Military Challenges to Future NATO Enlargement

[Music] my [Music] so welcome to csis online the way we bring you events is changing but we'll still present live analysis and award-winning digital media from our drakopolis ideas lab all on your time live or on demand this is csis online good afternoon i'm mark canty i'm a senior advisor at the center for strategic and international studies let me welcome you to our session today entitled nato enlargement force requirements and budget costs our purpose today is twofold i'll spend a few minutes discussing the csr is report on future nato enlargement that's being released today then we'll follow that with a panel discussion on the topic of nato enlargement and how this report fits into that broader discussion before we move on any further i want to introduce our panel first we have dr emma ashford she is a resident senior fellow at the atlantic council her work focuses on questions of grant strategy international security and the future of u.s foreign policy previously she was a research fellow in defense and foreign policy at the cato institute she is a term member of the council on foreign relations and recently became a non-resident fellow at the modern war institute she holds a phd in foreign affairs from the university of virginia our second panelist is dr john gordon iv he's a senior policy researcher at the rand corporation he joined rand after 20 years in the us army and has since participated and led numerous studies for the office of the secretary of defense the departments of the navy and the army john is also an adjunct faculty member at georgetown and george mason universities where he teaches graduate level courses on counter-insurgency and military operations he received his phd in public policy from george mason university thank you panelists for joining us i'm now going to take about 10 minutes to discuss the csis report that's coming out today having spent many years in the pentagon i've lost the ability to speak without powerpoint so i'm going to do to share my screen here and give me one moment to do that okay are we good okay now everything i touch on in this brief discussion uh is discussed in detail in the report itself there's a five page executive summary and then full deal details in the main text for those who want to dig deeper feel free to ask questions about the study as well as of our panelists but i ask you to submit them through the online mechanism you can see the overview of the project here and the purpose is as we know it a more secure united states and europe and we do that by uh conducting an assessment of the military requirements and costs for future uh enlargement if that should occur it's also important to note what the study the project don't do we're not looking at the uh at past enlargement we are not second guessing uh whether some of that was wise or not there's of course a ongoing debate about that and it's not a complete analysis about further enlargement enlargement is not just about military aspects but also about political so any decision about future enlargement would have to consider the two and we assess the military side the study has been funded by a grant from the charles koch institute and i want to note that coke has been a model funder after we agreed on the project description they stood aside and let us do our work we appreciate their support a key driver in the study has been the change in europe's security advise environment back during the cold war of course there was a confrontation in central europe and the nato membership was stable in the immediate aftermath there was enlargement as russia as you can see was considered a partner maybe a competitor but not the hostile russia we see today and there was some analysis as you can see about the military aspects of enlargement in the 2000s we see an energized russia which rebuilds its military particularly after 2008 and its poor performance in the conflict with georgia it takes an aggressive stance with crimea and eastern ukraine but there was essentially no analysis of force structure costs for circuit requirements and costs after the 1990s and in the united states a little congressional discussion about that either i don't need to dwell on the seriousness of the article 5 commitment for mutual defense although many people note that that only requires consultation in fact for 70 years it has been interpreted as requiring a military response by the other members with all of the military political diplomatic and humanitarian considerations to go with that we looked at five countries three of them ukraine georgia bosnia herzegovina have expressed interest in joining nato two others finland and sweden have had extensive discussions both internally and externally about the possibility of joining nato but they have not made such a request we know in the report that russia doesn't get a veto over nato membership but nato on the other hand can decide who it wants to defend who on which countries it will expend its blood and treasure so let me go back and just say one more thing here and this uh we note a similarity to the situation during uh the cold war that is uh there were soviet forces in eastern europe at that time the united states and nato did not recognize the legitimacy of those forces occupying eastern europe but their presence was a fact that needed to be dealt with and that's a situation we have today with russia and its attitude towards nato enlargement the report discusses the framing and detail here i'm only going to focus on two major elements the first is these the need for forward defense and the hesitation to use nuclear weapons and those sort of go together because one concept of defense is that nato would retreat into the interior and then threaten the use of nuclear weapons huge incentives not to do that not to use nuclear weapons except in the most extreme circumstances and nato countries all desire a forward defense they don't want to give up uh territory so we looked although we looked at both possibilities we focused primarily on the forward defense and then burden sharing there have been discussions about burden sharing literally since the beginning of the alliance and when we did our analysis we split the burdens between the united states and the non-us nato allies and i should also note here that when we did the analysis although we had a pretty good sense about what the u.s costs would be and we cite those we didn't have as good sense about what the cost to non-us nato members would be because until those members were identified it's very hard to say what the impact on their armed forces would be so those costs look lower than the u.s costs they probably in reality would be higher we looked at all five of these countries i discussed earlier but i'm going to focus here on ukraine because it's the most demanding the first scenario we looked at is a pretty standard one involving russian forces we looked at two nato responses we have this minimum deterrence which i mentioned before and you can see what those forces might involve and the rand actually did a study on this the problem was it took a long time for re reinforcements to get there