Dervish, let me tell you that Secretary Rice has explicitly thanked Germany for its "great efforts" in the WOT and for the continuing "friendship" between our nations. Yes, you´ve read it correct, even Sec Rice - and not "only" former Sec Powell - called Germany a friend.
May I let you know that it was Washington DC which urged Germany NOT to build up nukes on our own, due to avoid further conflicts with the Soviets, and that the US government has given us a security guarantee for our territory. This guarantee (to defend us even with nuclear weapons in case of serious attack on our territory) is still valid. You don´t have to complain about that, it´s your governments choice - and I don´t have the impression that the presence of US troops is/was not in the interests of the White House. Since the formal end of the occupation of Germany in 1994 your troops are here by your own choice, and you are free to leave. But let me get this one clear: Germany hasn´t received one cent for our own military.
First I assume if you are posting here that you do not necessarily share your country’s positions on the US and WOT. So forgive me but I must tell it like it is.
The measure of US military aid to France is the US contribution to NATO which is 2/3 that of all of Europe with its more than 15 member countries. NATO protects the continent of Europe, not the US, does it not? Thankfully some help is coming from the “New Europe” like Poland who recognizes the need for a strong military after the Soviets and understands the need to fight tyranny.
I read that France could not even deliver aid to Tsunami victims because it had no helicopters and had to rent them. This was a scandal in the French News and stirred internal debate about the poor state of France as a world power.
Why is it that in a regional European conflict in Bosnia and Kosovo did the US come in to handle it? Why on its own soil was Europe inadequate?
How about the run up to the Iraq War fiasco? France not only opposed the US at the UN, it actively lobbied Security Council member states to oppose the US. When Turkey needed protection against a possible attack from Iraq, NATO balked. And how about oil-for-food corruption? France is up to its ears in that scandal. It is the second largest recipient of contracts and money with ties going right up to Jacques Chirac. Do you think that did not undermine the US? If the sanctions had not been circumvented and undermined war may not have been necessary as Saddam would not have had the money to re-arm. And the European Press (France in the lead) constantly demonizes and distorts Pres Bush’s actions, the war in Iraq, and the US WOT.
As to the cooperation on the WOT there are many rifts. Germany, to the frustration of its own prosecutors, can not manage to convict terrorists. The German prosecutors have denounced their own system. Europe and US are in constant struggles about deportation because Europe, canonized by the EU, believes the death penalty is a US barbarism and demands guarantees from the US that they will not use it on any deportee convicted. Spain is in appeasement mode, and Holland is in the throes of realizing that there is a fifth column in their midsts but are still arguing about the benefits of tolerance. Europe can not even handle its own WOT (see increase of European anti-Semitism perpetrated by Muslim youths) let alone help the US.
I could go on but you get my drift.
The U.S. has historically shouldered a disproportionate military burden within the alliance. The Europeans seldom if ever meet their military spending commitments for NATO. The Germans didn't even have the capability to transport 900 peace-keeping troops to Afghanistan; having to borrow air transport from Belarus.
As the U.S. war on terrorism continues, the "arms gap" between U.S. and European forces will only grow larger. Within the next two-to-three years its doubtful that Europeans will have the ability to fight alongside high-tech American forces.
http://www.usainreview.com/1_30_NATO.htm
Kristol has been arguing for U.S. withdrawal from NATO at least since 1973. The main points he raised at Columbia were as follows: The U.S. presence in Western Europe, more than forty years after winning the war that brought us there, has created a dependent and demoralized set of allies. Just as welfare dependency corrupts inner-city dwellers, so military dependency has corrupted our European allies.
Europe today is economically healthy, indeed prosperous. Its combined GNP, its combined manpower, its technological resources, and its educational level exceed those of the Soviet Union by a wide margin. (Indeed, the combined GNP of the 19 Western European countries is not far short of the U.S. GNP, and Western Europe's population of nearly 400 million is considerably greater than ours.)
The Europeans could easily defend themselves. But, Kristol said, they don't want to. "And why should they, when in fact they can get away with funding social services which they believe, probably correctly, to be very popular?' They can get away with this because of our commitment to spend our money on their defense.
As the moderator, Morton Kondracke of The New Republic, said in his introduction: "The current total U.S. defense budget is approximately $300 billion annually. Experts usually agree that the cost of the U.S. contribution to NATO, which is to say the defense of the European front, is approximately half that figure, somewhere between $130 billion and $170 billion.' In his just published book, How NATO Weakens the West, Melvyn Krauss, a professor of economics at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, writes that in 1984 "the U.S.-defense-spending share of total NATO defense spending was 64.73 per cent.'
Admittedly there is some room for adjustment in these figures. Some Western European countries have a military draft, which is cheaper than an all-volunteer army. So their defense spending seems to be lower than it really is. Still, there can be no doubt that the U.S. has, since World War II, played a major role in the defense of Western Europe, and has continued to do so despite the European recovery from that war.
Kristol and Krauss are drawing attention to a state of affairs well known to economists. It is usually called the free-rider problem. If a group of people work collectively and divide the fruits of the labor equally, toilers subsidize shirkers. When the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Colony in 1620 they at first attempted collective farming, but gave it up by 1623. Their first governor, William Bradford, wrote: "The young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense.' When the land was privatized there was a dramatic improvement in the colony, "for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.'
