President George W. Bush will make clear at the NATO summit beginning Tuesday his annoyance with what he believes are inadequate allied defense spending levels. Aides charge that many NATO allies are ill-equipped to meet the demands of modern military operations.
The outlays of some NATO partners are less than half those of the United States as a percentage of gross domestic product.
Bush is set to leave Monday to visit Estonia, a NATO member, ahead of the two-day NATO summit in Riga, Latvia. He then heads to Amman, Jordan for talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki Wednesday and Thursday.
Discussion of Afghanistan, where the alliance has 32,000 troops battling the Taliban and working on reconstruction, is likely to dominate the NATO summit. But the administration hopes to use lessons from the alliance's first major combat mission to make the case for broader spending.
"I think that the president will address the issue of the need for more resources for NATO and for NATO countries to spend more for defense," Judy Ansley, senior director for European affairs at the National Security Council, said Tuesday in a telephone press briefing on the summit. "This has been a pretty consistent theme for us."
Nicholas Burns, the U.S. Undersecretary for Political Affairs, and a former NATO ambassador, told reporters Tuesday that Bush will make the case, as he did at previous NATO summits in Istanbul in 2004 and Prague in 2004, for increased spending on systems and capabilities "that are absolutely necessary for success on the modern battlefield and in modern peacekeeping."
While the U.S. currently spends about 3.7 percent of GDP on defense, most of the member countries spend less than 2 percent, he said.
"It is still true that only seven of the NATO allies spend more than 3 percent of their gross domestic product on defense," Burns said.
According to estimated figures published on NATO's Web site, France spent 2.5 percent of its GDP on defense last year, Britain spent 2.4 percent and German expenditures were at 1.4 percent, down from 2 percent at the end of the Cold War. Canada was among the members with the lowest spending, at 1.1 percent of its GDP.
Analysts say that differences in the perception of security threats particularly in addressing terrorism are reflected in the figures.
"In the U.S. there is the dominant perception that you can solve terrorist problems militarily and in Europe the belief is that boosting intelligence capabilities and development aid is more important," said Josef Braml, resident fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.
But despite U.S. pressure, some NATO allies have continued to cut overall spending.
"Many of the European nations, particularly the smaller and medium-sized powers, are hitting the budgetary wall," Michele Flournoy, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington said at a briefing Tuesday. "You have chiefs of defense across Europe making hard choices about what capability do I give up because I am going to go sub-critical in a given area."
The alliance's mission in Afghanistan has exposed some of those shortfalls, the analysts say.
"For NATO, Afghanistan has clearly concentrated the minds on the need for greater capabilities," said Alex Nicoll, director of defense analysis at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "We have seen some decisions by European members to step up purchases of armored vehicles and some movement toward helicopters as a result."
But NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Gen. James L. Jones said Wednesday that calls he had made to members in September for an additional 2,500 troops together with more planes and helicopters for the Afghanistan mission had gone unanswered. He also stressed the need for nations with troops in Afghanistan to lift restrictions that limit their deployment to particular parts of the country or prevent them from taking on certain tasks.
Leaders of member countries hope to address more of the alliance's weaknesses at the summit, including serious transport deficiencies. Some members have agreed to buy the alliance four C-17 transport planes, according to U.S. officials.
