Last week, Spain set the cat among the pigeons when its government announced that they could not accept the proposal to increase NATO’s target for defence spending to 5% of GDP. Spain’s left-wing government is hardly comfortable with such a significant increase in defence spending (the country’s current level is around 1.3%) and has rejected the idea that it should be compelled into making the sacrifices necessary for such a shift as a condition of its membership in NATO.
In some sense, the Spanish have a point. The American demands are unreasonable and the implicit threats are not the way that allies should treat with each other. There is an element of hypocrisy too; just like Europe, America also slashed its defence spending as a percentage of GDP after the Cold War. It only ramped up again for the Global War on Terror, a military campaign that they designed, led and lost of their own accord. US defence spending peaked in 2010 and then fell again in the years after. America has been as guilty as everyone else of trying to claim a peace dividend by redirecting previous military spending, even if they didn’t go quite as far or use the dividend quite as well.
But the Spanish, and their quieter supporters, are wrong for an important reason. The 5% spending target isn’t the right approach because Washington demands it. It’s the right approach precisely because the United States has shown itself to be so unpredictable and unreliable. Europe needs to ramp up its defence spending not because Trump is a good faith actor who will respect the deal we make with him, but because he isn’t. Europe needs a failsafe, an ability to defend itself even if the US chooses to look away, and unfortunately that will cost money.
How to manage that cost is therefore where the real fight should take place and is unfortunately where politicians across the continent are letting us down. Following the framing set by the United States, our governments are focused on the simplistic question of how high the percentage should be and how quickly we should get there. They consider only their own national security situation and whether they feel taking part in the Trump blackmail on defence is worthwhile.
The brute question of how much money to spend continues to eclipse the more vital question of how we spend it.
For while rearmament in Europe is necessary, throwing money at each country’s defence industry is hardly a guarantee of success. Indeed, without reform, we will likely end up spending much more to achieve much less than we could.
To really address the problem we must name it: European defence spending contains an intolerable degree of waste. We waste money duplicating bureaucratic and military structures and capabilities between different countries. We waste money on bespoke and overly complicated platforms with limited interoperability. We waste money on industrial firms that are actively protected from competition, awarded contracts for their nationality rather than their quality.
These are not new problems and I am hardly the first to identify them, but they stubbornly continue to impair our ability to spend effectively and generate a real independent deterrence force.
To break from this status quo, our governments must commit to three principles: simplify, standardise, Europeanise.
Simplify
One of the most significant lessons from Ukraine’s spectacular attack on Russia’s air force was that a simple drone could destroy or severely damage a far costlier plane. While there are times when we would want highly advanced systems to achieve specific objectives, the reality is that to defend ourselves against an enemy like Russia, we will need a significant quantity of tanks, planes, missiles and shells. Our procurement processes should be geared towards rapid scale-up and mass production and we should be willing to compromise on technical prowess in order to achieve this goal. To service our needs, our defence industry must be truly industrial, not artisanal.
Standardise
There are far too many different standards used in Europe for various pieces of equipment, partly as a legacy of many decades of equipment being produced and going largely unused, but even brand new equipment is produced according to a variety of specifications. For instance, Europe has donated no less than 10 different howitzer models to Ukraine and still today has five different models in active production. The United States has one. This impedes the interoperability of Europe’s armed forces and fragments our defence industry. Even if we cannot get down to one standard, successfully limiting them to two or three in each case would be a significant progress. For those countries with prized defence companies of their own, this will mean working more together to create single joint platforms (as France and Germany have been doing for their next generation tank design). For those countries not producing the relevant equipment, this means prioritising the purchase of those joint platforms.
Europeanise
It is already implied in the previous point on standardisation, but taking a European approach to our defence spending can go much further. Notably, countries could put in more joint orders to single suppliers, helping deliver scale for defence firms and enabling them to invest in more factories and more output. This should also allow governments to benefit from lower prices per unit thanks to economies of scale, getting more in return from their joint bulk orders than if they had all pursued individual procurement.
As Europe gears up for a massive rearmament programme, the need to rethink our defence spending is more urgent than ever. A pro forma increase to assuage Washington will not meet our needs in a world where the American security guarantee can no longer be taken for granted. To protect our peace and freedom, we need a rearmament process that can be relied upon to deliver real military capacity and deterrence value against an active hostile power, not just numbers on a spreadsheet. We need a new procurement strategy; simpler, cheaper and more European.
Good article. I'd only add that if we were serious, we would be asking ourselves whether we can get a bigger bang for our buck by paying Ukraine to make the weapons. And to use them.
While we should be rearming, frankly I think the same money could go further if given to Ukraine. The impetus for rearming is Russian aggression (and the withdrawal of US support), so if the money can be spent more cost effectively defeating Russia in Ukraine, then that's what we should be donig.