and eventually um the scenario escalated to the use of nuclear weapons the other approach we call hold until reinforced that would be a forward defense until other nato forces could arrive you can see what that force structure looks like i'm not going to go through that in detail but you can see the bottom line there uh 18 000 nato personnel in ukraine and the costs to the united states the project also looked at a peacekeeping scenario in ukraine you can see the elements of the analysis down there on the left on the left side bottom line a force of about 130 000 from nato and the u.s would provide half with an annual cost that you can see right there and the difference in the the range is caused by the level of military operations whether there would be any counter insurgency involved finally we have some recommendations and again i won't go through all of them i will note a couple of them here the major recommendation is to as you can see here assess and consider military requirements as part of enlargement decisions one of the comments we got as we discussed this issue was that the political decision should come first and then nato should figure out the military aspects of the military requirements and our argument was no those two need to be considered together the political aspects as well as the military requirements for bringing that country into nato and the other piece was that there are still even if countries don't become members of nato there are still many ways that nato maintains relationships with other countries and those many mechanisms should continue and there are also mechanisms to as we say strengthen non-members in other words there's nothing that says that nato and the united states cannot continue to provide aid to ukraine for example or georgia as it is doing uh to uh improve their security and finally i note that we have online the report which is now up on the csis website there's a short video that goes with that and then there'll be a recording of this event also on the nato on the csis website okay with that let me uh turn to our panelists to discuss their thoughts about the general topic of nato enlargement and how this report might fit into that discussion i'm going to start with uh emma ashford because she comes first in alphabetical order and we decided that that was the fair way to choose amongst our panelists so let me turn the floor over to emma great thanks mark and i'm really pleased to be here today to talk about this because this is a really interesting paper on a really important topic and you know for myself i am so grateful that people with experience in you know forced posture analysis and military requirements do this kind of work because it enables people like me to talk about some of the bigger strategic and political questions um so i wanted to talk broadly i guess about my big three takeaways from from the paper and from the study's conclusions um and so the first um you know one thing i think this paper does that's really interesting is try to separate out the question of political from practical um so to take the political questions out of nato enlargement and look primarily at the military aspects um you know what would actually be required to defend the new member states that are under consideration not sure you can actually separate those questions fully um you know oops sorry um i'm not sure you can separate those questions fully um you know the political is linked with military in many ways you know will to fight matters right so public opinion is inherently political one of nato's biggest existing problems um is public opinion and the fact that um i think it was pure put it recently that nato publics are far more likely to believe the united states should defend them from russian attack than they are to believe that they would help to defend other states from a russian attack so you know that's a political question with military implications um you know another one is alliance focus right expansion eastward would almost necessarily commit nato to looking primarily towards russia rather than south as some of its members would prefer rather than looking at terrorism or cyber issues you'd need different capabilities so again political question military implications um you know even the question of missions one thing i was struck by reading the discussion of ukraine in this paper which which everyone should really read was the the notion that nato might actually end up doing peacekeeping uh in ukraine in the east against ukraine's own population and it's not clear to me that would be a popular or sustainable mission um in western europe and in the united states and so you know political decisions are woven through the broader discussion even of capabilities but that said you know i i think this paper really shows um that you can't separate the practical from the political so that point that mark made earlier some people say would make the political decision and solve the practical problems later um you know something i learned during the process of the working groups for this paper is that there was really no public examination of the costs of prior rounds of nato enlargement so pub so private studies were done um but but there was really no public discussion of what the costs of defending new members would entail and i think that led to many of the problems that we actually have today um one wonders if some of the war games that happened post-enlargement had happened before if it would have been so popular um so i think the paper really frames this the right way which is you know russia doesn't get a veto and nato membership but it's up to the publics and the politicians in existing member states to decide who they will defend and what costs they will pay so so that's where i think this paper does a really great job um a second point i'll make briefly is um i was struck even as somebody that sort of worked on this before has talked about this a lot i was struck by the scope of the defense actually required for some of these member states and as mark suggested the ukraine one is is definitely the most obvious but but all of them are pretty um extensive require pretty extensive commitment from existing members so you know one stat from the paper is that a counter-offensive in georgia would require the largest amphibious assault since korea for example managing unrest in eastern ukraine as mark alluded to would cost um you know over 500 billion dollars it would require 130 000 troops these are not small costs right and they are just hypotheticals but they are substantive um and i you know so there were a few other things in this sort of discussion of costs that i thought were particularly worth pulling out and one was the idea that even some new member states might pay costs so we talked here mostly about ukraine but there's also a really interesting case study of sweden um which suggests that in part that is the um the question for swedish leaders and and the population as they make this choice about nato is the fact that they themselves would end up paying substantial costs for nato membership because they are more militarily capable um and and suggests you know