As the leaders of NATO convened in Prague this week to invite seven new candidates to join their club, American jet fighters patrolled the gray skies above the Czech capital.
The symbolism was telling. The American warplanes were not on the lookout for a Soviet invasion. That threat has long passed. Instead they were on the alert for a Sept. 11-style terrorist attack.
It was significant, too, that American air power–rather than NATO air power–was called upon to safeguard the airspace over a European capital.
Just as the main menace to the security of the Western democracies has passed from the defunct Soviet Union to a newly energized network of terrorists capable of striking anywhere, the technological gap between America’s war fighting capabilities and those of its NATO allies has widened.
Although it appeared nowhere on the official agenda, the main issue on the table at this NATO summit was relevance.
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“To be effective and relevant in the 21st Century,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, “NATO is going to have to migrate from being a Cold War institution organized and trained and equipped to deter and dissuade and defend a Soviet Union tank battle across the West German plain into an organization that’s capable of responding quickly to trouble spots in the world.”
The alliance took a major step toward reinventing itself this week in Prague when President Bush and the leaders of the 18 other NATO nations agreed to create a 20,000-member rapid-response force with global reach. This marks a significant departure from NATO’s core strategy of defending Europe from within Europe.
Relief for U.S.
The new force also should ease U.S. concerns about the European Union’s plans to develop its own 60,000-strong rapid reaction force. The U.S. has endorsed the European plan but at the same time it has reservations about a potential competitor to NATO.
Though the Bush administration made the creation of a NATO force a priority for the summit, the proposal faces many substantive, if not conceptual, obstacles.
The plan calls for the creation of a battalion-size, multinational unit under NATO command that could be dispatched quickly to any hot spot in the world and be self-sustaining for at least a month. The force would train for six months, stand watch for six months and then go through a six-month detuning process.
The force would be “operable and sustainable” by “land, sea and air,” a senior U.S. Defense Department official said. The official also said that the rapid-response force might be deployed in an effort to deter military action or to function as a peacekeeping force.
Hinting at possible problems in reaching complete agreement from all NATO partners for deployment, the official said, “I think the use of any kind of military capability that the alliance will have will be subject to the consensus principle.”
The idea of a rapid-response force was first floated by the U.S. last spring. It arose partly as a result of bruised feelings among the European allies and sharpening questions about NATO’s relevance after the U.S. shunned the alliance’s offers of assistance in the war on Afghanistan.
“It’s an indication that the United States believes NATO can be an important institution,” Rumsfeld said.
The NATO and planned EU forces won’t be redundant.
“It is clear that these two forces will have different ambitions and different mandates,” said Czech Deputy Defense Minister Stefan Fule. “The EU force will be for peace enforcement operations, peacekeeping missions and humanitarian missions. The NATO force will be suited for high intensity combat operations.”
Angles on an idea
The main European allies were quick to embrace the idea of a NATO rapid-response force, for quite different reasons. For Britain, it is a way to restore the relevance of the alliance’s frayed Euro-Atlantic link, while France likes it as a counterbalance to the Bush administration’s unilateralist tendencies.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the creation of the rapid-response force is seen as one way to address the widening gap between U.S. defense spending and everyone else’s.
The U.S. currently spends twice as much on defense as the 15 members of the European Union combined. This has bought so much superiority in air power, precision guided weapons, communications systems and electronic intelligence systems that soon none of the NATO allies will have the technological capability to fight alongside the U.S.
At present, 100 percent of NATO’s long-range bombers are American, 95 percent of the alliance’s long-range transport aircraft are American, and more than 80 percent of the airborne refueling tankers needed for jet fighter operations in places like Afghanistan and Iraq are American.
The rapid-response force would draw from niche specializations of many of its members, allowing the small and medium-size countries to focus defense spending in areas that serve a larger purpose rather than on expensive but almost certainly redundant weapons systems.
“The answer is not just an increase in defense spending but how to spend our defense euros in a better way,” Fule said.
The last three years have not been smooth sailing for NATO. Faced with new and unconventional challenges, the 53-year-old alliance has struggled.
The 1999 Kosovo war marked the first time NATO went into combat against a sovereign state. It won, but not as easily as expected. Overmatched Yugoslav troops held out for 78 days until President Slobodan Milosevic decided to withdraw from Kosovo.
Post-battle assessments indicated that NATO had caused far less damage to Yugoslavia’s outmoded Soviet-style army than had been previously thought. The experience underscored the alliance’s cumbersome command structure and the difficulties of waging war by committee.
Sept. 11 forces change
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The events of Sept. 11, 2001, changed everything. For the first time in its history, the alliance invoked Article 5, the cornerstone of the NATO treaty. It declares, in effect, that an attack on one is an attack on all. But the Bush administration’s response was a brusque “thanks, but no thanks,” and the U.S. went to war against Afghanistan without NATO’s help. This bruised some feelings among the European allies.
Sept. 11 also has played a role in the decision to expand NATO. In a speech he delivered three months before the terror attacks, Bush said he envisioned a NATO that included “all of Europe’s new democracies, from the Baltic to the Black Sea and all that lie between.” At the time, no one considered Romania and Bulgaria to be anywhere near ready to join. There also were also concerns about how Russia would react to having the Baltic republics in NATO.
But after the U.S. declared war on terrorism, NATO quickly reached a consensus “that it was better to have people inside the tent than outside,” according to a diplomat from an alliance state.