Barack Obama’s new defence plans neglect Europe at their peril

Networking, NATO-style

THE new “strategic guidance” announced by Barack Obama on January 5th, has triggered a wide-ranging debate about the future of American military power. On the right, critics have lambasted it as “declinist”, principally because, quite sensibly, it seeks to reconcile America’s strategic priorities with the need to find around $500 billion of defence savings over the next decade.

In particular, the retreat from the 60-year long assumption that America should be able to prevail in two different major ground wars at once has caused some angst. This is odd given that even with the huge defence budget increases that came after September 11th 2001, America struggled to provide the resources to win in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the latter campaign suffering nearly terminal neglect because of the needs of the former.

Mostly there is agreement that a more focused response (in the form of a new doctrine known as AirSea Battle) is needed to counter China’s fast-growing military capabilities and address the concerns of allies in the region about how the emerging superpower will behave. But there are worries over the administration’s assumption that America will not have to fight a big counter-insurgency operation once the bulk of combat troops have left Afghanistan in 2015, and that it is betting too heavily that counter-terrorism can be left to special forces and armed drones.

Perhaps the least remarked upon part of the new strategy is the seemingly bleak future for American forces in Europe. It glibly refers to “most European countries” now being “producers of security rather than consumers of it” and talks about a “strategic opportunity to rebalance the US military investment in Europe” following the drawdown in Iraq and Afghanistan. The American military presence in Europe, it hints, is an expensive relic of the cold war and it suggests there are no significant threats to Europe’s security other than Iran developing a nuclear-capable ballistic missile, which supposedly will be countered by the new missile-defence system America is starting to deploy.

The number of European-based American soldiers has already fallen from 213,000 in 1989 to only about 41,000 today. It has already been agreed that one of the US Army Europe’s four combat brigades will return to America by 2015. Its commander, Lieut-General Mark Hertling, has recommended a unit and a schedule. However, the Pentagon may now want more, running the risk of downgrading the United States European Command (EUCOM) into little more than a hollowed out headquarters. General Hertling says “there is a tension between the budget and national security and my worry would be that forces will be eliminated that ensure American interests are protected. Once eliminated, they are hard to regenerate.”

The thinking behind the “rebalancing” looks flawed for several reasons. The first is that far from being on oasis of stability, EUCOM’s 51-country region covers some pretty flammable trouble spots, among them Georgia’s border with Russia, Kosovo’s border with Serbia and Turkey’s border with Iraq and Syria. Israel is also within EUCOM. There are less conventional security threats too, from terrorists moving between safe havens to cyber attacks.

The second is that—quite apart from possible flashpoints in its own region—Europe is closer to many of the fights that American forces may be committed to in the future than bases in the United States. US Army Europe currently has two of its four brigades in Afghanistan—the 170th Infantry Brigade in Mazar-i-Sharif and the 172nd Infantry Brigade in Paktika, one of the most violent provinces in the country.

As well as generating forces for missions out of theatre, EUCOM is a service provider for two other important combatant commands, AFRICOM and CENTCOM. On a swing through Turkey and Afghanistan last month, your correspondent attended several meetings between General Hertling and senior officers in the field in which the commander never failed to ask what he could provide to make their jobs easier.

The third is that the new strategy places great emphasis on military-to-military co-operation with other countries. The best way of enhancing that is for American soldiers to train with their counterparts from other nations. General Hertling says that after training, the command’s second priority is to enter into effective partnerships with the many different countries in its region. “By sharing ideas, tactics and procedures,” he says, “you build trust with partners.” During the final readiness exercise before deployment to Afghanistan, the 172nd trained with troops from nine other countries, the same ones, notes the general, whom they would later find themselves fighting alongside.

Nearly 80% of the countries contributing troops to the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan have come from the European region. Many have trained at the US Army Europe’s Joint Multinational Readiness Centre at Hohenfels in Germany. After a big training event in October involving the 173rd Airborne Brigade and soldiers from Slovakia, Britain and Germany, General Hertling’s deputy, Maj-General James Boozer, said: “You’ll hear about theatre security co-operation and partnership capacity building. That is what we do. No units back in the United States do partnership capacity building.”

While the feeble defence effort of too many NATO members riles Americans, the organisation remains the only vehicle that reliably provides partners when America wants to do something and does not want to do it on its own. Mr Obama’s strategic guidance risks talking up the importance of partners while undermining the effectiveness of the command that does more than any other to make those partnerships work in America’s interest.