Written evidence submitted by Oxford Research Group
About Oxford Research Group
Oxford Research Group (ORG) is a UK-based think tank that provides information, analysis, methodology, policy advice and mediation in order to promote a more sustainable approach to global security. ORG currently runs or hosts programmes working on: sustainable security and alternatives to militarisation; the implications of remote warfare; and track II mediation of several conflicts in the Middle East.
1.1 This submission focuses on three issues raised by the Committee in relation to the defence relationship between the UK, European NATO states and the US:
1.2 European conventional forces are two or three times larger, and of greater or equal quality, than Russia’s armed forces but this does not necessarily translate to an ability to deploy operationally and effectively, particularly given the in-built dependence of NATO structures on US capabilities and leadership.
1.3 NATO’s attention to fighting international terrorism, particularly through its long counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan, has weakened the alliance’s central focus on collective territorial defence without weakening ‘terrorist’ adversaries.
1.4 The Trump administration’s focus on boosting European defence spending is a distraction from capability issues and the US/UK impediments to European states taking greater ownership of regional security.
1.5 Boosting European NATO defence spending will only exacerbate Russian perceptions of insecurity, and thus aggression and subversion; a better approach for NATO would be to converge spending at lower levels while better integrating and coordinating capacities for collective territorial defence.
2.1 The first point to note in regard to deterring Russian aggression against NATO is that an attack by Russia on any NATO member state remains unlikely. While Moscow chafes against the post-1990 European order, its diplomatic marginalisation, economic decline and the alienation of ethnic Russian-populated territories, it has not made overt irredentist claims on EU and NATO territory and nor does it have any transnational ideology to spread. Its very real and increasing attempts to divide and weaken NATO and its member states derive from perceptions of profound inferiority and insecurity relative to the (until very recently) expanding Western alliance and its preference for regime change in illiberal states. Russian conventional forces, clustered between Moscow and the western borders, could perhaps advance quite easily into the Baltic States but would be far more vulnerable beyond the Baltic Sea and to maritime blockade.
2.2 The second point, as the table below shows, is that there is no deficit in conventional forces between European NATO and the armed forces of the Russian Federation. In fact, in almost all conventional categories of equipment European states outnumber Russian forces by a factor of two or three to one. This is before considering that only about one-third of Russian military strength is normally positioned within striking range of Europe. Russia has certain conventional strengths relative to other European states, notably strategic bombers and nuclear-powered submarines and the ability to mobilise reserves and industry to war, but the picture overall is of Russian weakness relative to Europe and the US. The post-2008 dynamic of massive Russian rearmament and European austerity will not significantly change this imbalance. Russia is trading qualitative advances for the quantitative bulk it inherited from the USSR. It cannot afford both, and is already under significant economic pressure to curtail plans even as most post-Soviet equipment is superannuated and retired.
Table: Military Strengths of USA, Other NATO and Russia, 2015
Country/ | Active Personnel | Combat Aircraft | Attack Helis | MBTs | Major Surface Warships (C/DD/FF) | Aircraft Carrier | SSBN/ | Attack Subs (N/K) |
USA | 1,430,000 | 2,800 | 990 | 2,800 | 90 | 10 | 18 | 54/00 |
Other NATO[2] | 2,050,000 | 2,000 | 450 | 3,000 | 162 | 2(+2)[3] | 8 | 12/63 |
Russia | 770,000 | 900+ | 300+ | 800+ | 25 | 1 | 21 | 19/23 |
Sources: IISS Military Balance, IHS Jane’s, SIPRI. | ||||||||
2.3 The third point is that Russia’s nuclear arsenal is far larger and more dangerous than that of NATO excluding the US, which maintains strategic parity with Russia. However, this lack of parity does not necessarily equate to a lack of deterrence. Both the UK and France possess nuclear arsenals large and potent enough to destroy Moscow and millions of Russian citizens. Given the well rehearsed potential for NATO-Russia confrontations to escalate to use of nuclear weapons, both sides are eager to avoid direct use of force.
