Austerity’s silver lining
Will European defense cuts finally push the continent’s major players toward more significant security cooperation? In several recent statements, NATO’s secretary-general has been talking up ways for members to share capabilities and develop specialties so that the alliance won’t lose it punch as budgets consolidate. We could go for collective solutions instead of pursuing purely ...
Will European defense cuts finally push the continent's major players toward more significant security cooperation? In several recent statements, NATO's secretary-general has been talking up ways for members to share capabilities and develop specialties so that the alliance won't lose it punch as budgets consolidate.
Will European defense cuts finally push the continent’s major players toward more significant security cooperation? In several recent statements, NATO’s secretary-general has been talking up ways for members to share capabilities and develop specialties so that the alliance won’t lose it punch as budgets consolidate.
We could go for collective solutions instead of pursuing purely national solutions. One excellent example that could be expanded, 12 allies and partners have pooled resources together and acquired three expensive so-called C-17 transport aircraft. Individually they couldn’t afford it, but by pooling resources together they have now acquired a capability. And for each individual partner and ally at a lower cost. And finally, we could go for more common funding.
According to this Guardian account, Rasmussen got even more specific, endorsing greater Anglo-French cooperation as a way of maintaining investment in a time of slashed budgets:
A breakthrough between the UK and France could provide the model for sustaining NATO at a time of financial crisis and slashed defence budgets, Rasmussen told a group of journalists, including the Guardian, in Brussels. "It’s very much what I said is the way forward, to identify assets and capabilities that could be shared," he said. Paris and London should pool resources on "laboratories, shared services, and maintenance", he added, in reference to proposals that Britain’s 160 nuclear warheads should be transported to France for servicing by French atomic scientists and engineers.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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