re: "Quote of the Day"

Andrew at Abu Muqawama ("dedicated to following issues related to contemporary insurgencies as well as counterinsurgency tactics and strategy") liked what SecDef Gates said recently.

Money quote(s):

"From the perspective of many U.S. legislators and tax-payers, one of the reasons the states of Europe enjoy such nice social welfare programs is because the United States has effectively subsidized the continent's defense spending since 1989. A few weeks back, I was in a meeting with some representatives from one of our NATO allies, who warned me that if the United States moved troops out of Europe, European states would respond by only developing military organizations capable of operating in Europe and North Africa.

I responded that would be a real improvement!

Currently, the European states seem unable to carry out mid-sized military operations independently."

One of the, at the time, touted advantages of the NATO military alliances was sort of an economy of scale. With all these different nations pooling their military resources, each didn't have to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, and were thus able to specialize somewhat, rather than suffer multiple duplications of effort so that each country had their own full range of military capabilities.

Unfortunately, what we have today is, rather than national specializations, is something more akin to a collection of boutique militaries, each expecting Big Sam to provide all those over-arching (and expensive) capabilities like reconnaissance, logistics, aircraft carrier battle groups, and the like.

"This kind of reckoning between the United States and the states of Europe has been long overdue. Some European states have proven themselves serious about both the alliance and their own national defense. (I'm looking at you, Denmark.) Others have not. If Germans complain with justification that their workers subsidize Greek hair-dressers taking early retirements, it's perfectly fair for the United States to complain German workers enjoy comfy state benefits in part because U.S. tax-payers underwrite their national defense."