AFP, BERLIN (AFP) Nov 04, 2003-NATO's ambitions to evolve into a sleek fighting machine capable of rapidly deploying to the world's hotspots will require a new approach, political will and above all money, defence experts warned Tuesday.
“We have to give up the old ways of thinking,” said Wolfgang Schneiderhan, chief of staff of the German military, which is undertaking widespread reform aimed at making it more suited to operations abroad.
“We have to make a significant qualitative leap in the capability of our armed forces,” Schneiderhan said at a two-day conference in Berlin of some 200 international defence and military experts.
On Monday, NATO military commander General James Jones told the conference that the Alliance's new rapid reaction force must serve as the model for the future, with troops able to be deployed in as little as five days.
“NATO needs forces that are far more mobile and flexible than in the past,” added the Alliance's civilian chief, George Robertson, at the same venue.
But analysts said politicians from the 19 member states would have to change their thinking about the threats to global security and admit that trouble, mainly in the form of terrorism, could come from anywhere and at any time.
British Field Marshal Lord Peter Inge said that NATO's defence capability can not be improved if the politicians continue with their “head in the sand approach about the scale of the threat.”
“If they want to realise these capabilities they're going to have to dig very deep into their pockets to achieve them,” he warned.
But senior Pentagon adviser Richard Perle said he thought it was unlikely that governments in Europe were ready to increase defence spending to levels comparable to the United States, the Alliance's mainstay.
“I see no sign that this German government or many others in the European Union are ready to make that commitment,” Perle said.
The United States currently spends more on defence than all 15 EU member states combined and has been urging them to increase their defence budgets.
The experts agreed that the future lay in “network-centric operations,” a mantra at the conference, whereby NATO members would use computer technology to more closely share information and resources in times of conflict.
For that to happen in Germany, Schneiderhan said, the government would have to redefine its military ambitions and set clear political guidelines.
“The use of the armed forces has to be looked at with new eyes,” he said.
He said Germany in particular would “have to be technically capable of alliance and give up some of our old ideas” and be ready “to meet threats to our security in the places where they arise.”
Berlin must maintain 35,000-40,000 troops at a high level of readiness to live up to its NATO and EU obligations, and the Bundeswehr armed forces has to be capable of supporting operations or running smaller ones on its own, Schneiderhan said.
That would mean paying for more modern equipment but above all buying costly transport aircraft at a time of economic difficulty.
After the United States, Germany has more troops than any other nation deployed abroad in peacekeeping operations and the “war on terror”.
The experts in Berlin also said that the war in Iraq had highlighted the need for NATO members to have vast numbers of military personnel available to enforce the peace once a conflict was over.
“Sometimes you need more forces for the post-combat phase than you needed” for the war, said the former chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, John Shalikashvili. “Sometimes the armed forces have to do everything.”
“Post-combat operations require lots of people,” said Inge, whose country was the chief European ally of the United States in its war on Iraq.
More US troops have been killed in Iraq since the end of major hostilities was declared on May 1 than died during the war proper.