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_v38/ai_4580933
In a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal, reporter Philip Shishkin details why U.S. soldiers wouldn't want some of the members of the NATO fighting force to participate in an attack on Iraq: They're old, soft and ill-equipped.
The article specified one Belgian soldier, a 47-year-old hairdresser, who spends his time on an amateur singing career featuring Elvis and Tom Jones tunes. He said that when the military sent him on a field exercise, he was "amazed by the fellow soldiers lumbering around him," reports the Journal. "All the people are so old," he said.
Why? Because many of these soldiers have guaranteed jobs until retirement, plus benefits. The U.S. spends 36 percent of its defense budget on pay and benefits. By contrast, most European NATO member states spend an average of nearly 65 percent of their defense appropriations on salaries and benefits.
The Journal further reports that while U.S. spending on personnel has decreased by 6 percent since the early '80s, it has risen by nearly the same amount in Europe.
"We could do with fewer troops, but better troops; better trained, better equipped, more mobile," NATO Secretary General George Robertson said last month at the World Economic Forum. "The problem in Europe is that there are far too many people in uniform, and too few of them able to go into action at the speeds that conflicts presently demand."
Exactly what Shishkin postulates. And he doesn't stop there. He goes right on to pinpoint a reason why the three countries that are against military conflict with Iraq might be balking. He writes:
Belgium employs hundreds of military barbers, musicians and other personnel who aren't likely to be called into battle. Yet Belgium doesn't have the money to replace aging helicopters or conduct regular combat-training exercises.
Germany drafts 120,000 people every year but can't afford to buy all the transport planes it wants. German soldiers who went to Afghanistan as peacekeepers crowded into an aging, leased Ukrainian carrier that had to stop to refuel.
France, despite the fact that it increased spending this year, was lagging in military-procurement funding from '97 to '02, leaving its forces wanting in such key areas as refueling aircraft and missiles.
To top it off:
Europe has 11 troop-transport planes, compared with 250 in the U.S., and most European members of NATO don't have any modern precision-guided munitions at all.
Well, no wonder these countries can't support an attack on Iraq. They literally can't support an attack on Iraq!
U.S. Gen. Joseph Ralston, the former NATO supreme allied commander for Europe, calls European militaries "outdated and redundant, fat."
Other problems facing the European NATO members are 1) the fact that they can't run up deficits to finance military capabilities, 2) the position of most Europeans that the military should not be anyone's priority, and 3) the unionization of the military in Europe.
There is no such animal here in the U.S., but Shishkin writes that these unions have huge power in Europe. The Belgian soldiers are already eligible for six weeks of vacation a year, and they still protested for more benefits last year, which they received, by the way.
"We must be honest with ourselves," says Warrant Officer Emmanuel Jacob, secretary-general of Belgium's Centrale Generale du Personnel Militaire. "Either we have a smaller number of people who are well-trained and equipped or we continue to defend a bigger army and it won't work in the future." The median age of the Belgian soldier is 40. In the U.S. it's 28.
Granted, in some part the excess of troops was encouraged by NATO agreement during the '70s and '80s that soldiers were needed to fend off a Soviet invasion.
But during the meeting of Euro defense bigs in Warsaw last summer, before any talk of Iraq started, Rumsfeld told the European countries that unless they start spending more on advanced weaponry, secure communications, more mobile, special-ops units and long-haul planes, the U.S. won't call on them for backing when it goes to war. "The phone just won't ring," the Secretary of Defense told them.
Apparently, where Iraq is concerned, "Old Europe" took its phone off the hook before we even had a chance to dial.
http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/natosold.htm
Europe’s military capabilities at this stage are modest. Too modest. Too few allies are transforming their armed forces to cope with the security problems of the 1990s and the 21st century. To strengthen NATO and to make European defence a reality, we Europeans need to restructure our defence capabilities so that we can project force, can deploy our troops, ships and planes beyond their home bases and sustain them there, equipped to deal with whatever level of conflict they may face. George Robertson will address this issue in more detail when he speaks to you on Wednesday. But let me assure you of this: European defence is not about new institutional fixes. It is about new capabilities, both military and diplomatic.
http://www.britainusa.com/sections/articles_show.asp?SarticleType=1&Article_ID=713&i=117
But European pretensions and American apprehensions proved unfounded. The 1990s witnessed not the rise of a European superpower but the decline of Europe into relative weakness. The Balkan conflict at the beginning of the decade revealed European military incapacity and political disarray; the Kosovo conflict at decade’s end exposed a transatlantic gap in military technology and the ability to wage modern warfare that would only widen in subsequent years. Outside of Europe, the disparity by the close of the 1990s was even more starkly apparent as it became clear that the ability of European powers, individually or collectively, to project decisive force into regions of conflict beyond the continent was negligible. Europeans could provide peacekeeping forces in the Balkans — indeed, they could and eventually did provide the vast bulk of those forces in Bosnia and Kosovo. But they lacked the wherewithal to introduce and sustain a fighting force in potentially hostile territory, even in Europe. Under the best of circumstances, the European role was limited to filling out peacekeeping forces after the United States had, largely on its own, carried out the decisive phases of a military mission and stabilized the situation. As some Europeans put it, the real division of labor consisted of the United States “making the dinner” and the Europeans “doing the dishes.”
