Don't Panic: Our European friends can raise NATO's game

Wavell Room Audio Reads

Over the last few weeks a series of speeches have described the Russian threat to peace in Europe. On 10 January, Sweden's Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin asserted that 'there could be war in Sweden'. This warning was reinforced by the Swedish military commander-in-chief, Gen Micael Byden, suggested that Swedes should mentally prepare for this to happen. On 15 January the UK's Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, told the assembled audience at Lancaster House that a 'pre-war' 'inflection point' had been reached.1 Just two days after that, the Dutch Chair of NATO's Military Committee, Admiral Robert Bauer warned that the era of predictability was over and that NATO needed a 'warfighting transformation' as an all-out war with Russia could happen at any stage in the next twenty years.4 What, you may ask, is going on? The procession of dire warnings have led commentators to ponder whether the UK's fighting age population are ready, willing and mentally prepared for what they may be required to do. This is nothing new. In the early 1900s the ruling upper strata of post-Edwardian society worried that the social and psychological character of the urban working class had made them unfit to fight a major war.5 Of course, the vast majority of the working classes did not flinch in responding to the call to arms during the First World War. Indeed, it was the middle and upper class students at Oxford University who, in 1933, debated and passed, by 275 votes to 153, a motion proposed by Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad that 'This House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country'. Whether or not the majority of the current population feels that modern Britain represents their cultural aspirations - and is therefore worth fighting for - is, perhaps, a more prescient concern.6 Regarding the scale of the Russia threat, a study, in 2018, compared the size of its economy with that of the American state of Texas. Texas's economy, with its rapidly growing population, was adjudged the larger. It was noted that Russia's population was shrinking due to low birth rates. 7 That said, the dictum that you need a strong economy to have strong national defence forces does not seem to apply to hybrid-totalitarian states.8 Nevertheless, there comes a point at which war casualties and economic fragility coalesce. A U.S. Intelligence assessment reported that by December 2023 as many as 315,000 Russian soldiers had been killed or injured in the war in Ukraine, and that the losses in that war had set back Russia's military modernisation by 18 years. If correct, should we be that concerned about the likelihood that Russia will attack a recently enlarged NATO in western Europe in the next decade?9 What do Byden, Bauer and Pistorius know that overrides the logic of Lanchester's square law? Perhaps the Americans have told their European friends that when the situation in Ukraine is resolved they will concentrate on Asia and expect the Europeans to defend themselves against a militarily reinvigorated but economically fragile Russia. NATO's defence is predicated on the assumption that each country will spend at least 2% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defence. After America decided to pivot to Asia, President Barak Obama's administration hoped that its European NATO allies would embrace the idea of 'Smart Defence', where national capabilities and resources were pooled and shared to optimize their effectiveness. This concept appears to have been designed to make up for the absence of some American capabilities in Europe and the Mediterranean.10 Europe's ability to satisfy this desire rested on the character of their leaders and their willingness to spend their fair share of their country's GDP on defence. Unfortunately, Obama had a tendency to assess the leaders of Europe's largest economic and military states by the depth of their experience and their progressive credentials, rather than by their commitment to European security and defence. He tho...