The U.S. Department of Defense is encouraged that NATO members are starting to reverse years of shrinking defense budgets, but more work is needed to ensure the recovery continues, a Pentagon official said July 13.
Since the NATO summit in Wales in 2014, a majority of NATO allies have halted or reversed declines in defense spending, said Rachel Ellehuus, principal director for European and NATO policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. And in 2016, overall NATO defense spending will increase for the first time since 2009.
At last week’s NATO summit in Warsaw, Poland, alliance members renewed a commitment they made at the Wales Summit to increase their defense spending to 2 percent of gross domestic product within a decade. And at this week’s Farnborough International Airshow, Ellehuus noted, the United Kingdom agreed to buy nine Boeing [BA] P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft and 50 Boeing AH-64E Apache attack helicopters.
“Europeans and NATO are stepping up,” Ellehuus testified at a Europe-focused hearing before the House Armed Services Committee’s oversight and investigations panel. But the United States “must continue to encourage our European allies” to follow through on those pledges, she added.
“On 2 percent, I think we do need to keep the pressure on,” she said. “Five allies have stepped up and are now at or above 2 percent, and others are on their way, but we regularly in our office have people coming through and telling us that we need to keep the pressure on because they need to be able to go back to their parliaments and argue for greater defense spending.”
Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) expressed concern that a proposed quadrupling in DoD funding for the European Reassurance Initiative (ERI) could give European allies less incentive to follow through on their own defense spending commitments.
“They have the most to lose in a confrontation, and it blows me away that of the 28 NATO member-countries, only five have met a minimal threshold of 2 percent while we’re spending near 4 percent,” O’Rourke said. “We are creating a moral hazard by upping [the ERI] investment from $789 million [in fiscal year 2016] to $3.4 billion [in FY 2017] without a concurrent commitment in real dollars or euros from our allies on the continent.”