From the NY Times…..Europe continues to stumble along.
European members have underspent on their armed forces in the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and their military readiness as a result has tanked. Britain has a small fraction of the warships it had then. Germany went decades ignoring NATO’s spending target of 2 percent of G.D.P. and has fewer than 200,000 active-duty service members, compared with America’s 1.3 million. A few frontline states such as Poland and Finland have militaries capable of going toe-to-toe with Russia, but none can replace American capabilities, including airlifts, air-to-air refueling, battlefield intelligence and the ability to precisely strike targets deep in enemy territory.
Since The Hague, most NATO members are spending more on their militaries, most importantly Germany, which is on track to get to 5 percent of G.D.P. before the agreement’s 2035 deadline. For the United States to safely shift its attention and resources to deter China’s mounting ambitions in Asia, as Mr. Trump and all his recent predecessors have tried to do, the Europeans will need to buy the right equipment and coordinate better.
“If you imagine a potluck dinner where everybody gets to choose what they bring,” said Julie Smith, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, “everybody will bring the paper plates and a bag of chips, while the Americans still end up bringing the steak.”
Efforts to build a joint European fighter jet fell apart in June amid French and German squabbling over who would reap the biggest economic benefits. France has not joined the largest air defense collaboration, among more than 20 European NATO countries, preferring to build its own technology. The need to coordinate is only more urgent as the priorities of warfare are changing.