perhaps unsurprisingly that you know opinion in favor of joining nato is strongest in the states least able to contribute to their own defense and more divided in the states that are actually more capable um which is not generally a good thing for collective defense alive so that's that's really problematic um you know and i think the other notable assumption here is the idea that the united states will bear the majority of the costs um you know i i agree with with mark personally that the burden sharing is an absolute necessity as nato moves forward um but it's not clear that that is going to happen and so this analysis really focuses on what the us would have to provide and it really highlights again just how unbalanced those contributions are um you know in particular that it's not just about who spends what proportion of gdp um but it is as much about what those countries could actually contribute in uh you know in a concrete way and so you know again ukraine is an excellent example here spends more than three percent of its gdp on defense by nato standards that's great but that doesn't actually mean it would be able to contribute um a substantial amount to a concrete conflict situation um and so you know my takeaway started from all of this is that um expansion into most of these countries is is largely an additional burden on existing member states a burden that's concentrated very unequally and that suggests to me that is perhaps unlikely to make it past an increasingly skeptical u.s public um and then finally i guess let me just round up with a couple of thoughts on the the reports conclusions um so you know one point where where i i agree is you know i think the authors are absolutely right the european security environment has changed in the last decade and the last 15 years um but i think you know it's interesting to me to speculate why that was a surprise and why it wasn't considered in previous rounds of enlargement um you know we you know when we went through previous rounds of enlargement policymakers largely said well russia's not a major problem going forward we don't have to worry about this but you know to me that instead speaks to the importance of assessing not even just the sort of current likely defense costs of extending security guarantees in europe and elsewhere but thinking about questioning our assumptions about the current security environment looking at multiple potential futures um you know and thinking about whether the security environment might change going forward so you know for me i think that's a really important takeaway um and then finally i'll conclude with one slightly critical point um you know the authors make a couple of recommendations that i worry might be a little contradictory so um you know to help non-members um we're helpful for european security to continue programs like partnership for peace and other related programs and then to strengthen the credibility of article five and i worry that those are intentional little um because i think the ambiguity of some of those programs the notion that they necessarily lead to nato membership rather than being something you know a program that designed sort of for its own ends um i think is part of why we have some of the ambiguity um you know over ukraine over georgia over u.s obligations to to sort of defend those countries or help them and so i think that question might need a little more explicit scrutiny going forward um but overall i really highly recommend this report i i loved reading it and i learned a lot from it so um i will pass it over to john thank you emma over to you john very good thank you uh emma very much i i agree with uh uh the the points that you highlighted there i'll make a few minutes worth of remarks here to to in many of which will i think complement and and supplement the point the very valid you know points that you raised from your comments so first off like to thank csis for asking me to review the work uh this very interesting important uh uh a controversial topic of nato enlargement native expansion uh so i was grateful the opportunity to both review the work as well as participate in this panel today i think it's really excellent work that the team has done and i have no doubt that now the final product is out and available to people on both sides of the atlantic that it's going to be a very useful product for both political and military decision makers and planners as i said on both sides of the atlantic and and both the politicians and the military people uh need to be reading a worthwhile and valuable and informative piece of work like this um just background to hopefully set the stage for some of the discussion we'll have this afternoon um we all know nato is generally regarded as one most successful lines in history uh from its initial founding in 1949 with 12 members i really did become the cornerstone of uh stability in europe and to a very great extent the entire world um european nations that had fought each other many times in the preceding decades and centuries now stood together in a formal alliance and i think today a lot of people forget what a huge sea change was for the united states to to enter an alliance like nato because less than a decade before nato was formed in 1949 during about 1940-41 right before the united states enters the second world war the united states was still largely an isolationist country you know that that public opinion united states even very shortly before we entered the war uh uh after pearl harbor was still showing the united states still started very very strong isolationist sentiments and we certainly have had a deep isolationist a history and tradition in the country um and then you know when world war ii ends the united states finds itself this leading role of the of the non-communist world and and now it found itself for the first time bound to uh a in a formal a very important critically important alliance uh to committing itself to defend much of western europe with hundreds of thousands of military personnel first time in our history that anything like that had happened a hundreds of thousands of military personnel stationed on the opposite side of the atlantic throughout the duration of the cold war so nato participation was an enormous change for the united states to say the least and i think it's important to note that it worked that that you know harking back to the remarks i made just a moment ago this is this was and has been and still is today a successful alliance um that the united front that nato presented during the cold the dangerous decades of the cold war was really instrumental in convincing the leadership of the soviet union that any war with the alliance was going to carry absolutely unacceptable risk to them um we all know that a nato war support war uh had that terrible event ever occurred would have been a true cataclysm for europe and much of the rest of the world and it could easily have escalated into a large-scale nuclear exchange um the existence of the alliance we is was instrumental in preventing that war from ever breaking out um and indeed throughout the the very dangerous decades of the cold war uh nato did not