-Caveat Lector-
>From Wash (DC) Post
> Air War Exposed Arms Gap Within NATO
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> By William Drozdiak
> Washington Post Foreign Service
> Monday, June 28, 1999; Page A1
>
> BRUSSELS � The Kosovo war revealed a profound gap between the capabilities of
> the United States and its European allies that could soon lead to serious
> friction over how to share defense burdens, according to senior NATO officials
> and diplomats.
>
> The unqualified success of the air campaign against Yugoslavia was tempered at
> NATO headquarters by the stark realization that Europe has fallen so far behind
> the United States in the use of precision-guided weapons, satellite
> reconnaissance and other modern technologies that the allies are no longer
> equipped to fight the same way.
>
> In more than a dozen interviews, NATO political and military authorities said
> that the lopsided division of labor between the United States and Europe in the
> air war demonstrated that the alliance is in danger of evolving into a two-tier
> organization, with gross inequalities of military might that may distort NATO's
> ability to cope with crises.
>
> In the Kosovo conflict, the United States � which spends nearly four times as
> much as its European allies on defense research and development � supplied more
> than 80 percent of the aircraft and nearly all the intelligence resources used
> to select bombing targets. Meanwhile, the Europeans were relegated to flying
> mop-up missions, providing host-nation support and deploying the bulk of the
> 50,000 ground troops in the NATO-led peacekeeping force.
>
> Partly to compensate for the overwhelming military role played by the United
> States, the 15 European Union countries have vowed to pay for most of the
> economic reconstruction of Kosovo and the rest of the Balkans. German Foreign
> Minister Joschka Fischer said the rebuilding plan could cost $30 billion over
> the next six years.
>
> "The Kosovo war was mainly an experience of Europe's own insufficiency and
> weakness; we as Europeans never could have coped with the Balkan wars that were
> caused by [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic without the help of the United
> States," Fischer said. "The sad truth is that Kosovo showed Europe is still not
> able to solve its own problems. We have to accept the consequences and hope that
> Europe can grow from this crisis."
>
> NATO Secretary General Javier Solana, who will become the European Union's
> foreign policy czar later this year, said his biggest challenge will focus on a
> European security policy and on persuading EU governments to reshape their
> defense forces in ways that are compatible, not competitive, with those of the
> United States.
>
> "We do not need to build a second NATO," Solana said. "It's a matter of
> political will and harmonizing Europe's military industries, but most of all
> it's a matter of money. It's hard to say just how much will be enough. Defense
> budgets will have to rise, but we could accomplish a lot just through better
> coordination of the way we spend our money."
>
> But at a time when there is no strategic threat to NATO and European voters are
> being asked to surrender cherished social entitlements, it will be politically
> difficult to justify a new surge in defense spending.
>
> "Everyone agrees on the lessons to be learned from the Kosovo experience, but
> few people here are confident that we will apply them," said a senior NATO
> intelligence official. "It would take the Europeans two decades to catch up with
> the Americans even if they had the money and the will to spend it."
>
> In his valedictory address last month, German Gen. Klaus Naumann, who was
> retiring as chairman of NATO's military committee, said the Kosovo conflict
> confirmed his worst fears that the day is fast approaching when the United
> States and its European allies "will not even be able to fight on the same
> battlefield."
>
> The air war demonstrated the result of a U.S. investment in military research
> and development that has dwarfed Europe's in recent years. The United States now
> devotes $35 billion a year to creating the kinds of advanced weapons and
> intelligence gathering systems used over Yugoslavia, while European alliance
> members spend $10 billion a year � a sum fragmented into national projects that
> shrink its impact.
>
> Since the end of the Cold War, European governments have slashed their defense
> budgets � in some cases, almost in half. Austria, an EU member that has rejected
> appeals to join NATO because of its neutral tradition, now spends more money on
> its state opera company than on national defense.
>
> Among the 11 EU states that belong to NATO, many have been reluctant to invest
> in transforming their armed forces from large standing armies designed to thwart
> a Soviet-led invasion into the mobile, flexible units needed to cope with new
> security threats beyond their frontiers, such as the Kosovo crisis.
>
> Despite some progress in reorganizing their militaries, the European allies have
> balked at making key decisions that would improve their ability to cope with
> Kosovo-like situations. They spurned an opportunity to buy at a bargain price
> the U.S. J-STARS air-to-ground surveillance system that kept NATO planes out of
> harm's way over Yugoslavia. Because of disputes over how to share jobs and
> costs, France and Germany aborted plans to build a satellite reconnaissance
> system and a heavy-lift transport aircraft that would have made them much less
> dependent on U.S assets.
>
> Air Force Gen. Michael Short, who orchestrated the NATO bombing campaign, said
> the shortcomings of European aircraft were so glaring � such as the lack of
> night-vision capability and the absence of laser-guided weapons systems � that
> he curtailed their missions to a minimum to avoid unnecessary risks. Short said
> that unless remedies are found soon, the alliance will be riddled with "second-
> and third-team members" incapable of flying the same missions as U.S. forces.
>
> The discrepancy in American and European military capabilities also threatens to
> affect NATO's ability to shape consensus on combat strategies. While cognizant
> of the need in an alliance of democracies to obey the will of their political
> leaders, Short and U.S. Gen. Wesley K. Clark, NATO's supreme commander,
> acknowledged that military strategists would consider the Kosovo air war a
> textbook example of how political constraints can undermine a conventional
> bombing campaign.
>
> As an airman, Short said he would have "gone downtown on the first night" and
> taken the war to Yugoslavia's civilian population by knocking out bridges, power
> plants and telephone networks. But France and other European governments vetoed
> many civilian targets and imposed a limited, phased approach that the military
> commanders say delayed victory.
>
> In the end, Short and Clark say, it was NATO's ability to hit "strategic, fixed
> targets" � causing an estimated $30 billion damage and widespread hardship among
> civilians � that ultimately compelled Milosevic to accept the alliance's
> demands. Tactical raids against Serb-led Yugoslav military forces, which NATO
> commanders now say were less effective than they believed because of the use of
> ground decoys, apparently had a negligible impact on the Belgrade leadership
> until the war's closing days.
>
> As NATO conducts its post-mortem of the Kosovo conflict, NATO military officers
> insist that if the alliance hopes to prevail in similar operations short of
> full-scale war, they will need to retain control of the key elements of surprise
> and maximum firepower, which they were denied in the campaign against
> Yugoslavia.
>
> Naumann and Clark also have recommended that NATO take a hard look at its crisis
> management methods. The obsession with sustaining consensus within the alliance
> meant that NATO was unprepared when Milosevic accelerated the violent expulsion
> of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority as the NATO bombing began.
>
> The alliance was caught wrong-footed as the massive exodus of refugees
> threatened to destabilize neighboring Albania and Macedonia. It also made a
> mockery of NATO's claim that it launched the air war to prevent a humanitarian
> catastrophe, when it looked as if the bombing only made matters worse for the
> Kosovo Albanians.
>
> "We were much too narcissistic," said a senior NATO planner. "This air war was
> prepared almost as if Milosevic did not exist. We thought he would buckle right
> away, and when he didn't we did not know what to do except keep on bombing. What
> the alliance needs in dealing with future conflicts are more chess players and
> fewer pollsters."
>
>
>
>
> � 1999 The Washington Post Company
A<>E<>R
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