Air War Exposed Arms Gap Within NATO

By William Drozdiak
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 28, 1999; Page A1

Daily Briefing BRUSSELS – The Kosovo war revealed a profound gap between the
War Exposes capabilities of the United States and its European allies that could
Arms Gap Within soon lead to serious friction over how to share defense burdens,
NATO (The Post,
according to senior NATO officials and diplomats.
June 28)
The unqualified success of the air campaign against Yugoslavia was
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tempered at NATO headquarters by the stark realization that Europe
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has fallen so far behind the United States in the use of precision-
finds out their 11- guided weapons, satellite reconnaissance and other modern
year-old boy was technologies that the allies are no longer equipped to fight the same
killed. 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,

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 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

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 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.

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 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.
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 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

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