even have to uh conduct combat operations its focus was the defense of europe against potential soviet warsaw pact aggression during that period and it did work and it didn't even have to fight in order to achieve its primary objective which is a certainly a huge indicator of the success of the whole concept of nato in the years since the end of the cold war there has periodically been this discussion about uh what utility nato has going forward uh that periodically is raised uh uh despite those you know periodic doubts about the future of nato or the need for nato the alliance has been busy uh in fact its combat operations have all come uh after the cold war came to an end as i noted a few moments ago um nato's been engaged in combat operations in the baltics i'm sorry the balkans in afghanistan libya and other operations in places like the indian ocean and this issue that we're really focusing on today of late nato expansion legal enlargement um since the end of the cold war has certainly been one of the most contentious issues the alliances had to grapple with um the first additions that were made uh to nato in the 1950s and then when a reunified germany joined in 1990 have been followed in the subsequent two decades by a host of new entrants uh which have taken nato's area of responsibility much farther to the east and as we know and as emma mentioned this eastward expansion has not been without controversy uh and now the alliance is considering several possible new entrants that would take it even farther to the east uh in particular ukraine and georgia which are you know much of the focus of the research that csis has done here so um and again hopefully agreeing and supplementing the point emma made uh and i think this is this is clearly one of the the main objectives of csis project here having a really clear understanding of the of the alliance military capabilities that would be required what type of military capabilities will be required in what quantities and perhaps also what specific locations these military capabilities would have to be located in order to protect new members is really essential um the five nations that are included in this study have significantly different military needs in the case of some of the prospective entrants geography would confer a considerable degree of security to them and probably minimize the need um for a significant increase in alliance capabilities in other cases however and the two most obvious ones are georgia and ukraine um the location of the possible new entrance would present significant challenges in addition to the relative military weakness of some of those countries which which emma has also mentioned um what are the expectations of the new members uh do they expect a guarantee from the alliance to prevent the loss of any of their territory in the event of an attack by an aggressor are there expectations something less than that the csis report raises that very very important issue um but that's but one issue or one example of the important considerations that nato as an entity as an alliance would have to consider uh that that could drive future alliance requirements and and perhaps drive them uh in a very considerable way um [Music] meanwhile as we are considering the possibility of new entrants which could result in significant new military commitments for the existing nato countries today many of the current nato member states are experiencing significant readiness and they have important limits in their military force structure so how might nato have to change what already troubling military deficiencies would have to be corrected in the event that new members enter the alliance um particularly ones to the farther to the east that are in geographically vulnerable locations um come to summarize uh it was as mark mentioned early on it was not the goal of csis research to focus on the the national political issues associated with with possible uh uh nato mem new nato members nor was their intent to review the uh uh the the the recent entrance uh you know the baltic states for example that have entered nato in the relatively recent past no that was not their charter or their intent to go back and revisit past decisions rather what they're trying to do here and i think this is a very very worthwhile goal that they established for themselves is to examine uh the possible costs uh and the alliance military requirements that could arise uh should any of the countries that are considered as possible new entrants be accepted into the alliance this is a very important project and um decision makers in again on both sides of the atlantic you need to have a clear as clear an understanding as possible what the implications are for their individual countries as well as the alliance as a whole if one or more of these prospective new members does in fact enter the alliance at some point in the future um and so with that i'll conclude my remarks and say again my compliments to csis for their excellent work on this project and i think we've already identified some issues which should prove interesting in this afternoon's discussion and with that back over to mark well thank you both uh let me ask a few questions uh you know my role as mona uh moderator and then i'll go to some of the questions that are coming in from the audience my first one actually i'm going to start with john because it goes back to one of the discussions we had in the working groups which is do we underestimate the forces that are required for some of these um you know prospective or you know potential members let's call that um we uh actually increased you know the the force structure in a couple of places based on the discussion but you you had done a fair amount of war gaming on this uh at rand and so i wanted to give you a chance to talk about you know is this about right you know some people might look at it and say this is way too much you know we have several brigades and pre-positioned equipment in uh ukraine in georgia on the other hand there was some discussion about maybe maybe this isn't enough maybe we've underestimated so let me start with you john um sure great initial question mark and and i think that that uh as emma mentioned how you answer this the question that you just raised on how large a force or how small a force would be adequate to to to improve the security of these new member states again particularly georgia and ukraine because they are the most uh vulnerable geographic locations i i think that um i i noted with considerable interest the forces that you all postulated would be required in each one of these countries um and and you know there's of course no one knows precisely what would be needed because no one knows precisely how a conflict you know might might unfold um but again going back to one of the statements that you all make in your own report about what is the expectation of new member countries is it that their territorial integrity would be maintained with minimal loss of territory in the event of aggression uh or is it something less than that because i think depending upon what the expectations of the member nations are that's really going to what's drive