Air University Review, September-October 1981

NATO Dilemmas

As a coalition of fifteen nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is one of the largest organizations of its kind in the history of Europe. It is axiomatic that both size and time tend to wear down the cohesiveness of any alliance, yet this large, old arrangement persists. But what about the internal strains? The three books at hand deal directly or indirectly with some of these dilemmas.

The Western Alliance considers political strains. The Other Western Europe handles political, economic, and social tensions within and among the smaller powers of Western Europe. Arms, Men and Military Budgets attends to the military difficulties from the American Perspective.

The controlling idea of The Western Alliance* is that NATO is a dilemma for Europe. The nations on the eastern side of the Atlantic are haunted by the fear that the American ally will not assert itself, but at the same time they are preoccupied with the fear that she will so assert herself.

*Alfred Grosser, The Western Alliance: European American Relations since 1945, translated by Michael Shaw (New York: Continuum, 1980, $19.50), 375 pages.

Alfred Grosser is a multilingual scholar, a columnist, and TV commentator in France. He has an impressive list of publications to his credit, mostly concerned with economics and international politics. His interest in economics is especially evident in the present tome.

The dilemma for our European allies pervades most fields of human endeavor. They are convinced, to varying degrees, that U.S. participation in European affairs is vital to both the security of the continent and its economic prosperity. Yet, they all fear, again in varying ways, that the United States will come to dominate the strategy, politics, economy, and even the culture of European countries west of the Iron Curtain. Since the earliest days of the alliance, the problem was to discover ways to eat the cake and have it too—to benefit from U.S. economic and military muscle without having her words creep into the French language and her jeans appear on French derrières. The Germans, partly because of their exposed position on the front lines, were most concerned with security. The French, further from the threat and with the humiliation of 1940 and the Liberation burned into their consciousness, were more concerned with independence.

The book is not the complete history of NATO. It is much more concerned with Franco-American relations than with European-American relations. It is long on economic explanations and short on security analysis—and shorter still on social and cultural matters. To the American reader the chief value of The Western Alliance is its insight into French obstructionism. Grosser often sides with the Americans and castigates his countrymen—in a benign way. Yet, he does pay lip service in a mystical and annoying way to French cultural superiority and the Gallic civilizing mission in the world that is supposed to set France apart from other nations. In my opinion, he never gets at the real root of the problem though he briefly alludes to the shock of 1940 in the last chapter. The French are, justifiably, a proud people. Their language is an admirable instrument. They were preeminent in art for a long time and still hold a commanding position there. Paris remains one of the most beautiful cities on the planet. Not a little of our own political system comes to us through the pen of Montesquieu (via Thomas Jefferson and others). Yet, since the day that Napoleon pitted the flower of French cavalry against the British squares at Waterloo, the collective French military ego has had to absorb one shock after another: the capture of Napoleon III in 1870, the Dreyfus Affair, the Army mutiny of 1917, the collapse of 1940, the agony of Dien Bien Phu, and the endless bleeding in Algeria. Even though the United States had little to do with any of that, it seems that the bigger brother must always suffer the resentments of the siblings when the real sources of their frustrations are beyond their reach. Thus, when Grosser cites U.S. selfish manipulations in the currency market, when he points to U.S. high-handedness in NATO strategy-making, and when he complains about U.S. trade policies, he gives only partial explanation of the friction in Franco-American relations. Much lies buried in the accidents of history and the realm of psychology. Nevertheless, Grosser is fair-minded enough to give his own country a full measure of criticism.

There is little that is new in The Western Alliance, and what there is, is hard for an American to dig out. The editing and translation appear to be defective; many of the sentences seem to be almost straight literal translation, resulting in awkward English and heavy going. Some sentences are far too long. Often the subject comes after the verb and object. Long quotations are presented, and one discovers the identity of the speaker only at the end of the passage. Sometimes it is necessary to go to the footnotes at the end of the book to find who wrote the quoted passage. Statistical information is presented in narrative form when it would have been much clearer as tables or graphs. Finally, the organization of the work is weak. In his introduction, the author complains of the problems of addressing the topic through a chronological, geographical, or topical arrangement. In the end, though he presents the book in three chronological sections, he really has no particular organizational scheme. Within each section, within each chapter, and even within paragraphs he leaps back and forth in time and across borders and from subject to subject. The awkward sentence structure, ineffective arrangement of the quotes, and occasional poor word choice could have been avoided by good editing. However, the organizational problems are beyond redemption and make the cost of reading the book greater than the rewards to be gained from its insights.

