Saving NATO's Foundation

John Deutch, Arnold Kanter, and Brent Scowcroft

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 1999

Article preview: first 500 of 4,453 words total.

Summary:  As the United States and Europe dither, an often-ignored factor is increasingly imperiling NATO's future: the sorry state of transatlantic cooperation in the defense industry. The U.S. and European defense industries are growing increasingly separate, undermining NATO's political base and strengthening America's isolationists. The leading defense companies on both sides of the Atlantic should start working together -- for their mutual benefit, and for NATO's.

John Deutch is Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Director of Central Intelligence in the first Clinton administration. Arnold Kanter is Senior Fellow at the Forum for International Policy and served as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and Special Assistant to President Clinton for Defense Policy and Arms Control. Brent Scowcroft is President of the Forum for International Policy and was National Security Adviser to Presidents Ford and Bush.

TRANSATLANTIC DEFENSE-INDUSTRY COOPERATION

Transatlantic defense cooperation is a little like the weather: everybody talks about it, but nothing much seems to happen. Meanwhile, Europe is building a separate "European" defense industry, based in part on shortsighted, if not downright misguided, calculations of self-interest. For its part, the United States is tentative at best and ambivalent at worst about greater cooperation. But as the United States and Europe dither, the effectiveness of the NATO alliance -- and ultimately its future -- is increasingly at risk.

The costs of inaction mount daily. Declining defense budgets, already stretched too thin, are denied the efficiencies that greater transatlantic cooperation could yield. Both Europe and the United States have therefore had to delay the modernization of their military forces and thus have been slow to take advantage of advances in technology -- notably information technology that applies to command, control, communication, and intelligence. The air war in Kosovo demonstrated a potentially more worrisome consequence: the gap between U.S. and European military capabilities is growing, undermining both NATO's ability to undertake joint operations and the European allies' hopes to participate on an equal footing with America. At the same time, taxpayers in Europe and the United States are paying more than necessary. Most important, the industrial bases of American and European defense are growing increasingly separate, which could undermine the political basis of the alliance itself.

The stability of the Atlantic alliance is built on three mutually supporting principles: political and cultural community, common military defense, and shared burdens and risks. For many decades, improved cooperation between European and U.S. military and related aerospace industries has been seen as central to these principles; such cooperation strengthens NATO by giving it more effective armed forces that are both better equipped and interoperable. But for a variety of reasons on both sides of the Atlantic, industrial cooperation on defense has proved an elusive goal.

In the past, U.S. industry profited from selling sophisticated equipment to NATO countries without sharing much work or technology. An excellent example was the sale of AWACs, an airborne warning-and-control aircraft developed and produced in the United States, to NATO in the 1970s. Another is the acquisition of f-16 fighters by many of our NATO allies. At the same time, the U.S. defense market was largely closed to Europeans, ostensibly on the grounds that European systems were consistently inferior to their American competitors but actually in response to strong domestic political and business interests -- reflected in various "buy America" legislation -- which have no interest in "exporting" defense-budget dollars or jobs to Europe.

Increasingly, our European allies have been producing their own hardware -- even when it is more costly and less advanced than what they could buy from the United States. A good example is the European Fighter Aircraft, which is being developed (principally by the Germans and the British) at significantly greater cost than that of better U.S. aircraft already available. The reasons for what seems irrational if not irresponsible ...

End of preview: first 500 of 4,453 words total.