what the required force structure is going to be both from those countries themselves and any additional nato forces uh that might have to be stationed whether it's actual permanent units or equipment sets that would have to be stationed in these countries um ukraine's a huge area for example it's it's a tremendous amount of territory and just the defense of the eastern portion of ukraine uh would could represent a very considerable military requirement i think these are some of the issues that people are wrestling with today about how much force uh is required to defend new members these are the kind of questions that people are wrestling with with with the baltic states as we speak and certainly this issue would come up even more so with large new country new entrants farther to the east you know like ukraine or georgia perhaps even finland so i i think you all have identified the right kind of forces in the report this general mixture of air and ground units and pre-position sets um exactly how much would be needed i i think there's uh there's quite a few dials that can be turned there and a lot would depend on what the expectation of the new entrance would be am i anything you would like to add you know just again i'm i'm not a military force specialist here but i was struck again just reading through this report how difficult the challenge of defending some of these potential members is you know ukraine in addition to its size as john notes we've got you know the potential for a somewhat encirclement where you know russia now holds crimea it obviously borders ukraine there's you know there's potential for troops to come from both sides that that came up in the working groups a couple of times um you know with georgia um you know just the question of airlift into the caucuses and actually getting troops there fast is is almost impossible so you know the logistical difficulties of actually defending these states i think really can't be overstated um you know from the rapport and i think that's you know as john said that you know different scenarios would play out differently but no matter what scenario you're in you're still in a situation where russia is basically reliant on internal supply lines and logistics and nato was operating you know thousand plus miles from from his borders let me ask uh a question that has actually come up in the from the participants and um and keeps coming up with nato and that is if you just look at the numbers um uh you know nato uh outspends russia by many times its forces are much larger you know but it can't seem to turn those resources into deployable capabilities so my question is why do you think that is i say if you if you just look at the numbers you'd say hey this is going to be easy you know you don't need the united states you know just the raw numbers uh would make it seem easy but when you look at what happens when nato tries to deploy um you know it's much more difficult so let me again turn uh to john sure i think this is uh a very valid issue that nato's been struggling with for a very long time and you know that despite the fact that there's an alliance this is an alliance that's been in existence for many many decades now and has some very formal well-established planning procedures to try to rationalize force type and and enforce structured decisions uh among the member states you know there's a there is a decent effort to do that at nato headquarters to try to say you know the germans have this many mine sweepers how many do the brits need to have you know if there's this many fighter squadrons in these countries uh then what might what types of capabilities might we need from other member states so i think there's long been an attempt to sort of rationalize um nato force force planning but i think you always are going to run into the difficulty of doing that because each one of these member nations has got its own national preferences and and i think that that that you know there's in some nations the the willingness to trust you know country a or country b not going to name names here to provide the mine sweepers for example or to provide some critical air capability or provide some critical ground-based air defense capability i i think that there's um [Music] at times at least a lack of willingness to completely trust other countries to provide all those required capabilities despite the mechanisms that the alliance has established over the decades to try to rationalize as best they can so i think that reality that i've just tried to describe here results in inefficiencies so i i think this is one of the ramifications of having um uh nato of the nato alliance composed of of of a collection of independent democratic countries that have got their own national preferences and they might for whatever reason um you know want to maintain more of a particular type of ground force or naval forces than they compared to what the alliance might actually need for them to provide but they have their own national desires their own natural prerogatives their own national preferences that do result in these types of inefficiencies and i'm not sure nato is ever going to be able to get completely beyond that come up i mean yeah so again this comes back to the point that i made at the start that i you know i think this paper does a really great job of separating out the military from the political in saying that we need to talk more about the military questions but military and political are just so tightly linked and and one of the things that that comes out of this analysis is the fact that when you're talking about purely military capabilities in regards to nato versus russia you know russia is operating on its one state you know they can marshal their resources in the way that works best for their national interests whereas nato they're all astronomers all these divergent interests states not necessarily fully trusting one another um you know states that don't want to provide certain kinds of equipment um you know and i think in particular the the long-term reliance on the united states um and we've seen this again in the last few weeks and perhaps we can talk about this a little further i saw there was a question from the audience on it but even in the context of afghanistan right there was some discussion from other nato member states that they might try and stay um you know and assist with evacuation in kabul even you know perhaps not in a nato context but in just a national context and found that they were incapable of doing so without us sort of logistical and airlift support um and so nato has done a lot of work over the years in trying to sort of build up capabilities in a way that reflects the actual sort of full diverse strength of the alliance but it's clearly not been sufficient because we're still in this situation where capabilities are mismatched we can't always deploy what we need and the us often ends up having to sort of swoop in right at the end of the day i i do want to move on to afghanistan in a minute here but i i do want to give nato it's due also you know in the last couple years nato members on the whole have increased their spending and there are a