The perfect complement to Grosser’s The Western Alliance is The Other Western Europe.* Whereas Grosser concentrates on the affairs of the Western European Big Three (United Kingdom, France, and West Germany), Earl Fry and Gregory Raymond cover most of the other, smaller powers of Western Europe. Their objective is merely to inform, and they achieve it in a direct way using a comparative-politics approach. Organized along geographical lines, The Other Western Europe is divided into five parts: the Iberian Peninsula, the Low Countries, the Alpine countries, Scandinavia, and a concluding section covering West Europe’s international organizations. Each chapter is presented in identical format: the history of each country, its party and institutional structure, its internal cleavages, and its most important current problems. The text is supported by effective tables, footnotes where required, and a preliminary bibliography at the end of every chapter. The authors have a clear, economical writing style that adds to the value of their work and makes it far easier to digest than Grosser’s book.

*Earl H. Fry and Gregory A. Raymond, The Other Western Europe: A Political Analysis of the Smaller Democracies (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-Clio, 1980, $24.75), 251 pages.

The Other Western Europe is intended as a college text and, consequently, is more descriptive than interpretative in nature. Though it really does not argue a thesis, one gathers that the authors fall within the mainstream of American international relations scholars. They would probably be happy were the postwar dream of a united Europe realized, were arms control to progress, and NATO to continue to keep its powder dry. They conclude, however, that though some worthwhile progress has been made in terms of cooperation among the European nations, a United States of Europe is still a long way off—perhaps it will never be realized. Nationalism still reigns supreme in Europe and is quite likely to do so for many decades.

Many of us are not very knowledgeable about the affairs of the smaller democracies in Western Europe, and the book is a handy survey that can help bring the professional officer up to date in short order. It promises to cover Western Europe aside from the Big Three, but it leaves out Italy (a part of NATO and The Common Market) and Finland (a member of neither). Portugal is included (part of NATO, but not The Common Market) as is Austria (a part of neither). There is a disparity between the cover artwork and the text. For example, the cover includes Finland but omits Denmark as part of the subject; the text includes Denmark but omits Finland. This work would be better if it had included all the smaller nations or else limited discussion to those in NATO or The Common Market. Still, The Other Western Europe is well written and well edited. It is an informative and interesting work, and were it not for the inelegant binding and exorbitant price, I would recommend it for the personal libraries of professional officers.

A nice complement to both The Western Alliance and The Other Western Europe, which concentrate on political problems but pay little attention to military dilemmas, is Arms, Men and Military Budgets: Issues for Fiscal Year 1981.** Raymond and Fry introduce the reader to four of the main problems of the NATO alliance: burden-sharing, weapons standardization, control of nuclear weapons, and the difficult in sustaining political unity. Arms, Men and Military, Budgets, which explores NATO’s dilemmas arising from these problems in a clear and interesting way, is the fourth book in a series published by the National Strategy Information Center.

**Francis P. Hoeber et al., Arms, Men and Military Budgets: Issues for Fiscal Year 1981 (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Transaction Books, 1980, $6.95 paper), 186 pages.

Arms, Men and Military Budgets is not a book about NATO. Rather it surveys the entire security problem of the United States from the military point of view, which includes an examination of many of our problems connected with NATO. It does not give much attention to one of the problems covered by Fry and Raymond, the difficulty in sustaining the political unity of the Atlantic alliance.

Nevertheless, Arms, Men and Military Budgets is organized in a crisp, no-nonsense way. It begins with a chapter of conclusions and then has three chapters treating the ideas of the first in greater detail. Hoeber handles the chapter on strategic forces with his usual competence, Norman Polmar and Ray Bessette cover the naval and marine portions of the general purpose forces with like facility, and William Schneider discusses army and air matters impressively.

The problem of burden-sharing for the West has been made more critical by the continuing Soviet buildup in numbers and quality. According to Schneider, there have been improvements in U.S.S.R. logistical systems and tactical aviation equipment and doctrine. Proven competence of the Soviet ground-based air defense has enabled release of air forces from their former defensive roles. These air resources have been transferred from the air-to-air role to the air-to-ground mission. The new generation of Soviet aircraft have longer range and greater payloads and nuclear capabilities—all of which spell trouble for NATO’s rear area supporting forces. These problems have been recognized for a long time but the dilemma is in getting all the nations of an alliance of equals (each NATO power has a veto) to accept their share of the burden.