2.4 The fourth point is that the quantitative advantages of European militaries over Russia do not necessarily equate to an ability or willingness to defend territory. Russia under Vladimir Putin has a different appetite for geopolitical risk than the rest of Europe. It is also by far the most powerful state actor in Europe in military terms and is willing and able to exploit the inter-state divisions inherent in the EU and NATO to its advantage. The deployability of most NATO militaries is low and the command, control, intelligence and logistic structures are heavily dependent on US capabilities and force multipliers structured into NATO. In the medium term, without these, European states might well struggle to meet the unlikely event of a direct challenge from Russia.
3.1 For many NATO states, not least the US, UK and France, the security threat to their citizens from international terrorist groups is more immediate and more real than the threat from any potential state adversary, including from Russia. However, the challenges of countering the threat from non-state adversaries utilising asymmetric warfare or terrorist tactics are very different from the challenges posed by deterring or defeating potential state adversaries, whether in direct combat terms or some more subversive form of hybrid warfare.
3.2 NATO was created specifically as a form of collective defence against the state-based adversaries of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. As such, it excels at conventional and nuclear deterrence – the credible threat of an overwhelming military response to any military attack on a member state. In short, the cost of an attack by the Soviet bloc states on Western Europe (or, far less likely, North America) would be too high in terms of military damage to be worth countenancing.
3.3 NATO is not credible as any form of deterrence against international terrorism because terrorist groups do not present a target for retaliation in the same manner as a state and, in most cases, utilise terrorist tactics in order to provoke a disproportionate military response. This generates publicity for their cause and aims to radicalise supportive populations impacted by the military response.
3.4 This is particularly the case with transnational Islamist groups like al-Qaida and Islamic State which seek to divide and fracture Western societies as well as provoking revolt within Western-aligned Arabic or Islamic countries. Unlike any state adversary, their strategy is to actively court armed retaliation by Western states in order to advance their narrative of Western crusaderism and Christian imperialism and thus to deepen sectarian divides, weaken Western states and stimulate recruitment of militants.
3.5 The idea that force must, and can, be met with force – that there can a winnable ‘war on terrorism’ – has proved seductive within the contemporary political and media climate but is shallow and treacherous. The massive US and NATO-led intervention in Afghanistan since 2001 has not succeeded in lessening the terrorist threat to Western states, nor in stabilising Afghanistan or its region. While al-Qaida in its classical form has been substantially weakened by sustained military attack on Afghanistan and Pakistan, its affiliates have spread and metastasised into ever more radical and dangerous groups, not least the Islamic State. The aerial war against the Islamic State since 2014 has succeeded in killing tens of thousands of combatants and their supporters (amongst others), and diminished the size and capabilities of their pseudo-state, but not the threat it poses to the West. Indeed, the threat has increased, albeit still being very far from an existential challenge.
3.6 With the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan the main focus (at US behest) of NATO’s energies between 2002 and at 2014, the alliance was hugely distracted from the collective defence objective that had guided it since its founding. Putting aside questions of whether NATO was well suited to a state-building mission or should have deployed outside of its operational area, ISAF’s major commitment to high tempo military operations in Afghanistan meant that, inter alia, European states devoted their defence resources to fighting counter-insurgency operations, buying equipment suitable for use in ‘hot-and-high’ conditions alien to Europe, and maintaining long logistic trains into landlocked Central Asia. Apart from being expensive and dangerous, this clearly came at a cost to maintaining the capabilities to deter or defeat a conventional rival (e.g. air defence, anti-submarine warfare, electronic warfare), especially in the cold, maritime context of the North Atlantic.
3.7 While there is much that can be done to bolster international cooperation against international or transnational terrorist groups, and much common interest between European and North American states, this is largely a question of intelligence and policing and unsuitable for an overtly military alliance like NATO. Indeed, focusing on counter-terrorism, or out-of-area counter-insurgency operations, is likely to substantially weaken NATO as a European collective defence organisation.