number of initiatives you know the 30 30 30 initiative to improve nato deployability and military capabilities so let me ask just the question again going back to some things that have come up in the q and a's what effect do you think that has had and what you know what what do you think for the future in terms of nato developing the kind of capabilities that would allow it to first defend the existing eastern members and then beyond that defend you know perhaps some additional members to the east and i again i'll start with john sure um i i think one of the the things that nato really should strive to do um during the remainder of this decade and i i make this statement irregardless of whether or not they would accept one or more of these potential new entrants into the alliance i think what i'm about to say they need to do irregardless of that um i i think that nato still has a lot of readiness challenges and uh you know that when you look at the um uh the the readiness levels of a lot of nato military forces whether it's ground units or air units or naval forces that in many cases the the times the lead times the prep times required uh to get units ready to deploy and ready to go to some crisis are are are quite extensive and and there's been a number of studies mark mark uh recalls i'm sure that during the course of their research uh i recommended a a an excellent study that came out a two-volume study by sweden's foi organization uh uh that was done in both volumes were released in february of this year it's titled uh western military capability in uh in northern europe two parts while volume one is called collective defense and volume two is national capabilities and in in this this very well done swedish report on the review the the uh the current state of military capability to include readiness in in not all nato countries but the ones that they considered most likely uh to have to respond to a crisis saying in eastern europe like poland or the baltic states and and some of the things that you see in there are quite telling where you know in the case of many countries it's the amount of time that's required to for example have a heavy brigade and armored bringing a tank brigade ready to deploy to some location outside their blowing borders it is measured in many weeks or months not days or a couple of weeks so i think that um uh that you know as i've said already regardless whether these new countries join the alliance or not i think nato needs to work on improving the readiness of its forces and then that would certainly if that was done you know if if the overall readiness in terms of equipment and personnel the the the times it takes for these certain key units to be ready to deploy outside their own national borders as part of an alliance response to a crisis if you could drive those times down it would increase deterrence it would certainly be to the benefit of new member countries and then the next step i think mark would be uh that once they do that that i just mentioned fixing some of these readiness problems or challenges then then identifying as you suggested in your study what are the specific military capabilities required if you're going to help finland or help georgia or help ukraine defend themselves you know what specific air land naval capabilities are needed um and in what quantities and where do you need to put those things but i think nato should start uh with fixing a lot of the readiness challenges that they've experienced you know they're for for quite a number of years now okay emma yeah i mean so i think we have seen an increase in spending in recent years and that's a really good thing and it's something the us should be encouraging and pushing for more um but i think you know as john pointed out there are some caveats right and he points out the one about readiness that i think is very valid um i'll point out a couple of other caveats you know one is that i think nato has i mean traditionally always suffered from a lack of focus um you know in the the member states are not often all on the same page about what they want to focus on and so you know today we see conversations about whether nato should be pivoting to asia and the us is kind of pushing it to do this when really it would probably be better for them to build up european defense um in lieu of u.s capabilities and so i think that focus question is still very much unanswered um you know another problem or another caveat here is that that spending um continues to be somewhat disparate between the newer member states and the older member states um you know obviously those countries that feel more of a threat are building up and spending more on defense again that's a good thing unfortunately those states are also typically smaller less capable of actually contributing to the larger defense project so that's that's a continuing problem um even as some member states increasing their spending um and then finally i guess the final caveat i'd make is that a lot of the discussions around nato um spending and increasing in nato spending is still subject to a lot of the pathologies um that we've seen in particular in dc but in european capitals for a number of years where spending is not directly translatable into actual outcomes um because it's almost more of a talking point than a reality and and for me the clearest example of this in the last couple of years were the people pointing to dramatic increases in nato military spending in 2020 so many countries suddenly spent about two percent of gdp um the problem is for anybody economically literate you know that that's because the coronavirus everybody's gdp crashed um and so it's not that military spending improved it's that the denominator the gdp got worse um and so i think that that's a silly example right but that is the kind of pathologies that we see in this discussion where it's much more about hitting the metrics than it is about actual deployable forces on the ground and that that's a big problem great well let me go back to afghanistan which has come up in the q and a's and we've touched on it and there are a couple of aspects about afghanistan of course the united states has pulled out a lot of questions about commitments nato has been in afghanistan for quite a while and of course they've been enormously helpful to the military effort there but there have been questions about the capabilities that some nato members were able uh to bring so let me turn to our panel and ask about you know what does the experience in afghanistan say about this issue of enlargement and i'll let emma start since she began this conversation sure yeah so i mean really i guess let me just expand on the comment i made before um about sort of u.s u.s capabilities um in in the context of broader nato um discussions and really i think what we've seen in in afghanistan is reflective of conversations we've seen before on other subjects like like libya or syria um which is that there are countries um in europe that might like to see nato take a more active role in some of these conflicts but they are effectively reliant on the us to do so um and that's because so much of what nato does is basically um you