BRUSSELS — With the Pentagon facing severe budget cuts, Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta asked NATO’s European members on Wednesday to heed the lessons of the Libya war and cooperate on much-needed defense spending in order “not to hollow out this alliance.”
Mr. Panetta, in his first European speech as defense secretary, handed out praise as well as criticism, speaking with care in the aftermath of a fiercely phrased warning in June by his predecessor, Robert M. Gates, that NATO risked irrelevance because of its failures to invest in defense.
Mr. Gates said that NATO had become a two-tiered alliance divided between those who bore the burden of defense spending and those along for a free ride.
He warned of “a dim if not dismal future” for the alliance unless its European members increased their participation, and he said that Washington would not forever pay for European security when the Europeans could do that for themselves.
Mr. Panetta took a softer approach, balancing concerns about shortages of equipment and personnel with praise for the NATO’s accomplishments in Libya and Afghanistan.
The fighting in Libya showed, he said, how quickly and decisively NATO could go to war and proved the value of sharing burdens, with France and Britain taking the lead instead of the United States.
But the Libyan conflict, he said, also showed that American capabilities and supplies of ammunition were vital, and it illustrated “growing gaps that must be addressed.”
He warned of “legitimate questions about whether, if present trends continue, NATO will again be able to sustain the kind of operations that we have seen in Libya and Afghanistan without the United States taking on even more of the burden.”
NATO had too few targeting specialists to interpret intelligence and guide aircraft, so Americans filled in, he said.
“But nowhere were the gaps more obvious than in critical enabling capabilities — refueling tankers, the provision of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms such as Global Hawk and Predator drones.”
Without those American assets, “the Libya operation would have had a very difficult time getting off the ground or being sustained,” he said.
Mr. Panetta, speaking at Carnegie Europe, the Brussels branch of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that the Pentagon was facing at least $450 billion in budget cuts over the next 10 years, and that he was committed to ensuring that the American military did not once again cut muscle while saving money.
Europeans should avoid the same historical error, he said, and not assume that Washington will always be able to compensate for their shortcomings.
“After World War I, after World War II, after Korea, after Vietnam, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, we made the mistake of hollowing out our forces, and that cannot happen again,” Mr. Panetta said.
“Similarly, NATO nations need to send a strong signal of our determination not to hollow out this alliance,” he said. “We need to use this moment to make the case for the need to invest in this alliance to ensure it remains relevant to the security challenges of the future.”
He urged Europeans to use the success in Libya to make the case to their own publics for the need to spend more on defense, and to spend it more wisely, on cooperative projects.
“With the fall of the Qaddafi regime, our nations saw an example of why NATO matters and why NATO remains indispensable in confronting the security challenges of today,” he said. “We need to use this moment to make the case for the need to invest in this alliance, to ensure it remains relevant to the security challenges of the future.”
By some measures, he said, European defense spending had dropped 2 percent a year for the last decade while Europeans were engaged in Kosovo, Libya and Afghanistan, meaning that the savings had come from budgets for modernization. At the least, he said, NATO members must coordinate spending cuts so that their allies are not surprised.
“We are at a critical moment for our defense partnership,” he warned. “While these warnings have been acknowledged, growing fiscal pressures on both sides of the Atlantic, I fear, have eroded the political will to do something about them.”
After a visit to the Middle East, Mr. Panetta came to Brussels for his first NATO defense ministers meeting, which will address how to conclude the operation in Libya and how to better train Afghan forces to take over security as allied combat forces withdraw through 2014.
The NATO ministers also will discuss Kosovo, where clashes continue between Kosovar Albanians and Serbs, and the antipiracy patrols off Somalia, now in their third year.
Source: nytimes.com