CIAO DATE: 02/02

US Perceptions of NATO Deployments Beyond Europe and of European Capabilities

Stuart Johnson 
Senior Scientist, RAND Corporation, Washington, D.C.

GCSP-RAND Workshop Papers: "NATO's New Strategic Concept and Peripheral Contingencies: The Middle East"
Geneva, July 15-16, 1999

The Geneva Centre for Security Policy

The United States and its NATO allies have engaged in two high intensity conflicts in this decade, Desert Storm in the Gulf and Operation Allied Force in Yugoslavia. Both campaigns were characterized by a strong, and successful, effort to maintain broad coalition participation and cohesion. But the story is more complex than the press releases from NATO Headquarters, Washington, and other NATO capitals would have us believe. Both operations revealed differences in US and European allies' capabilities and styles of prosecuting warfare. These forced the commanders to adopt an ad-hoc, inefficient division of labor in what, to the public, was presented as a seamless coalition operation.

The drawbacks of forming too large a coalition are not new. In the 5th Century BC, Herodotus describes the grand coalition that Xerxes assembled to invade Greece. He notes that the different nations in Xerxes army had different weaponry, different armor, different styles of fighting and, worst of all, different motivations for being on the battlefield. In fact, Herodotus comes close to ascribing Xerxes' defeat in at least one key battle to the incoherence of the Persian attack that more than neutralized the immense numerical advantage his army had over the Greeks.

Without pushing the analogy too far, there is a strain of thinking among US military planners that resonates with Herodotus. These military planners regard, with some pride, the considerable advances that the US military has made in

• incorporating modern technologies, especially information technologies, into its forces
• developing the operational doctrine to exploit the advantages technology provides on the battlefield
• identifying, recruiting, training, and retaining personnel with the mix of technical skills needed to prosecute a campaign that includes a sophisticated application of technology.

From this starting point there is a great temptation to draw the wrong conclusion: "We (the US military) are pressing ahead with more effective and more efficient ways to fight. If the allies want to keep up with us, fine. If not, we're not going to slow down for them and we'll just go it alone."

Needless to say, this is not the policy of the US government. Senior civilian leaders, and senior military commanders recognize that in any conflict far from US shores, the political imperatives for operating in a coalition will overwhelm concerns of battlefield efficiency. This has led the US leadership to press its NATO allies to adopt a military strategy that focuses on Western interests beyond NATO's borders and to enhance its capabilities to project military power accordingly.

First the basics: the US spends $270 billion on defense while NATO Europe spends $160 billion. This represents 3% of US GDP and 2.% of European GDP spent on defense respectively. The U.S. fields 1.5 million troops while NATO Europe fields 2.2 million.

This represents a considerable reservoir of military potential. But it is only a small part of the story and not a very revealing part at that. Defense spending and manpower totals are input measures and, by themselves, say little about the military capabilities that the US on the one hand and the European allies on the other hand can field. The more pressing question is: "Do these forces have the capability to execute the missions required to defend critical Western interests?"

In this paper, the primary focus will be the ability of the European members of NATO to project power to the Gulf region to protect the supply of oil should that be necessary again. Are they adequately equipped for these missions? Are they configured appropriately for these missions?

The view from Washington is, to generalize a bit, no. Washington perceives that the great bulk of defense capacity among the continental European allies is still focused on defending borders that no one is threatening. As a result, much of the allied investment in defense is viewed as wasted or, at best, misplaced. It is precisely this mismatch of capabilities to mission that led the US to press for a strong focus on "peripheral contingencies" in the new Strategic Concept that was adopted at the recent Washington Summit. The language is quite specific in citing the importance of adequate mobility, deployable logistics support and the ability to command and control forces far from home territory.

There was a sub-theme as well that motivated the US to push for the adoption of the corollary Defense Capabilities Initiative. As the U.S. military experiments, reorganizes and re-equips to take advantage of rapid advances in technology (especially information technologies), a concern has spread among US senior leadership that our European allies will very soon be unable to keep up. Without a separate initiative to target this growing gap, the US feared that well-integrated coalition operations would soon be impossible. The Defense Capabilities Initiative is targeted squarely on this problem.