know underwritten by u.s logistical and other capabilities um and you know really i see this as sort of a question primarily for those those nato member states is if they don't want to be purely dependent on decisions made in washington that that may also impact them um then they need to start talking about developing those capabilities um and actually for myself i feel like i'm somewhat encouraged by the debates that i've seen over the last couple of weeks arising from the afghanistan question um you know in european capitals about whether these countries do need to develop their own capabilities um and and i think that that's a good thing and would be a good thing for the alliance overall because it would actually mean that it wasn't so unbalanced and it wasn't just the us providing these these capabilities so i'm i'm kind of taking a glass half full approach to this year i don't think this is about us abandonment i think this is about europe you know needing to step up john yeah i don't i totally agree with what evan just said there i i think that afghanistan the the good news about the nato experience in afghanistan was the alliance did come together that that you had you know multiple countries european nato countries um as active participants you know there were national caveats you know the germans and others you know had some significant restrictions on what they allowed their forces to do but but i think from the the grander strategic perspective the fact that nato was willing to go that far from nato from europe deployed that far from nato from europe um uh is very impressive and many countries did participate uh the command structure worked reasonably well once they got some kinks you know worked out of it so i think that there's you know a considerable amount of good news there um you know at the political strategic level you know the the the the the lessons that need to be learned where some of the deficiencies were exposed was i'll go back to the remarkably just a few moments ago about readiness that a lot of you you know the americans in at times i remember reading american articles about why can't the europeans deploy more helicopters to europe to afghanistan you know helicopters are critical capability by the way helicopters were a critical capability when the soviets were there in the 1980s you know soviets were very dependent on helicopters from moving them around the you know the mountainous afghan terrain and they were certainly very important when the us and nato were in afghanistan so i and and you know you see these american writers and commentators uh uh bemoaning the fact that why can't the europeans send more helicopters to afghanistan and the answer to a very large extent was those readiness problems that i mentioned earlier you know the fact that that you know if you looked into the details of the helicopter fleets in a number of nato countries you know they could they were actually able to deploy but a tiny fraction of their of the the number of helicopter units number of airframes that they had in their inventory so i think that you know again the the readiness issue that i raised you know a few moments ago applies to afghanistan and then i very much agree with emma's point about it also showed the european dependency on the united states in a number of key areas especially you know long-distance deployment and logistics and and i think again i very much stand by the remark that i made a few moments ago that this was a good news story at the strategic level that you had this many nato countries willing to participate in a natal operation this far from europe that's that's good news um but i think that it exposed in addition to those readiness problems that i mentioned uh it exposed that many of these european countries were were tremendous were terribly dependent on the americans you know to get their forces there and to supply their forces you know once they arrived so so in in areas like intra and inter theater lift uh many of the european countries were were um seriously dependent on the americans and and i think that that emma's point in that regard is very very well taken um we'll see what they do about that you know we'll see to what extent nato wants to devote x or y or z percent of its budget to uh what used to be called out of area operations and you know afghanistan is about as far out of area as you can imagine from europe so uh the question is you know do they want to buy more lift strategic lift and intra theater lift to support these kind of operations once they deploy uh you know considerable distances from europe uh we'll see you know because there's a lot of capability gaps that do need to be filled in these nato countries uh we'll see to the extent to which the alliance and the specific countries within that alliance are are going to want to uh to devote a lot of assets i i guess i should mention there are some small number of nato countries the french and british come to mind you know right away that that do have you know better than average ability to protect and sustain forces at considerable distances from europe but but the french and british are the exception you know they're they're not the norm as far as that kind of a capability within the european nato members so back over to you okay thanks um we've had a couple questions about the implications of potential rebalancing or pivots to asia i'll let our panelists think about that for a second while i answer one question that came up in the chat regarding uh the black uh the um the black sea and uh particularly georgia and ukraine the question was that they're already nato members on the black sea turkey romania bulgaria and what does that mean for the military balance there and then potentially for supporting ukraine or georgia were they to become nato members and the answer is absolutely there are nato members on the black sea the problem is that the russians outgunned everybody their black sea fleet has been upgraded in recent years so that it is far stronger than other naval components they also have a strong air component both in crimea and in the caucuses the attitude of turkey would be critical in defense of first georgia and then also ukraine um you have the montreux convention which regulates the flow of forces through the bosphorus and you know if turkey were to enforce that strictly it'd be very difficult for nato to bring forces to bear because of those restrictions similarly turkey borders georgia you know and if turkey were willing to participate wholeheartedly that would make the defense of georgia much much more attainable on the other hand when we talked about this in the working group there was a lot of question about how deeply georgia would want to or rather turkey would want to get involved in a conflict against russia with whom they have been improving relations and you know there's a whole gradation of actions that the turks could take from strict neutrality up to full participation that the working group at least were thinking that there'd be probably something in the middle uh you know maybe allowing nato to operate but not allowing it to use uh you know to not allowing turkish forces to