NATO Likely To Approve New Military Spending Goals
Brian Everstine February
15, 2023
NATO members are expected to agree
to a new plan to increase defense spending—at a summit in Lithuania in July—as
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown a greater need to invest in militaries.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin,
speaking following a meeting of NATO defense ministers on Feb. 15 in Brussels,
said new defense plans and increased readiness across the organization will
require more spending.
“Our leaders will agree on a new
defense investment pledge to ensure the alliance has the resources to carry out
these new plans,” Austin says. “We had productive conversations about that
pledge and we look forward to working with our valued allies to ensure we all
do even more to invest in our shared security.”
The new investment plan will likely
be budgeted at more than 2% of GDP by 2024 as outlined in a 2014 summit in
Wales, and will be needed to support a strategic concept that focuses on
deterrence and defense, crisis prevention and cooperative security as outlined
during last summer’s meeting in Madrid.
“If it was right to commit to spend
2% in 2014, it is even more right now. Because we live in a more dangerous
world ... So it is obvious that we need to spend more,” NATO Secretary General
Jens Stoltenberg said during a separate appearance on Feb. 15 in Brussels.
Instead of 2% as a ceiling,
Stoltenberg says it should be the minimum to cover spending for ammunition, air
defense, training and other capabilities.
A major area requiring more
investment is the industrial capacity to build key munitions and replace
ammunition that has been provided to Ukraine, Austin says. Critical weapons
include artillery rounds, air defenses and anti-armor missiles.
“Even as we rush to support Ukraine
in the critical months ahead, we must all replenish our stockpiles to
strengthen our deterrence and defense for the long term,” he says.
NATO is reviewing its capability
targets for munition stockpiles as allies have agreed to new multinational
production plans, Stoltenberg says.
He added there is a new project for
allied ammunition warehousing, under which it will be prepositioned and
stockpiled, along with a project dedicated to ground-based air defense.
“What we see is an enormous
expenditure of ammunition, and we have seen that for several months,”
Stoltenberg says. “And that’s also the reason why we actually started to address
that last fall. We convened meetings with the defense industry. We addressed
this issue in different NATO capitals, and now we see that things are actually
moving in the right direction.”
The upcoming NATO summit could be
the first to include Finland and Sweden as member states, if all NATO members
approve their membership. Austin says the two nations are ready to join now and
can bring a lot of value to the military alliance.
“We’ve trained with them in the
past. They’ve invested a lot in modernization, and so they’ll bring a lot to
the table,” he says.
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