In cash terms, The Hague Defence Commitment, as it’s to be known, agreed last week, will add roughly $1 trillion a year to the common defence of the Nato military alliance, according to US president Donald Trump.
But cash alone is never enough. As critical in military terms are the new capability targets the deal will activate, triggering increased cross-border standardisation, improved technical co-operation and more operational integration, aimed at readying the West for war with Russia within five years.
On Trump’s insistence, the European alliance members plus Canada agreed to increase their defence budgets from the current 2 per cent to 5 per cent of GDP by 2035 – 3.5 per cent on “hard military spending” and another 1.5 per cent on related civil costs such as infrastructure and cybersecurity.
That’s why, as the 32 leaders who comprise Nato’s decision-making North Atlantic Council were doing their best not to fall out with Trump over the spike in cost, behind the scenes the military planners who assess risk were calculating what strategic difference the extra trillion will make.
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With military efficiency, a 10-page briefing, “Future-proofing Nato’s industrial capacity: how the decisions at the summit will strengthen the allied defence industry”, was circulated in the summit’s closing hours, underpinning the imperative to reverse “60 years of progressive decline” in spending.
Although the alliance was set up in 1949 as a post-second World War collective security network, it’s worth remembering that with the end of the cold war, however, many of the allies switched their spending away from defence to modernising their societies, in what became known as “the peace dividend”.
Consequently, faced with rapidly diminishing activity, defence companies on both sides of the Atlantic underwent a series of mergers and acquisitions, leading to consolidation in the defence sector.
The 51 significant defence manufacturers that remained at the end of the cold war merged into “the big five” – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, RTX and Northrop Grumman.
Here, European multinationals such as Airbus and missile systems developer, MBDA, emerged.
Everything changed, however, in February 2022 with Russia’s “full-scale and brutal invasion of Ukraine”, which reminded the allies that “although the Euro-Atlantic area is not at war, it is not at peace either”.
The reality, maintains Germany’s chief of defence, Gen Carsten Breuer, is that a full-scale attack on a Nato member is not as far-fetched as it may seem.
Moscow, he says, has been producing at least 1,500 battle tanks a year, with a significant build-up of missiles, artillery shells and drones as well, not all of which are earmarked for the war in Ukraine.
His assessment, shared by other military experts in the region, goes as far as to conclude that the “most vulnerable” area for an attack would be the Suwalki Gap, a largely unpopulated corridor in northeast Poland where Poland meets Lithuania, Belarus and Russia.
The military experts’ briefings to their political leaders have been uncompromising.
“Individually, all of them understand the urgency of the threat that is approaching Nato”, says Gen Breuer, who adds he believes Russia could attack by 2029.
Given that threat, Nato’s new capability targets involve co-investment, co-development and co-production to make the alliance “more lethal” as secretary general Mark Rutte put it.
And that collaboration will be global – reaching far beyond its 32 member states.
Nato’s four Indo-Pacific partners – Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea, known as the IP4 – will be critical to that “enhanced co-operation”.
So too will its partnership with the EU, where the political and cultural links are already close and often overlapping.
The aim overall is achieving a “new coherence” in dealing with a familiar enemy.
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