Originally Posted by
Skroe
Not necessarily.
Once more, the key problem with European defense spending - and ignore the Trumpist idiots who blabber about what they don't know - is redundancy.
Every military has it, tons of costs people think little bit. I've talked about some before (i'll review briefly). I'll talk about a few others.
The ones i've talked about before are procurement related. I'll again refer to my megapost, but pretty much over the last 15 years, 10 different European countries constructed something classified as a "frigate" (4500-6900 tons displacement in European parlance), that pretty much all do the same thing. They all have either the US Aegis Combat System, or the Thales or British equivlanet (or both). They all fire either from US Vertical Launch tubes of franco/british ones. THey all carry roughly similar armament, + or - 15 tubes (for things such as cruz missiles). Some use british / french weapons and sensors. Some use American. Some use both. Some have Rolls Royce Power Plants. Some have GE power plants.
Basically it's like somebody got 10 different countries into big warehouse and said "here's the western equipment availible for a frigate... assemble", and everyone mixed and matched size. Oh and they also all cost the same, about $800 million - $1.2 billion per boat. This is tremendously inefficent because all these programs end up costing about $12 billion, half of which is development and half of which is procurement. This had lead to situations where countries replace 10 legacy boats with 5. Now imagine if instead of this mode, you had that $6 billion development cost spread across 10 countries, and then had, with a common design, all countries spend $11.4 billion on procurement. you'd get nearly double the number of boats.
In the US, operationally speaking what Europe calls a frigate the US calls a "Destroyer" (which are larger for the US than the European frigate - 8000-9600 tons... the names are historic). But the Arleigh Burke class, the US picked one design in the 1990s and is building perhaps as many as 75 of them.
A Euro army's greatest revolution one be the homogenization of equipment. One helicopter, one tank, one submarine, one fighter, one frigate, one tanker, and so forth. It would vastly simplify logistics. It would vastly increase capability because countries would stop having to spend half on R&D and half on buying (and instead can buy more). It would through economy of scale, dramatically lower COST OF OWNERSHIP (annual recurrent cost), because the industrial base across Europe would be modified to support one model, rather than two dozen.
You could probably in fact, cut defense spending on a per-nation basis, were Europe to adopt a uniform procurement model. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
There is a whole theory of management relating to number of "workers' versus number of "managers", and it is directly applicable to the military and thus, spending. For example, right now the US is in the midst of retiring (through voluntary seperation) a quarter of it's Generals. The Army and Marines grew during the Iraq War, while the Navy and Air Force shrunk. Now the Army and Marines are shrinking, so there is a cut in generals proportionate with the smaller service size. THis is a non trivial matter - it's going to save the military hundreds of millions of dollars per year because it's not only their salaries, but their staffs and everything they're in charge of. Imagine the savings of a common European command staff? Billions of dollars per year.
And let's extend that. How many 'airborne brigades' does Europe have? How many "Nuclear Biological Chemical" teams? How many heavy armor formations operating different tanks? Imagine if they all consolidated.. the cost savings from that.
Let's talk facilities. It's a common anti-American refrain on forums for some slackjawed weenie to whine about the 700 bases the US has in the world. The irony is, no one agrees with that weenie more than the Pentagon. The Pentagon desperately wants another Base Realignment Commission. They want to close about 25% of their US bases. They want to consolidate European bases in the West and move them eastward. They want to change the entire concept of basing across the arc of instability. The foreign consolidations are likely to happen, but the domestic consolidations have been fought because a base = tax dollars at home for a Senator or Congressman. But from the military perspective, every base has recurring annual cost of ownership, and the US, even in 2016, has so much excess capacity left over from the Cold War... from the time of Interceptors and Carpet Bombing and Massed Army forces in the 1960s sense, that it would love to get rid of huge amounts of it and save billions of dollars per year. For the US military, nothing would make it fiscally happier, than to turn that 700 number to be like 300. What's the European analog of this? A common Euro military would see what amounts to a continent wide BRAC, keeping or opening bases where they are needed, and closing them where they aren't. Of course, just like the US, if that means closing most military bases in say France, because France is so far away from Russia that it doesn't need the huge network of bases it has now, it would be politically unacceptable to France, just that concept is to the US senate. The truth is for the US... the entire country used to have vast numbers of bases. Now, they're heavily consolidated and where they make sense to be. Boston, for example, used to have an Air Force base guarding it with F-16. Now it is guarded by the same ones that guard New York.
Let's talk strategy because that informs spending as well. The US operates a global strategy. To effectively do that strategy, frnakly, it neads a much larger military and needs to spend more than it has now (how much larger? Going from 279 to 450 ships, spending about $800 billion a year instead of $600B, 15 carriers instead of 11, 60 Army combat Brigrades instead of 45, about double the number of fighter squadrons). But we spend what we do because, objectively, our defense plan is a global one. Europe is not. Europe is continental defense. It spends $300 billion a year, collectively. Consolidated, it could easily spend less because not only does the US put huge amounts of resources into Europe, but the geographic area is so much smaller and less complicated than the Middle East and the entire Pacific Ocean. The US needs its carriers mostly because, for example, to execute a defense strategy in the Western Pacific, that is very far from plentiful amounts of friendly US territory, thus, most carriers are based in the Pacific. By contrast, most aircraft defending Europe have always been land based fighters. Europe may need some and a common 'Euro-carrier", but it will never need 15. Because it is not executing a global defesnse strategy.
Folks foam at the mount about military spending, but it's appalling how much little thought people actually put into it. They forget the elephant in the room, which is, like anything else, even your and mines everyday life, recurring costs of ownership. Your car has a recurring cost of ownership - in the US, it's auto insurance, gas money, and any annual maintenance / inspections. Your house has a recurring cost of ownership - the mortgage, the utilities and ammenities, the insurance and any repairs. Even your computer has a recurring cost of ownership - not just your internet bill but consider how much cheaper your electrical bill would be per year WITHOUT a PC.
This concept applies to the military in every way. X numbers of soldiers cost Y number of billions extra, per year. The cost of ownership of a carrier is $300 million per year - staffing it, using it, deploying it... just owning it. Fighters have a cost per hour and per year to keep them flying. The Military has a gas bill, a medical bill, an insurance bills. We talk about guns and bombs, bombers tanks and strategy, but fundamentally any military in the world is a hugely complex accounting problem.
I write a lot on defense stuff, but I hope this topic is one people actually learn and care about, because it truly informs everything... from US and European strategy fighting Russia and China and ISIS, to policy, to modernization, to taxation and procurement... everything. Cost of Ownership keep Russia's military backwards. Cost of ownership slows US procurement. Cost of ownership is why programs get cut. When you think about anything the military buys or does, the best thing you can do as an informed taxpayer is not to think "how much did that cost to buy", but rather "how much did that cost this past year?" It could be a 30 year old aircraft carrier and it still has a cost.
Europe could save so much money by consolidating these costs, unifying industrial bases and reducing overhead. The "2% GDP target" is a somewhat meaningless fantasy number. 1% for Europe is fine, so long as - and this is the qualifier - the continental spending is efficiently done. In some ways it is. In many ways it isn't. But I'll tell you why a Pan-European Military will happen (and probably under NATO). Because the European taxpayer working age population is in decline. The continent is growing older, and so are the cost of the old upon society, and defense spending truly can't be cut any further. And next generation systems are just going to be very expensive, as you're seeing in the US. So it's going to be a Pan-European approach, or nothing, and nothing will not be chosen.
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