At the NATO Council meeting in the spring of 1977, all members agreed that each would increase its defense spending by 3 percent annually (in constant dollars) until 1983. For a time both the military periodicals and general media fretted that European members might not live up to that commitment. The United States reversed the trend in her defense spending which is continuing to rise, but Arms, Men and Military Budgets claims that the United States beginning to fall short of the 3 percent commitment---which is far short of the annual Soviet growth in any case. (p. 12)

Weapons standardization is related to the problem of burden-sharing. As Fry and Raymond pointed out, nationalism is alive and well in the West, and that gives rise to the dilemma of standardization. Efficiency and effectiveness require that the weapons and supplies of NATO’s armies be identical; the demands of national economies and national prides dictate that each country do its own thing in terms of research and development and supply. Standardization and interoperability have been a thorn since the beginning of the Atlantic alliance. In fact, the problem is worse now than it was in the beginning. In 1945, only the U.S. armaments industry was intact and only the U.S. treasury was capable of supplying arms. Thus the initial equipment of NATO was automatically standardized to U.S. designs, and the Europeans were pleased to get the material. The Marshall Plan helped to restore European industries, and as they improved, they began to press their own governments for arms contracts. Being democracies, the governments often yielded to local demands over the requirements of the alliance. Further, there was always the suspicion that the United States was interested in standardization not so much for the sake of combat effectiveness as for the health of her own arms industries. Even now, according to Schneider, NATO has still not able to settle on a standardized main battle tank or even on the gun for it. The United States, Britain, and Germany have decided to use the 120 mm weapon, but all the others are equipped with 105s. Further, it is possible that the British will adopt a rifled 120 mm rather than the smooth-bore version used in the German and later models of American tanks. The logistical ramifications of that are immense: the October War suggests that the consumption of ammunition will be far greater in the future than in the past. If that were not bad enough, the United States is using a gas turbine in its tanks while the British and Germans are using diesels! The dilemma has received as much attention as any other in NATO’s history, and though some progress has been made (multiple use of the U.S. F-16 and the European Roland missile), the alliance remains far from a solution.

Fry and Raymond point to the control of nuclear weapons as another of the dilemmas of the Atlantic alliance. No part of NATO’s business is more fraught with dilemmas and emotions than nuclear affairs. European members are afraid that Uncle Sam will not use his nukes to defend them, and they are also afraid that he will use them. They fear that if a Soviet onslaught comes, the U.S. will not risk nuclear attack on their own cities merely to defend Bonn and Paris. They also fear that the United States would indeed use them to blunt the Soviet offensive and at the same time devastate the West European countryside. Yet, when the United States began to speak of a flexible response strategy based on a viable conventional defense, the other NATO members worried that the building of a conventional capability would weaken deterrence because the Pentagon planners could hope for a war without nukes. Thus war would become more "thinkable," and that war would be fought on European soil. There were objections to defending with or without "nukes," and when the Mansfield Amendments seemed to suggest giving up the effort by bringing the American boys home form Europe, there were howls of protest from all the alliance---even France wants them to stay there. Moreover, in America the law of the land, the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), and the inclination of the majority all dictate the nuclear secrets not be shared with our allies. To further complicate matters, France and Britain have developed their own nuclear forces, but the strongest of the European allies, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), is prohibited from doing so by at least two treaties and by world opinion on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

The whole thing came to a head in the midsixties with the multilateral force (MLF) proposal. Europeans have considered themselves second-class citizens within the Atlantic alliance because only the United States (much later Britain and France) had her finger on the nuclear trigger. The MLF was to have been made up of a fleet of surface ships equipped with nuclear missiles and manned by a multinational force. Each of the nations was to have a voice in the decision to fire, but the United States would retain the last word, which prevented the Europeans from getting any real satisfaction out of the idea. The proposal became an obstacle to the Nonproliferation Treaty. Finally, President Johnson gave it up in order to get the NPT. Later, a NATO nuclear planning group was formed to give the allies a greater sense of participation in nuclear targeting policy, but that did not solve the problem.

More recently, nuclear problems have again come to the fore because of the Soviet buildup of theater nuclear forces in Europe. As Arms, Men and Military Budgets shows, the U.S.S.R. has recently deployed Backfire bombers and SS-20 missiles against Western Europe. Since 60 percent of U.S. nuclear warheads in the theater are tied to short-range artillery delivery and the others are old and relatively hard to hide, the Russian deployment creates an asymmetry that is serious. For example, the Soviets are quite capable of opening a war with a limited nuclear attack against a few great airports and seaports and against NATO nuclear facilities. This would make defense through the planned reinforcement from the United States out of the question. It would prevent any retaliation using a limited strike with the NATO nuclear weapons. The U.S. President would then be faced with a dilemma: acquiesce in the Soviet conquest of Western Europe or escalate to the worldwide nuclear holocaust. Of course, the problem has been recognized within NATO since the Soviet deployments began.

