SECURITY & DEFENCE
Towards fairer burden-sharing in NATO
Summer 2008
It’s not only in Afghanistan that some NATO allies shoulder a greater share of defence costs and responsibilities, says NATO’s Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. He explains how the problem is now being addressed, and stresses that the alliance offers the best solution to the problem, even though it may never be “totally fair”
Recent headlines like “Two tier Alliance” or “Some NATO allies not pulling their weight” have helped to foster a false impression in some quarters that many of the European allies in NATO are under-performing in Afghanistan, and are either unable, or unwilling to make a greater effort. Naturally, those allies who have been criticised feel that their own efforts and sacrifices are under-valued, and complain about being treated unfairly. But how do you assess or calculate what is a fair and equitable burden?
There is no simple answer to that question, not least because there is no unequivocal yardstick for measuring burden-sharing. Nor should we fall into the trap of reducing burden-sharing to a debate solely on today’s force levels in Afghanistan, because however important these force levels are, they only tell part of the story.
Let me therefore broaden the debate and offer a more holistic perspective by covering three interconnected elements: defence transformation, operations, and the wider context of the international community’s efforts.
It might come as a surprise that I start by highlighting defence transformation as an important aspect of burden sharing. It is a golden rule within the alliance that, for reasons of national sovereignty, the bulk of the forces and capabilities are owned by individual nations – the alliance’s fleet of Airborne Warning and Command System (AWACS) aircraft is one of the rare exceptions. As I don’t expect nations to give up this principle, NATO will continue to depend heavily on the efficiency and effectiveness of individual allies and on their willingness to commit adequate resources to defence. The nations that make up NATO hold the key to equitable burden and risk sharing; they need to make their forces more usable and allocate the necessary financial resources to actually deploy them.
Contrary to popular opinion, the type of forces and capabilities needed by the alliance are not as widely available in national inventories as one might think. Large proportions of NATO allies’ armed forces are still better equipped and suited for static territorial defence, rather than for the expeditionary type of operation needed in places like Afghanistan. And when the right type of forces and capabilities do exist, NATO-led operations are not the only call on these assets; operations led by the United Nations, the European Union or ad hoc coalitions, as well as national requirements, place additional demands on these rare assets.
Developing the necessary expeditionary capabilities is a major feature of NATO’s transformation process, but it’s a process that is costly as well as lengthy. It is not possible to convert territorial forces into expeditionary forces overnight, and the costs of transformation programmes often have to compete with the costs of deploying forces on actual operational missions. Many allies are now facing the dilemma of either spending money on operations or investing it in new acquisition programmes. I certainly am not advocating that we should run operations on the cheap, but nor can we run them at the expense of future capabilities. The fact that many allies still fail to respect the 2% of GDP target for their defence budget clearly imposes limits on their ability to fund operations, and it also widens the capability gap between themselves and those allies that are genuinely investing in usable and deployable forces. This is not only a NATO problem; the EU suffers from similar problems that stem from inadequate defence spending.
While there clearly is no substitute for appropriate defence budgets, I still believe we could be getting more from the current budget levels, especially through a smarter approach to defence acquisition. In spite of the efforts of NATO and the EU, the defence sector in Europe is still very fragmented. This fragmentation exists both on the demand side, with government’s identification of their military requirements, and on the supply side in the defence industry. Fragmentation leads, of course, to unnecessary duplication, unhelpful competition, and as our operational experience in Afghanistan shows, significant gaps or incompatibilities. In Afghanistan, for example, national systems for friendly-force tracking, which are vital aids to preventing accidental attacks on one’s own forces or allies, are not compatible. Extra time and money has therefore had to be invested in the urgent acquisition of NATO friendly-force identification gateways to achieve an appropriate level of interconnectivity between the different systems, and so provide allied commanders with an integrated picture of ISAF troop deployments.
Although these quick fixes are helpful, we run the risk that “urgent military requirements” become the norm rather than the exception. More collaboration is needed on capability development as a means of sharing the burden and dealing effectively with common challenges. In Europe, many national defence budgets can no longer sustain both fully-fledged national forces and a national defence industry. Only smarter multinational and transatlantic cooperation will give us forces that are capable of dealing with the security challenges of today.
It is against this background that NATO and its allies continue to pursue their transformation efforts. I have therefore launched an ambitious overhaul of our defence planning processes at NATO headquarters and in national capitals. Over time, this should provide us with the right pool of forces and capabilities from which to draw for the type of operations that the alliance is conducting, both today and in the future.
