spend more, but since Germany doesn't have remote islands to defend and has no nuclear weapons program, 1.8% seem quite fair to me. France and the UK spend about the same amount (% of GDP). The US spend much more, about twice as much as the European Union in total, but then the US have interests all over the world (like the UK) and it also looks like one big military force is always needed to keep trade going (the British Empire kept it going in the 19th century, now the US do; and the US do have advantages because of their military presence everywhere, I don't think it's coincidence that all the large oil companies are either American or British).

Why would Germany need to spend more than 1.8% of its GNP? Germany already spends more than the UK.

I wrote a response that I was going to mail him, but I decided to post it instead.

I base my judgment about "enough" not on absolute money spent, or on percent of GDP, but on the basis of actual military capability which the nation has. If they can get adequate military capability for cheap, that's fine by me. If they spend vast amounts of money and don't, then either they need to spend more or spend it better.

I consider the British to be spending a reasonable amount of money because they have an outstanding Navy, a very good Air Force, among the best ground forces in the world and, most important of all, the ability to project at least some force abroad if necessary. I wish they had more of everything, but I understand the limits under which they operate. The UK is spending a lot of money and they're spending it well.

The situation with Germany specifically is complicated because of memories of previous German aggression and the German constitutional limitation on operating outside its own borders. But when you say "Why would Germany need to spend more?" I have to ask why it is that the US needs to keep two divisions in Germany? (And a not inconsiderable Air Force presence?) Doesn't this suggest a deficit in Germany's own military?

The biggest problem is that by American standards, most of the equipment in use in Germany and France is obsolescent. The military forces in Germany and France and Italy and Spain -- and even in the UK -- are badly in need of several years of massive capital expenditures to upgrade or replace old equipment. You guys aren't equipped to fight an information-age war.

That's one of the things that Lord Robertson has been saying to the Europeans: it's nearly reached the point where American and European forces can't fight side-by-side any longer. Our equipment is much more advanced, and we have changed our tactics to take advantage of that. You don't have the ability to use our tactics, and we don't want to fight using yours.

For one thing, the Europeans are badly in need of replacing nearly all communications equipment, switching from narrow-band FM to digital spread-spectrum. But that's not all.

Do you know about JSTARS? It was first used in the Gulf War. It's like AWACS except that it can also track ground operations. An American general has the ability to monitor and move his forces on a nation-size theater directly, and to provide unprecedented coordination of combined-arms attacks against enemy strong points. It all depends on modern communication, which has to be unjammable and impossible to intercept. Ours is. Yours isn't.

All our troops are equipped to fight at night. Indeed, we're so good at it that it is our preferred mode, because our enemies are not. All our aircraft have night vision and FLIR; all our tanks and IFVs are similarly equipped.

Some of your stuff is moderately equipped for night action. Not enough of it is, however.

Another problem is precision guided munitions. We have the ability to drop bombs from 7 kilometers up and control where they'll hit with a CEP of 30 meters. That means that high level bombing can now become a tactical battlefield weapon. A squad being attacked by a mortar can call in an airstrike from an orbiting high level bomber to take it out. With laser-guided munitions, accuracy is even better.

Your air forces don't have that ability. It isn't just a matter of attaching JDAM systems to iron bombs; the jets themselves have to carry a huge avionics load (things like LANTIRN for low-level work, and other kinds of avionics for high level bombers) to make it work. Ours have got it. Yours don't. And we can't just refit your jets with this stuff at the last moment; it takes a long time for the pilots to learn how to use it. (And anyway, who'd pay for it?)

That whole discussion is academic anyway: you don't have any high level heavy bombers.

When I say "yours" I mean Germany/France/Italy/Spain et. al. (Maybe I should spell it "yEUr"?) As mentioned, Germany's situation is unique, since in theory Germany is never supposed to actually fight outside its own borders.

Forgetting quantity and dealing only with quality, what we come to is this: some of your equipment is equal to ours. Most of it is a bit worse. A lot of it is horribly out of date. Enough of it is in the latter two categories so that we're rapidly reaching the point where we may not be able to fight alongside you even if we wanted to (or vice versa).

And it's only going to get worse, when we deploy Land Warrior.

But yeur biggest deficit, and the most fatal one of all, is insufficient cargo airlift and sealift, including aerial refueling tankers. Even if yeu were willing to fight alongside us in Iraq or some similar theater, we'd have to supply yeur troops because yeu don't have the ability to do so. And we'd have to provide nearly all the air power.

A simplistic look at money expended doesn't indicate anything. You have to evaluate capabilities. By American standards, Europe's military is crippled. It is capable of defending European territory moderately well with American help, but not capable of operating anywhere else at all. Look how much trouble European forces have had operating in Yugoslavia. That's right next door.

When this has come up before, the usual response has been that "we don't want to fight in American overseas wars." Fair enough. Don't. But what about fighting to defend NATO territory? You've already agreed to that.

Suppose that Turkey was attacked by Syria or Iraq. Western European forces would be expected to deploy to defend Turkish territory. But aside from the US and UK, which NATO countries actually would have the ability to deploy substantial ground forces in Turkey and keep them supplied?

There seems to be enthusiasm now for massively expanding NATO, possibly including Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine. Do the Western European nations actually have the ability to move forces into those theaters to fulfill treaty obligations there? Could the French put a division into Kiev and keep it supplied?

No way. And that is the problem: the underspending European nations are making promises they cannot keep. What they're really promising, when they let new members into NATO, is that the US will defend the new nations. That's because we're the only ones who are militarily capable of doing so. We can put a division into Kiev and keep it supplied. And it would be a hell of a good division, too.

Yeu don't have the ability to defend California or British Columbia, either.

Yeu're faced with a stark choice: massively upgrade your military capability to bring the quality up to our standards, or accept that your military is second rate and no longer capable of operating with ours even with the best of intentions by all involved. At the rate things are going, in fifteen years European forces would be about as able to operate on a battlefield with us as Greek hoplites.

And in the mean time, stop making promises that only we Americans can fulfill.