actually cross the border and engage the russians but it would be a critical consideration so with that we were down probably to our last question here which is about the united states and its orientation reorientation to the pacific and its uh encouragement of nato to do the same and does this mean that you know nato is now going to be looking in a different direction and maybe make this discussion moot or how does it how does that affect the enlargement discussion and again i'll start with uh emma since we put john on the hot seat a couple of times first sure yeah so uh i mean so this is an act of an ongoing debate right about the extent to which um nato should contribute to america's new found i guess we're pivoting to asia again but it's great power competition at this time um and i'm not sure that dc is of one mind about this there are people arguing that nato should be contributing to these missions there are people in european capitals arguing that and then there are people saying no nato should um you know european members of nato should instead step up and focus on european security and i i am much more of that latter mind um because i think that europe is increasingly not a priority theater for um the united states the way that it was during the cold war even during the post-cold war period um and just in purely structural terms right if the us is in relative decline economically militarily if china is rising if russia is more militarily capable than it has been in recent years um something needs to fill the gap and the u.s has carried uh the european members of nato for for many years um and those members are very capable of stepping up and filling that gap and so so from my point of view i see this process of burden-sharing burden shifting to europe as as almost an essential part of shifting for the us of shifting its focus to asia um and i think you know i did also note a second question there that i thought was particularly interesting about you know um how feasible is it that europe will sort of rearm and re-mobilize and push back on russia um and i think you know that is that's also an open question because i'm not convinced that european countries are going to pursue the line that america would want them to pursue or would pursue if it was america taking the lead um but i do think those countries are perfectly capable of assuring their own defense and deciding what it is that they want to pursue with regard to russia um so i i think this is all sort of tied together with if the us wants to focus more on asia it needs to talk more about burden shifting and you know just to bring us back to the question of enlargement um further enlargement is kind of a non-starter if you're already in a position of talking about pulling down u.s commitments to the nato alliance so i think in laying out the burdens that we would face from further enlargement i think this paper does a really good service on that front john i'll give you the last word sir um again i find myself agreeing with emma so much this afternoon that said and that's a good thing i think she's uh i i think she had a number of really important points here probably the most the biggest the most important point is perhaps u.s can't have it both ways that that that you know the u.s is increasingly concerned about china um the us military is being oriented more and more and more in the direction of china the europeans are conducting some exercises there you know there's a british carrier group in the with us marine f-35s on board the british carrier the queen elizabeth operating along with u.s and british warships in the in in the pacific but that's not nato you know that's not a nato commitment to the pacific that's you know a a bilateral one-off kind of uh uh uh arrangement for the us and some other specific european countries like the french or the british for example who i mentioned before you know have the uh they're they're they're the exception in most of nato europe that they've got the you know a reasonable ability to project uh uh you know fairly significant forces and and maintain fairly significant forces you know a far field from europe so it's no you know of those who have the capability much less the willingness european countries have capability to send like naval forces into the into the far east to operate alongside the americans you know as part of sending a message to the chinese etc etc you know the british and the french are going to be the ones at least in the near term that are most able to do something like that but getting back to you know my agreement with what emma said um and and my remark that the the us perhaps can't have it both ways is that if the us is in fact reorienting its military focus more and more and more toward the indo-pacom region um and [Music] the us could should uh probably should um expect the european nato countries to assume more of a burden in europe and if that happens in fact in order to help facilitate a u.s reorientation toward the pacific then the u.s needs to be realistic about how much the europeans are in fact going to be able to project power outside europe's immediate region you know some have physical limitations they lack the lift et cetera et cetera logistics capability as you know we talked about earlier but i think that if in fact there's this expectation that the us can shift its focus to the far east and and the europeans will will do more as emma suggested well that means the europeans and daniel nato you can't expect a whole lot from them uh in terms of operations out in asia alongside the americans and and getting back to the the the subject hand or those potential new entrants to nato the five countries that that are the focus of csis's report that if you are going to expand nato to the east in europe with all the challenges associated with doing that we talked about this afternoon then the united states should have an even further reduced expectation that the europeans are going to be able to contribute much to asia because and again there's gonna be some exceptions like i said french and british naval forces are are you know are just one that comes to the top more public possibly some some air forces but if you're going to bring georgia if you can bring ukraine or some of finland or some other combination of countries that are rather geographically exposed in eastern europe you're going to bring them in and then expect the europeans to do more to defend them then don't expect european nato countries to commit much in the way of forces alongside the americans out in asia great well panelists thank you very much we've come to the end of our time i greatly appreciate you joining us and uh having a really interesting discussion uh for audience i point out again that the report is online along with the short video thank you for joining us [Music] you

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

Views: 3,239

Rating: 4.2972975 out of 5

Keywords: Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, bipartisan, policy, foreign relations, national security, think tank, politics

Id: 6rleJZTZVYs

Length: 68min 25sec (4105 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021