Before Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, there were many commentators who sought to sanitise the President. Take him seriously but not literally, they said. Some hinted that his cruder and wilder hyperbole was not the ignorant, boorish reflex it seemed but a shrewd and daring negotiating tactic in Trump’s beloved ‘art of the deal’.
It has been reported that the United States is planning to announce a reduction in the number of troops it will make available to Nato in Europe. America is planning to shrink its commitment to the Nato Force model, under which troops ‘carry out the alliance’s operations, missions and other activities during peacetime’. One vital part of the model is the allied reaction force, made up of personnel and capabilities right across the spectrum, which is maintained at high readiness to carry out Nato’s three core tasks: ‘deterrence and defence, crisis prevention and management, and cooperative security’. It is, in essence, the alliance’s first line of defence.
Headcount is a crude metric
Trump has always been hostile towards Nato, which he sees as nothing but a cabal of European countries tricking the United States into providing military protection for them while they are able to underspend on defence. This antipathy surfaced during the first Trump presidency but has come to the fore again in recent weeks because the President feels allies were not as supportive as they should have been over the US-Israeli conflict with Iran. On social media in April, Trump blared in all-caps:
NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN.
It hardly matters that this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of Nato, which is not to be a gang of acolytes for whatever adventurism is currently in vogue in the White House. It reflects Trump’s fixed, paranoid and arrogant view of the world, so it is what we have to work with.
Earlier this month, the US Department of Defense announced that 5,000 troops would be withdrawn from Germany over the next 12 months. Trump added to reporters the following day, ‘We’re going to cut way down. And we’re cutting a lot further than 5,000.’ He also raised the prospect of pulling US forces out of Spain and Italy on the grounds that ‘Italy has not been of any help to us and Spain has been horrible, absolutely horrible’.
This is not yet an extinction event for Nato, as the United States European Command currently has more than 65,000 personnel deployed in alliance member states. It does, however, indicate a direction of travel – one which was clearly visible before the second Trump administration began for those willing to take the President literally as well as seriously. And it underlines the importance of European countries expanding their own armed forces, as many have belatedly begun to do (sadly the United Kingdom has no plans to increase numbers significantly).
Headcount, however, is a crude metric. If we are seeing a general winding-down of American deployments to Europe – and it would be irrationally optimistic to perceive any other trend – then there are more fundamental challenges than simply fewer personnel. Much more worrying for Nato’s European member states is the prospect of losing a range of capabilities of which the United States is the only or vastly predominant provider.
Many of these come under the heading of what military jargon calls ‘strategic enablers’: functions and equipment which support combat forces and allow them to operate effectively. Nato relies almost exclusively on the US for space-based assets like satellites, as well as signals intelligence and electronic intelligence from aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles to provide comprehensive intelligence, surveillance, targeting acquisition and reconnaissance.
America also provides the vast majority of Nato’s strategic lift, with large transport aircraft like the Boeing C-17 Globemaster and the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy. Other member states have simply no equivalent, with the Airbus A400M the largest airframe in service and only 125 of them across the alliance.
Member states are also woefully lacking in air-to-air refuelling assets. They rely heavily on the joint Nato/EU multinational multi-role tanker transport fleet, a pooled force of 12 Airbus A330s. For a rough comparison, the US Air Force has over 400 tanker aircraft.
As well as all this, the US is also the dominant provider of anti-missile air defence systems for Nato’s European members. The Integrated Air and Missile Defence (IAMD) includes air defence destroyers and frigates from the Royal Navy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark. But its backbone consists of US systems like the MIM-104 Patriot and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAADS). European countries currently have no equivalents of these and are encountering problems even purchasing them from the United States because of the shortage of missiles.
Another gap in Nato’s non-US capability is deep precision strike, sophisticated long-range missiles which can reach high-value enemy targets far behind the front lines at distances of 1,200 miles or more. While the UK and Germany are collaborating on developing a new long-range missile, Nato is still largely reliant on American-made BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missiles.
The important point is that these are, in many cases, capabilities which rely on sophisticated, highly advanced weapons systems which cannot be put into production overnight. The Anglo-German deep precision strike missile is not expected in service until the 2030s.
It is these huge gaps in what European Nato members can do, rather than shortfalls in personnel, which should worry political and military leaders most. How quickly can new systems be developed, what are the most urgent gaps, and what can be done to persuade the United States to maintain their availability, at least for now, to Nato’s collective security? This is a multi-pronged problem that will not go away.
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