3.8 There is a related question of whether or not NATO ought to be more involved – or involved at all – in operations to protect civilians from likely crimes against humanity. This ‘responsibility to protect’ has tended to be conflated with an idea of counter-terrorism since the bombing campaign against Islamic State in Iraq began in August 2014 as an operation to protect the local Yazidi population. While there is merit in international security cooperation to prevent genocide, ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity, the offensive NATO operations in Kosovo (without mandate) and Libya (with a contested mandate) have somewhat sullied the concept among many non-Western states. NATO certainly has tremendous capabilities to bring to bear in protection operations-of-last-resort, but it should be accepted that the UN is the only international body capable of mandating such use of force. In this context, the Trump administration’s apparent contempt for the authority of the UN and multilateral fora is concerning.
4.1 The UK Government cannot currently be said to share with its continental partners a clearer sense of a European defence identity. Indeed, it is unclear whether the UK will seek to remain within the European Defence Agency, as non-EU Norway is and EU-member Denmark is not, or participate in EU military operations abroad, or seek to maintain its important role in constituting EU battlegroups, as some non-EU states do.
4.2 For many EU states, the removal of UK objections to closer military cooperation is a relief and there are multiple initiatives, from an EU military headquarters to joint air transport and refuelling capabilities, that will be advanced by Brexit and aversion to US military leadership. These will advance under varying degrees of EU leadership, in parallel to NATO, but not necessarily duplicating or frustrating it.
4.3 The Trump administration’s clear message that European states must meet their commitment to spend 2% of their GDP on defence or face a reduced US commitment to their defence is unlikely to stimulate an actual commitment from most to meet this target, although many are already moving upwards in their commitments after years of decline. With the exception of the post-imperial powers (UK and France) and the most insecure-feeling perimeters of the alliance (e.g. Greece, Turkey, Poland), raising military expenditure to this level would necessitate an increase in real terms defence spending of between 50 and 100%. In the context of austerity and limited perceptions of threat, this is just not going to happen, especially in big states like Germany (1.2%), Italy (1.3%), Spain (1.2%) and the Netherlands (1.2%).[4] Part of the reason these states, with France, are among the most committed to closer European defence integration is to be smarter in spending their budgets and not duplicating capabilities, especially support and logistics, that can be more efficiently developed in common.
4.4 Two factors are crucial in understanding the imperfect linkage between defence spending and contribution to European security. The first is that there is no direct correlation between level of defence spending and provision of capabilities. Thus, while the UK and France both spend at levels around the 2% mark, both are nuclear and maritime colonial powers that spend large shares of their defence budgets on maintaining nuclear weapons, blue water navies and distant garrisons; their conventional forces within Europe are quite modest. Capabilities-per-euro-spent are also highly divergent within NATO’s non-nuclear states. Germany and Benelux states seemingly get far less value-for-money (or ‘bang for buck’) in spending their large defence budgets than, for example, Italy and Spain, let alone Poland, Turkey or Greece.
4.5 The second is that NATO’s high collective spending on defence in actual terms is a major driver of insecurity in Europe and further afield. While the alliance maintained a balance of conventional and nuclear forces relative to the Warsaw Pact throughout the Cold War, the geopolitical and economic shifts since 1989 mean that NATO already[5] outspends its only possible peer-rival (Russia) by a factor of 13. Even just the EU states currently collectively spend ($241 billion in 2015) almost four times as much on defence as Russia ($66 billion). Coupled with the eastwards advance of the alliance’s membership, this asymmetry generates tremendous insecurity in Moscow, which responds with disproportionate rearmament and a more aggressive, unpredictable posturing of its conventional, nuclear and cyber capabilities.