With this background, how do we perceive the ability of our European force structure?

• How adequate are the allied plans and programs that are in place?
• Are they targeted on the right challenges?
• Are they well-funded?

I will take the remaining time to give a view that, broadly speaking, represents the current tenor of discourse in Washington following the summit.

I will address these questions in three parts:

1. The emerging military strategy of European NATO countries.
2. The present capabilities of European forces to deploy to the Gulf and sustain a military operation there.
3. An emerging shift in Washington's view of ESDI.

Military Strategy

NATO's new strategic concept and its accompanying Defense Capabilities Initiative puts a country's ability to project power front and center. It calls for a shift of focus away from defense of territory that doesn't need defending to developing capabilities to protect NATO's interests on the periphery of Europe and beyond.

The U.S. military, beginning with the end of World War II, always had an element of this strategy. But it was the OPEC oil shock of the early 70's that shifted US planning focus steadily away from defense of the West Germany. The ability to deploy sizeable ground, air, and naval forces promptly to an area, the Gulf, where we did not already have large standing forces in place and a robust network of bases and local infrastructure to receive us became the new focus of planning and programming.

A new command was established, the Rapid deployment Joint Task Force, and the commensurate doctrine was developed. By the 1980's we were investing as a priority in power projection forces focused on the defense of important interests in the Gulf. We see our allies, 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, making the same shift. For all intents and purposes, the UK and FR now base their military strategy solidly on power projection.

Italy's new defense plan takes a giant step in this direction. The NL began earlier. By 1994, its defense program began to give priority attention to its airmobile brigade that is kept in a high state of readiness, elements of which can deploy promptly.

Germany is largely out of step with this trend although this is a debate waiting to happen. Defense experts in Germany recognize that their current force structure is an anachronism appropriate to a security environment that disappeared a decade ago and that planning has to include a broader set of military missions.

In sum, a broad confluence of military strategy, i.e.- a focus on the ability to project power, appears to be developing. But the best strategy is only as good as its implementation and here is where the Washington feels improvement is needed. It is not that the forces are lacking, it is the means to deploy forces promptly and sustain them far from the countries' boundaries for an extended period of time.

I assess below critical "enabling" capabilities of European members of NATO to contribute to defending NATO's interests in the Gulf. A number of European countries have "classified" certain units as "rapid reaction", "crisis reaction", or "immediate reaction". If we total up the units in these classifications, we have over three corps-equivalents of NATO ground forces. But some key enablers are missing and they are examined below.

Professionalization: European members of NATO are gradually abandoning conscription and replacing it with a fully professional, volunteer armed force. This is critical, since extended deployments can only be supported by a sizeable cadre of professional soldiers. This problem has already been solved by the UK and the Netherlands to name two, France, Italy, and Spain are on the way, and Germany may not be too many years behind.

Lift: This requirement seems obvious but it is not getting the progammatic and budgetary attention it needs. Most attention gets focused on airlift, but prompt accessibility to sealift is equally important, in fact it is more important if the deployment is to the Gulf. A great deal of capability can be purchased at a modest price. European defense officials usually respond by pointing out that sealift is abundant in the commercial secotr and it is cheaper to have stand-by lease agreements than to own sealift. Point granted. That said, the key word is prompt access to sealift and there is no substitute for a robust core of ships dedicated to moving sizeable stocks of military equipment within the opening days of deployment.

Support: Units organized to support in—place combat forces organized for territorial defense are badly configured to support projected forces. France has begun to re-organize its support forces to provide the flexibility to tailor a support package according to the mission at hand. GE has made only embryonic changes. The UK has a good program on the books but it faces programmatic challenges. For example, the support forces in the UK plan require an increased allocation of some 3000 troops. It doesn't sound like much, but as overall forces levels are being cut, no expansion is easy. In fact there is an irony in this requirement.

In the 1970s the US leadership pressed its NATO allies and its own military leaders to adapt a greater tooth-to-tail, combat to support, ratio. Power projection requires a shift back in the opposite direction.

To summarize there is no lack of combat forces assigned to NATO's ARRC. But at best, less than 40% can actually deploy and, taking away the US contribution it is more like 25%. Consider only those forces that can be adequately supported out of area over a period of months and total is half that.

