Battle for Kosovo Shows Europe Still Needs U.S.

As the Balkans began their descent into war eight years ago, Luxembourg’s veteran foreign minister proclaimed, “This is the hour of Europe, not the hour of the Americans”--meaning that Europeans could solve their own problems.

The calamities that ensued--wars in the independence-minded Yugoslav republics of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the last of which cost more than 200,000 lives--showed the rashness of the forecast by Jacques Poos, the foreign minister.

And what’s been happening for the past month in the skies over Yugoslavia shows just how junior a military partner Western Europe remains, paradoxically at the time when the Europeans have been clamoring for more decision-making power and a “defense identity” of their own.

“If anything, what we’re doing in Kosovo proves that Europe can’t handle war without the Americans,” said a European official at NATO headquarters in Brussels. “Peacekeeping operations the Europeans can do, but not war-fighting.”

As NATO’s 19 members prepare for the alliance’s 50th anniversary summit in Washington beginning Friday, what was supposed to be a celebratory birthday party is shaping up as a soul-searching session.

“Kosovo is clearly going to be a main theme--perhaps the main theme,” NATO spokesman Jamie Shea has said.

For Europeans in particular, some of the lessons now coming out of the Balkans have been jarring. The air campaign against Yugoslavia “has underlined the range of capabilities where Europe is too dependent on U.S. help,” British Defense Minister George Robertson said in a speech Friday at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

“If Europe is serious about shouldering more of the burden in future conflicts like this, it must improve its capabilities,” Robertson said.

Few expect a quick fix.

The label “NATO campaign” that has been affixed to Operation Allied Force, in fact, masks its great asymmetry. Of the roughly 1,000 aircraft committed to or requisitioned for the campaign of airstrikes against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s army and police, about 700 are American, NATO sources say.

The operation is under the command of a four-star U.S. Army general, Wesley K. Clark. And U.S. armed forces, military analysts say, have contributed assets no others can match: B-1 strategic bombers, F-117A Stealth fighters, and two types of tank-hunting attack aircraft, the fixed-wing A-10 “Warthog” and the AH-64 Apache helicopter.

A British Royal Navy submarine in the Adriatic, the HMS Splendid, has fired a grand total of five cruise missiles since Operation Allied Force began March 24, a NATO source said over the weekend. U.S. warships have launched Tomahawks by the hundreds.

“The fact is, without the Americans, without their airplanes and ships and command-and-control structures and all the other things they bring to the order of battle, we can’t win this,” said the European NATO official, speaking on condition he not be identified.

To some on this side of the Atlantic, such U.S. preeminence is humiliating in a year that has seen creation of a common European currency, and one in which the 15-nation European Union is supposed to name its first common representative on diplomatic and security affairs. Many hope that the European trade bloc will turn out to be the skeleton of a future Pan-European government.

“It’s one thing to intellectually know that Europeans are dependent on Americans; it’s another to see it. Here, now, we’re seeing it,” Franklin Dehousse, a professor and specialist in European affairs at Belgium’s University of Liege, said in a newspaper interview.

Jane Sharp, defense analyst at the Institute of Public Policy Research at King’s College in London, predicted that the imbalance in capabilities bared by the Kosovo conflict will galvanize Europe’s NATO members to do more in the future.

In particular, she said she believes that it will energize a pioneering effort undertaken by Western Europe’s two nuclear powers, France and Britain, to sketch out a military role for the EU.

In June 1996, NATO foreign and defense ministers agreed to build a separate “European Security and Defense Identity” inside NATO--jargon for allowing the Europeans to use alliance assets for missions that the United States doesn’t object to but where it found no compelling reason to get involved itself.

Planning, however, evidently has run away from hard reality.

Since the end of the Cold War, estimated one German official at NATO, military capabilities of the European allies have been drawn down by a total of 30%. During Operation Desert Storm, in what must have been a humbling moment, a detachment of the French army, once Europe’s largest, had to be supplied by a U.S. logistics unit to stay in the line of battle.

“If people want a European defense identity, they need to get used to the idea that they are going to need to spend money,” Ben Fiddler, defense-sector analyst with the London-based bank Dresdner Kleinort Benson, told the European Voice, a Brussels weekly.

The level of defense expenditures, however, is just one measure of European weakness. In many cases, European countries still are paying to maintain hardware designed for the Cold War, when the threat was a massive invasion of Soviet armor. “It’s like keeping up a 12-year-old Mercedes, when for the same amount of money, you could get a new one,” a NATO official said.

According to the British Defense Ministry, European NATO members have more than 4,000 warplanes between them. But many are old, lack infrared and laser guidance systems, or aren’t carrying the kind of “smart” bombs or other munitions needed for the precision attacks that the alliance is trying to carry out over Yugoslavia.

After NATO’s earlier peacekeeping operations in Bosnia, and growing talk about the need to use ground troops in the current crisis, “the Europeans now realize the need is for mobility and sustainability--to go in quickly, in force, and to be ready to stay,” a senior NATO official said.

Defense specialists rate the European allies as particularly deficient in long-haul and massive airlift capability, in their ability to get troops rapidly to a battle zone and in warplanes that can take on a gamut of combat missions.

For West European policymakers, the fallout from Kosovo may be enough to change one anomaly: the fact that more than four decades into the process of European integration, defense operations and industries still are a jealously guarded national prerogative.

“The European Union countries [11 of which belong to NATO] collectively spend on defense a bit more than 60% of the U.S. defense budget,” said Francois Heisbourg, chairman of the Center on Security Policy, a Geneva-based think tank. “But out of those 60-and-some percent, we don’t get 60% of your force projection capability, we don’t get 60% of your military intelligence-gathering capability, we don’t get 60% of your theater command-and-control capability.”

After the conflict in Kosovo is over, Heisbourg predicted, there will be a “very significant push” for better Europe-wide coordination in defense planning and spending.

Western Europe’s slowing growth and high joblessness--16.3 million people are out of work in the 15 EU countries alone--are added incentives to squeeze everything possible from each pound, mark or drachma spent on defense.

Unless the Old World starts playing catch-up with the New, a two-speed NATO may be the result. In the future, “those without U.S. technology may be flying blind in relation to those with it,” David Wright, Canada’s permanent representative to the alliance, has warned.

NATO’s Washington summit is expected to chart a future for what is known as the alliance’s “European pillar.” A debacle in Kosovo could fuel demands already aired by some Europeans for a greater say in what they consider an organization overly subject to U.S. influence. But even critics of NATO as it is currently constituted don’t think that’s happened yet.

“What’s been wholly demonstrative in this war is that the Europeans have acted in the framework of NATO alone, inside NATO structures under NATO command, and have applied NATO plans,” said Paul Marie de la Gorce, a prominent left-leaning defense analyst in France.

In any event, as the makeup of Operation Allied Force shows, Europe’s hour is yet to sound.

“Europe must do more to contribute to the alliance’s capabilities. But in the real world, this will take time,” Robertson, Britain’s defense secretary, said Friday. “America, as the alliance’s principal power, must play the role assigned to it by history.”

More on the Crisis

* REASON TO SMILE

Boy separated from family gets to talk to dad on phone. A19

* CONVOY ATTACK

U.S. general admits NATO may have hit civilians. A20