Gates urges NATO's European allies to share more burdens
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U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned on Friday that NATO's European allies "must be responsible for their share of collective defense" to avoid becoming strategically irrelevant.
During his final policy speech before retiring at the end of this month, Gates said some NATO partners "apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets."
"The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress, and in the American body politic writ large, to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense," he told the Security & Defense Agenda think-tank in Brussels.
"Future U.S. political leaders - those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me - may not consider the return on America's investment in NATO worth the cost," he warned.
Gates said NATO's operations in Afghanitan and Libya had exposed shortcomings of the military alliance, particularly lack of military capabilities and political will.
"Turning to the NATO operation over Libya, it has become painfully clear that similar shortcomings -- in capability and will -- have the potential to jeopardize the alliance's ability to conduct an integrated, effective and sustained air-sea campaign," he said.
"Frankly, many of those allies sitting on the sidelines do so not because they do not want to participate, but simply because they cannot. The military capabilities simply aren't there," he continued.
"The mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country, yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the U.S., once more, to make up the difference," he said.
Gates criticized some European nations' reluctance to expand defense budgets and unwillingness to take on combat missions, which has created a two-tier alliance: the United States at one level and the rest of NATO on a lower, almost irrelevant plane.
"What I've sketched out is the real possibility for a dim, if not dismal future for the trans-Atlantic alliance," he said.
"Such a future is possible, but not inevitable. The good news is that the members of NATO - individually and collectively - have it well within their means to halt and reverse these trends and instead produce a very different future."
Facing with shrinking military budgets, NATO member nation must "examine new approaches to boosting combat capabilities to avoid the very real possibility of collective military irrelevance," Gates said.
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