Air Force Equipment and Training: NATO forces still tend to put the primary accent on air defense aircraft. This is a hangover from the days when, at the opening bell, we anticipated a swarm of Warsaw Pact aircraft coming over the horizon delivering crippling attacks on NATO's rear area. No such problem faces us today. No conceivable enemy has an air force worth its name. Yet, NATO air forces tend to keep their air defense squadrons in the highest state of readiness and give priority to air to air training. Moreover, in planning for the next generation of aircraft, the tendency is to optimize the airframe for air-to-air combat to the detriment of air-to-ground attack payloads. It is precisely the latter category that the allied commander needed in Desert Storm and more recently in Operation Allied Force.

Munitions: There are three problems here:

1. European forces slight munitions in favor major equipment items.

2. Allied air forces are planning for the wrong kind of combat. They have about eight air-to-air missiles for every air to surface missile (far too few for the kind of combat alliance forces have been experiencing).
   
3. Allies still have large stocks of freefall bombs as opposed to the much higher unit cost PGMs. In modern warfare, it is how many targets an air force destroys that counts, not how many bombs it can drop. This is solvable. As we convert to munitions that are guided by GPS, the unit cost of a PGM is dropping sharply since the guidance is done in space and does not have to be engineered into each individual munition. It is well within the budget of our allies to procure adequate stocks of these precision all weather munitions—munitions badly needed in Operation Allied Force.

Information Technologies: The U.S. is incorporating advanced information technologies into its weapon systems and is about to adopt the next generation of automated planning tools. The allies could be left behind (literally). The pace at which US forces will soon be able to execute military operation could so outstrip the allies that integrated combat operations could become impossible. This is not pre-ordained. Careful attention to operational doctrine and ensuring that certain systems are interoperable (or at least compatible) can go a long way to preventing "two-tier" combat operations.

Secure Communications: This is a serious problem today if we operate against an enemy with any modicum of technical sophistication. It may have been a problem in Operation Allied Force. There is no excuse for it. As communications equipment shifts from analog to digital, the problem of secure interoperable communications become eminently solvable. It is a matter of careful planning to make sure that the next generation of communications equipment that our allies procure meets this requirement.

Firepower: Some of our allies have earmarked forces for power projection but they don't pack much power. The Dutch are a good example. They have a well-trained and well-supported air-mobile brigade. It can deploy, but it lacks the firepower and force protection for serious warfare. The Dutch are taking corrective measures but we have to be sure that other countries don't fall into the same trap.

Allied Defense Budgets: Much of what is outlined above can be done by reprogramming existing resources, but by no means all. A real increase in defense spending concentrated on the procurement account is needed. Most the NATO continental European allies are not only underfunding procurement but also concentrating what they are spending on a few big-ticket items. Programs such as sealift and modern munitions that provide considerable leverage in power projection need to be beefed-up. This problem is compounded by the fact that the total spending on procurement in European NATO capitals is fragmented among 15 different countries. But even here there is hope for improvement. As defense industries consolidate, and especially if balanced trans-Atlantic industrial co-operation expands, considerable efficiencies can be realized as they have been realized in the commercial sector.

ESDI

There has been a gradual but unmistakable shift in the attitude of most US defense planners toward ESDI. The shift has been from outright hostility and suspicion — the fear that it would undermine NATO and shatter the Trans-Atlantic alliance — to a recasting of the issue entirely. This perspective can be summarized as follows:

Today, we have a strong NATO organizational framework but when we get into the field, there is not much military capability alongside us. So the system is not working.

If a true commitment to an ESDI yields stronger, more balanced European forces, capable of projecting power as far as the Persian Gulf, then its benefits will outweigh any supposed "price" the US may have to pay in negotiating leadership arrangements when we deploy into the field.

To conclude, a gap between the capabilities of US and of European forces on the two sides of the Atlantic is indeed emerging. But the existence of this gap is not pre-ordained. A refocus of priorities and a targeting of investments on high leverage programs can go a long way to mitigating the gap in the ability to deploy and fight on battlefields at the periphery of Europe and beyond.