Obtaining the necessary troops and capabilities for NATO-led operations is done through a process called force generation. In essence, the operational commander identifies the forces and capabilities he feels he needs to accomplish his mission and nations are invited to offer contributions to meet the stated requirements.
In an alliance founded on the musketeer principle of “all for one, and one for all”, it is vital that all nations are seen to contribute fairly to operations. At NATO, a burden-sharing mechanism was developed to assess the manning commitments of nations for critical operational activities in relation to their gross national income. This sort of arithmetic has the merit of giving some indications on burden-sharing, but it has also showed that the burden-sharing issue cannot be fully captured in graphs and spreadsheets. How does one decide what is a fair contribution from a country of 50m people against a contribution from a country with a population of only 4m? How can you evaluate a contribution of light infantry against the provision of critical enablers such as helicopters or air-to-air refuelling tankers? And over what time period do you make your calculations? How can you measure contributions in one part of Afghanistan against contributions in others, or contributions in Afghanistan against contributions to other operations elsewhere around the globe, whether they be other NATO operations, such as Kosovo, or are UN or EU-led operations?
It is often said that burden-sharing boils down to the political will of national capitals. There’s some truth in this, but it is not the whole truth. Sending soldiers into harm’s way is a national decision, but I believe that collectively NATO could do more to help facilitate capitals’ decisions to deploy their national forces and capabilities.
Common funding, where all the allies pay a share according to their GDP is one of the instruments that can be used to achieve more equitable burden sharing. Traditionally, NATO has applied a policy of “costs lie where they fall”, which means that each nation picked up all the costs for the operational contribution it made to an alliance operation. Over the last couple of years, NATO’s funding policy has been updated to allow common funding to be used as an incentive for the provision of certain theatre-level enabling capabilities, like medical facilities, airports handling troops and supplies, intelligence, air-to-ground surveillance, engineering support, and fuel storage and supply. We also developed arrangements for financial support to short-notice deployments of the NATO Response Force, and currently I am urging allies to consider extending the use of common funding to cover the basic infrastructure needed by rotating forces. Until now, the first NATO country to send in troops has to pick up all the costs of constructing these vital facilities, and that has been a clear disincentive to initiating an operation.
When I read some press reports, I at times get the impression that the media associates Afghanistan solely with NATO, rather than seeing it as a challenge for the entire international community. Yet when we look at the enormous challenge of supporting Afghanistan on its way to stability and security, it’s obvious that burden-sharing cannot take place only within NATO but has to be seen in a much broader international context. ISAF’s contribution to creating a secure environment is clearly indispensable, but greater security must go hand in hand with stronger development. NATO provides a multilateral format for security assistance to the government of Afghanistan, but it also recognises that its contribution can only work if it is part of a broader approach. This idea has been encapsulated in the so-called “comprehensive approach”, which emphasises the importance of all international actors not just NATO but also the United Nations, the European Union, the G-8 and other partners still coordinating their individual efforts more effectively.
From this perspective, burden-sharing should be seen as not just a NATO-centric exercise. Some countries have taken on important responsibilities as lead nations in a G-8 framework, many more have developed bi-lateral frameworks for assistance, and the EU has committed to a partnership with Afghanistan. And we should not forget that the government of Afghanistan itself bears an important part of the responsibility in building democratic institutions in a country free of fear. Assessing burden sharing through this complex network of cooperative models is impossible, but from time to time it is good to put things into perspective and identify NATO’s role vis-à-vis the responsibilities of the broader international community. This is what we have done through the comprehensive strategic political-military plan for Afghanistan that has been presented at the Bucharest Summit
Burden-sharing is an emotive issue, both inside NATO and beyond in the international community, and at times passions run high. But by stepping back and looking at the broader picture, it is clear that it is not just an emotive issue but a highly complicated one. It is not just a matter of having the right capabilities but also having the money and political will to deploy them. It is also clear that no single measure will on its own resolve the burden-sharing problem. But the range of initiatives now underway in the alliance should certainly help: the transformation efforts to increase the pool of usable and deployable forces; the wider use of multinational initiatives; a greater use of common funding to assist force generation; and our comprehensive approach for sharing burdens more equitably across the whole of the international community.
My final point is perhaps the most important: an alliance like NATO, in contrast to many coalitions of the willing, has the political consultation structures, the proven planning mechanisms, the effective command and control and the legitimacy that encourages nations to contribute to an operation in the first place. Alliance solidarity is not just a slogan. The sense of keeping one’s obligations and commitments to other allies upon whom one’s own security ultimately depends, is a powerful driver towards equitable burden-sharing. Totally fair burden-sharing may not be possible, but an organised security organisation like NATO undoubtedly allows us to come closer to it than could any other approach.