5.1 What all this means is that, were the European states (here meaning the EU, including the UK, plus Norway, Iceland, Albania) to spend an equivalent amount (in current dollars) on defence as their assumed enemy (Russia), they would not increase average spending to 2% of GDP but decrease it to about 0.4% of GDP. Even using purchasing power parity (PPP) rates to give a more realistic picture of what capabilities such spending might procure, European states would match Russian spending by cutting defence budgets to less than 0.9% of GDP. Of course, such assumptions that Russia is the only potential threat to European security are not wholly accurate and there are inevitably large inefficiencies in splitting spending between 31 militaries. But neither is continent-sized Russia wholly obsessed with NATO. It also looks east to peer rivals China, Japan and the US (Alaska), south to turbulent Central Asia and the Middle East, and is heavily deployed in operations in Syria, Ukraine and the Caucasus. The point is that, even without any US presence, Europe could, if it wanted to, balance any threat from Russia while reducing its own military expenditure, but only if its strategic ambitions were focused on the collective territorial defence of Europe and surrounding seas.
5.2 A good example of how this has not been the case in recent years has been the decline of British anti-submarine capabilities and the ability (a core role within NATO) to patrol the North Atlantic. Core aspects of the UK’s territorial defence were neglected in order to fight wars of choice in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and project naval power into the Persian Gulf. Given the Russian Navy’s comparative advantage in submarine construction and warfare, the government already understands the need to redress this capability gap in partnership with the US and Norway.
5.3 If NATO is to be effective in building confidence and long-term mutual security with Russia, rather than generating an arms race and armed division of Europe, it needs to reconceptualise what signals defence spending sends between Brussels and Moscow. An alternative, and achievable, approach to Washington’s current demands would be for European NATO states to commit to spending between fixed bands of, say, 1% and 2% of GDP on defence. Not exceeding the upper level would send a signal that Europe would not succumb to an arms race. Not falling below the lower rate (as Belgium, Hungary, Luxembourg and some EU neutrals currently do) would send an equally clear message of commitment to collective security burden-sharing. European states could then set their own spending within these bands according to their own commitments, ambitions and threat perceptions.
5.4 To be useful, such minimum spending commitments would need to be pegged to some common understanding of minimum required capabilities – i.e. what quantities of troops, frigates, fighter aircraft, armoured vehicles, etc. 1% of GDP should procure and maintain effectively – in order to incentivise efficiency and avoid perceptions of freeloading. For some member states, even a few like Germany that spend comfortably above the 1% minimum threshold, this would probably entail greater armament. There would also need to be smarter procurement, incentivisation of greater interoperability and deterrence of duplication – no mean feats, but all initiatives that current European defence integration initiatives are working to foster.
5.5 None of this should suggest that a US role, or even leadership of, NATO is undesirable. European-US (and Canadian) military cooperation was crucial to the defeat of fascism in World War II and to the stabilisation of Western Europe in the decades thereafter. However, it does not follow that a significant US military presence is necessary to secure Europe in the 21st century or desirable for either the US, which has huge commitments in less stable, self-sufficient regions, or Europe. Giving the US military the dominant role over allied NATO forces in Europe does send the message that Europe remains incapable of providing for its own security. Seven decades on from NATO’s founding, that message retains some truth but is likely to be self-reinforcing as long as the two principal NATO powers – the US and UK – oppose European states taking greater ownership of continental security. In this respect, at least, the Trump administration’s push for greater European contribution to collective continental defence may be a welcome break with the status quo ante.
This submission was written for ORG by Richard Reeve, Director of the Sustainable Security Programme.
6 March 2017
[1] An additional 2,000 Russian and 1,500+ Non-US NATO active battle tanks are from earlier generations (e.g. T-72).
[2] Of which, about one-quarter of troops and 15% of other capacities are Turkish or Canadian.
[3] Two UK carriers close to completion. Ignores two light carriers of Italian and Spanish navies.
[4] All these figures are for 2015 and from SIPRI’s Military Expenditure Database. They may differ from figures officially recorded by NATO, which exclude non-deployable paramilitary units such as Gendarmeries.
[5] 2015 SIPRI figures.