Smart but too cautious: How NATO can improve its fight against austerity By Claudia Major, Christian Mölling and Tomas Valasek ★ At the Chicago summit, NATO countries are unveiling a number of multinational acquisitions such as a fleet of spying drones. While these are needed, expensive and technologically impressive, most new collaborative projects are far more trifling and cover areas such as military education and human resources. ★ Member-states remain afraid of defence collaboration: the dependencies it creates, its initial costs and the potential loss of jobs. The alliance’s approach – waiting for NATO governments to propose mergers of military units and joint weapons purchases – has run out of steam. ★ The alliance needs to start offering incentives for the governments to collaborate. It needs to help them build the business cases, identify opportunities and offer assurances to allay their fears. This paper explains why and how. On July 6th 2011, Italy withdrew its aircraft carrier, the Giuseppe Garibaldi, from NATO’s operation in Libya. In doing so, it wrote military history: a NATO member-state sent home a key unit in the middle of war because the government had run out of money. Italy has not been the last: the UK has withdrawn ships from permanent service in NATO’s anti-piracy mission in the Indian Ocean for financial reasons, while Spain is considering docking its only aicraft carrier indefinitely. Since the economic crisis started in earnest in 2008, NATO countries have eliminated tens of billions of euros from defence budgets and abolished entire categories of weapons, such as tanks or maritime patrol aircraft. In principle, the alliance’s members aim to deploy their forces anywhere in the world. But they are gradually losing the capacity to act globally. NATO’s secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has suggested how the alliance’s members can collectively save money and retain capacity: focus their dwindling defence money on priority projects, specialise in distinct military tasks, and seek savings in collaboration with one another. ‘Smart defence’, as
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NATO calls its efficiency drive, makes sense: by getting rid of unneeded equipment, merging their defence colleges, sharing training grounds, or buying and maintaining future generations of weapons together, governments can buy more power for less money. Some countries such as the Netherlands, the Nordic countries and Belgium have been collaborating with partners for years. A few more, including major players such as Britain and France, have started since the onset of the crisis. But most NATO countries are dragging their feet. This paper argues that to revitalise smart defence, NATO officials must give member-states incentives to co-operate, and address their fears about collaboration. NATO can do so in a variety of ways – by helping the countries identify opportunities for cooperation, or sharing evidence on which approaches work and which ones do not. This paper offers several such proposals, whose common denominator is that they change NATO’s policy from that of waiting for allies to co-operate to actively enticing and assisting the member-states.
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