One of the proposed solutions was the ill-fated enhanced radiation (EHR) weapon or "neutron bomb." The Communist propaganda apparatus capitalized on that, indicating that a bomb aimed at the destruction of human life instead of equipment and buildings was barbaric. Actually, the choice of names (an American choice) was unfortunate. The EHR could just as well have been called the "reduced blast weapon." The notion driving the design was the need to reduce collateral damage to surrounding civilians and their homes while attacking invading Warsaw Pact formations. The idea was to reduce blast effects, hold down the area of destruction, and rely on the remaining radiation effects to halt the invaders. But that was not the way it came across, for the Soviet propaganda succeeded in selling the notion that a less-damaging weapon was somehow more inhumane than the more damaging weapons mounted on their SS-20s. The EHR destroys with radiation; the SS-20s with blast and radiation. Whatever, it seems that President Carter had to bow to public opinion and postpone the decision to deploy EHR, and that solution to the growing nuclear asymmetry in Europe was denied. Arms, Men and Military Budgets argues that the EHR should be revived, but that does not seem likely in the near future.

In the aftermath of the EHR affair, another solution, that of nuclear-armed cruise missiles, has been implemented. That, too, was subjected to a Soviet propaganda barrage as being somehow escalatory rather than merely an answer to the Backfire and the SS-20. The notion that a subsonic, low-altitude system be deployed in the early eighties is somehow more fearsome than the supersonic, large Backfire deployed in company with thousands of ballistic, MIRVed SS-20s in the late seventies simply did not sell to West European leaders. The decision to deploy the cruise missile to the NATO area was taken in the warning days of 1979. William Schneider thinks that a good thing, but he does not see it as the complete solution. Other sources suggest that the Soviets may have acquired an F-14 with its Phoenix missiles and associated manuals from Iran. If so, then the Russians will have boosted their program to develop a look-down, shoot-down capability in a big way—and that capability will mark the beginning of the end for the cruise missile. Schneider sees greater potential in such things as the deployment of a standoff bomber with appropriate missiles, the upgrading of the Pershing II or some other longer-range theater missile, and even the development of a tactical version of the ABM as components of a permanent solution. In any case, he and his colleagues insist that the increase in military spending that we have seen in the last few years is not enough. They say that major investments still need to be made in the conventional forces both in Europe and elsewhere.

Another dilemma for NATO has been the "elsewhere." The treaty was explicit in defining the area of its application: it applied in Europe, North America, and in the Atlantic north of the Tropic of Cancer. The dilemma was that all of the interests of the European members were inside that area, but a great part of U.S. interests were outside the zone. Thus, it tended to become the duty of America to defend all the interests of her partners; but when she got in trouble in the Pacific or Latin America, there would be precious little help coming from them. In this regard, perhaps, there is a change in the wind.

Inasmuch as the United States is less dependent on Middle East petroleum than are her NATO partners, and inasmuch as only she among the NATO powers has any real power projection capability, perhaps there will soon be a greater interest in cooperative military efforts outside the area of the treaty limits.

According to Arms, Men and Military Budgets and many other sources, things have not been going well for the United States Navy and Marine Corps. The Soviet Navy is alleged to have changed from a coastal-defense to a power projection force of no mean capability. United States disillusionment with Vietnam, among other things, has led to a concentration on the NATO scenario and a neglect of the power projection capability. Meanwhile, arms of all sorts have been proliferating in the Third World, and the new technology seems to favor the defender more than the power projection force. This, according to the authors, has caused a decline in the viability of the amphibious method of projection and, consequently, a need to restructure both the Navy and the Marine Corps to some extent. The rising costs of both personnel and equipment probably mean that there will have to be a smaller but more effective Navy and Marine Corps in the future. The savings, according to the authors, should be applied to buying more but smaller ships to increase flexibility. It seems that there will be no more large carriers, and though VSTOL is not a substitute for conventional planes on large ships, that capability will have to be built up—and it has more than just power projection potential, as with anti-submarine warfare (ASW). Even submarines have grown too big and costly, and Polmar and Bessette urge that we explore smaller alternatives to both the attack and missile boats being built today. As with the rest of Arms, Men and Mi1itary Budgets, the treatment of the Navy and Marine Corps part of the work is competent and balanced.

None of the three works under consideration suggest the imminent collapse of the West. Each argues that the Western Alliance has serious problems. All imply that the problems can be contained though some of the dilemmas are beyond human solution. Whatever the reasons for the Soviet buildup in arms, it is beyond question a reality. Therefore, I think all these authors would agree that it is necessary for NATO to keep its powder dry and continue seeking ways to counter the Warsaw Pact apparent threat without undermining either the prosperity or the liberty of the West.

David R. Mets, USAF (Ret), (USNA; Ph.D., University of Denver) is Professor of History and International Relations, Troy State University, Florida Region. He has served as commander of an AC-130 squadron in Thailand; C-130 aircraft commander in Vietnam; MATS instructor-navigator; ATC instructor-pilot; SAC aircraft commander; assistant professor of history at the U.S. Air Force Academy and West Point; and Editor of Air University Review at the time of his retirement. Dr. Mets has published in Aerospace Historian, Military Review, and the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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