Europe must work to address its military capability gaps and continue to boost its defense spending to share some of the burden of protecting the continent with the United States, French Minister of the Armed Forces Florence Parly said March 18.
“The Europeans have a hell of a homework in front of them if they want to stand on their own two feet and really share the burden with America, and France wants to be at the forefront of that effort,” she said Monday during an appearance at the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
The European allies of NATO have begun to respond to threats from President Trump that the United States might pull out of the alliance if partners did not push more quickly to allocate 2 percent of their country’s GDP to defense spending, Parly said. Multiple European nations, including France, have launched large-scale military procurement programs and have begun contributing to a European defense fund to cooperatively pay for new systems.
“When the Europeans heard this July at NATO that unless their defense expenses move to 2 percent GDP the U.S. would ‘do its own thing,’ they were not reassured,” Parly said. “They started to … wonder if the unthinkable might be slowly happening.”
She noted that the United States military still owns and operates the majority of European-based assets, including 71 percent of the surveillance aircraft; 72 percent of the attack helicopters; 81 percent of strategic transport platforms; 91 percent of air tankers; and 100 percent of strategic bombers and ballistic missile advanced alert systems.
“For all this progress, the reality still remains unflattering,” she said. She highlighted several capability shortfalls that are “especially concerning” and need to be addressed: strategic transport; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; air tankers; and cruise missiles.
Parly, who previously worked as a senior leader of Air France and the country’s state-owned railway SNCF, said Europe must work to consolidate its defense industries, noting that the continent possesses 20 different types of combat aircraft, “while the U.S. only has six.” That affects resources and limits interoperability, she added.
France and Germany are partnering to develop Europe’s next-generation battle tank and future fighter aircraft, and European nations should “support every effort to develop European solutions whenever possible,” she said.
While she acknowledged that Europe needed to contribute more to its collective defense, she also pushed back on the Trump administration’s efforts to seemingly push U.S. arms sales on its partners as a condition for remaining in NATO. Trump has made his “Buy American” initiative a central focus of foreign arms sale deals and announced at the 2018 NATO summit that he would help smaller countries in the alliance procure U.S.-made equipment, Reuters reported at the time.
“NATO’s solidarity clause is called Article 5, not Article F-35,” Parly said. “I am personally more concerned at the notion that the strengths of NATO’s solidarity might be made conditional on allies buying this or that equipment.”