This inadequacy should have come as no surprise, since these were the limitations that had forced Europe to retract its global influence in the first place. Those Americans and Europeans who proposed that Europe expand its strategic role beyond the continent set an unreasonable goal. During the Cold War, Europe’s strategic role had been to defend itself. It was unrealistic to expect a return to international great-power status, unless European peoples were willing to shift significant resources from social programs to military programs.
Clearly they were not. Not only were Europeans unwilling to pay to project force beyond Europe. After the Cold War, they would not pay for sufficient force to conduct even minor military actions on the continent without American help. Nor did it seem to matter whether European publics were being asked to spend money to strengthen nato or an independent European foreign and defense policy. Their answer was the same. Rather than viewing the collapse of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to flex global muscles, Europeans took it as an opportunity to cash in on a sizable peace dividend. Average European defense budgets gradually fell below 2 percent of gdp. Despite talk of establishing Europe as a global superpower, therefore, European military capabilities steadily fell behind those of the United States throughout the 1990s.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/kagan-20020520.htm
He said during the 1990s, defence spending in most European countries - apart from Britain and France - had dropped below 2% of national income, compared to about 3% in the US.
Europe, said Mr Straw, had achieved "impressive results" through the quiet promotion of democracy, trade, foreign aid and peacekeeping.
But this did not compensate for "effective armed forces" when facing post-Cold War threats.
Mr Straw said Europe needed to invest more to make Nato work - or risk relations with the US.
"A relationship where one side of the alliance disproportionately shoulders the military burden is a recipe for resentment," he said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2331943.stm
All is not well with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The conflicts and tensions that have challenged the alliance since the end of the Cold War reveal an organization in need of urgent reform. Yet the political tensions at the core of NATO's problems can be explained succinctly: Americans resent being asked to shoulder more than their fair share of Europe's military burden, while Europeans resent being dictated to by the United States. Like a poison, these resentments eat away at the heart of the alliance that has assured European security since World War II.
Although burden sharing and power sharing have been overarching issues since the founding of NATO in 1949, neither has seemed more treacherous than they do today, in the absence of the Soviet threat that had compelled the allies to overlook their internal grievances for decades. How the alliance addresses these problems could very well determine its survival in an era when threats to European security are frequently less well-defined but proliferating rapidly. A Grand Bargain on burden sharing and power sharing must be struck that strengthens and empowers both pillars of this worthwhile transatlantic alliance.
OUT OF BALANCE: NATO'S SECURITY BURDEN
A core problem for NATO security became more evident during the recent Kosovo intervention: Europe clearly does not share enough of the alliance's military burden. European military hardware is significantly inferior to that of the United States in strategic transport and logistics (which includes C-17s, rapid sealift, inflatable fuel tanks, and forward repair facilities), intelligence (satellites, sensors, computers), and high-tech weaponry (precision-guided explosives and cruise missiles). Problems with compatibility--always the bane of this uneven alliance--are growing worse as U.S. technology advances. The Economist reported on this disappointing inequity:
Compared to U.S. forces inspired by the "revolution in military affairs" that promises perfect knowledge of everything on a battlefield, Europe's static conscript-dependent forces look increasingly like dinosaurs. Western Europe's defense budget is almost two-third's that of America, but it produces less than one-quarter of America's deployable fighting strength. 2
Yet, the technological discrepancies between the U.S. and European forces pale in significance next to the difference between the U.S. and European forces in "lift" capabilities, or their ability to transport an army at will. Europe, in the words of the Western European Assembly, has ceded "a virtual monopoly" 3 in this area to the United States. While unglamorous, logistical lift is probably the key component to fighting and winning a war in the post-Cold War era. Just as the British navy's ability to move its forces in the 19th century was key to the success of its empire, so is America's ability to place its troops quickly anywhere in the world the crucial reason for its military dominance. This disparity is a basic weakness that limits the effectiveness of European defense forces. The United States is the only NATO country in a position to deploy large numbers of forces well beyond its national borders and sustain them for an extended period of time. Europeans depend heavily on the United States for force projection, even in places as close as the Balkans.
A major reason for these technological deficiencies is that European allies do not devote enough of their resources to defense-related research and development. The United States spends nearly four times as much as its allies do in this area. 4 Generally, the defense-spending picture among the allies is mixed; some have made genuine efforts to adapt to the post-Cold War security environment, while others continue to take a strategic holiday. U.S. defense spending in 1998 was 3.2 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), for example, while France spent 2.8 percent of its GDP; the United Kingdom, 2.7 percent; Italy, 2 percent; Germany, 1.5 percent; and Spain, 1.3 percent. 5 Poor procurement decisions do not convincingly explain the technological gap between the two pillars of the alliance; an insufficient financial commitment on the part of the Europeans has been a significant part of the problem.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Europe/BG1360.cfm