military costs

Memo from Europe: Europe’s Shrinking Military Budgets Scrutinized

That was two years ago. Since then, with the Afghan war winding down and pressure from the European Union to limit budget deficits, Europe has only cut deeper.

Now, as President Obama wrestles with his own huge budget deficit and military costs, the responsibility for keeping NATO afloat has fallen disproportionately onto the United States, an especially untenable situation as priorities shift to Asia.

The United States finances nearly three-quarters of NATO’s military spending, up from 63 percent in 2001. And yet among the alliance’s 28 nations, experts note, only the United States, Britain and Greece are meeting NATO’s own spending guidelines of 2 percent of gross domestic product. Even Britain and France — the two leading European nations willing to project military might — are slipping further. France says that by 2014 it may cut deeper still — to just 1.3 percent of G.D.P., down from 1.9 percent this year. By comparison, the United States spent 4.8 percent of its G.D.P. on the military in 2011.

In 2012, for the first time, military spending among Asian nations, in particular China, exceeded that of the Europeans.

“We are moving toward a Europe that is a combination of the unable and the unwilling,” said Camille Grand, a French military expert who directs the Foundation for Strategic Research. “European countries are continuing to be free riders, instead of working seriously to see how to act together.”

Increasingly, without United States assistance, military experts said, Europe’s armed forces have trouble carrying out basic operations as its dwindling financial and political commitment has derailed multiple initiatives intended to make the continent more self-reliant.

NATO’s deputy secretary general, Alexander R. Vershbow, a former senior Defense Department official, said that “the financial crisis has been corrosive to the alliance” and that relations between the European Union and NATO remained “dysfunctional.”

Even as Britain and France have boasted of operations in Libya and Mali, those interventions have revealed Europe’s weakness more than its strength. In Libya, the United States supplied intelligence, drones, fighter and refueling aircraft, ammunition stocks and missiles to destroy air defenses, and in Mali the French required American intelligence, drones, and refueling and transport aircraft.

Senior American officials have warned that unless European countries spend more on defense, they risk “collective military irrelevance.”

A senior American official said that Washington was eager for partnership in the Middle East and Asia, but that “Europe’s decision to abdicate on defense spending increasingly means it can’t take care of itself, and it can’t be a valuable partner to us.”

While the United States would like to be able to rely more on its European allies, many experts doubt that even the strongest among them, Britain and France, could carry out their part of another Libya operation now, and certainly not in a few years. Both are struggling to maintain their own nuclear deterrents as well as mobile, modern armed forces. The situation in Britain is so bad that American officials are quietly urging it to drop its expensive nuclear deterrent.

“Either they can be a nuclear power and nothing else or a real military partner,” a senior American official said.

The challenge is particularly acute as NATO pulls its forces out of Afghanistan after a long, wearying and unsatisfying war, with results widely seen as fragile, even unsustainable. After Afghanistan, with Europeans looking inward and the Russian threat considered more rhetorical than real, some wonder once more about the real utility of NATO.

James M. Goldgeier, dean of the School of International Service at American University in Washington, thinks that NATO has some considerable soul-searching ahead if its European members become increasingly unwilling to operate abroad.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/world/europe/europes-shrinking-military-spending-under-scrutiny.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Economix: The True Cost of Carbon

Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney, economists at The Hamilton Project, are releasing a new paper Wednesday on the costs of American energy policy. They argue:

… our energy choices are based on the visible costs that appear on utility bills and at the gas pump. This system masks the social costs arising from those energy choices, including shorter lives, higher health care expenses, a changing climate, and weakened national security. As a result, we pay unnecessarily high costs for energy.

For example, Mr. Greenstone and Mr. Looney estimate that a coal plant must spend 3.2 cents to produce a kilowatt hour of electricity (and consumers then pay slightly more than this). This price appears to be a bargain, the economists write, but the true costs — once health costs, military costs and the like are taken into account — are more than twice high: 8.8 cents per kilowatt hour.

The paper calls for four steps that will be familiar to anyone who follows climate policy: a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system; more money for research and development; more efficient regulations; and negotiations with foreign countries over similar steps elsewhere. In the foreseeable future, all these steps all seem to be an enormous long shot. But the climate problem is not going away.

In addition to being the director of the Hamilton Project, Mr. Greenstone is an M.I.T. professor and one of the country’s leading environment economists. More from the paper follows:

Our primary sources of energy impose significant health costs on our citizens — particularly among infants and the elderly, our most vulnerable. For instance, even though many air pollutants are regulated under the Clean Air Act, fine particle pollution, or “soot,” is estimated to still contribute to roughly one out of every twenty premature deaths in the United States (EPA 2010b). Indeed, soot from coal power plants alone is estimated to cause thousands of premature deaths and hundreds of thousands of cases of illness each year….

The social costs associated with using carbon-intensive fuels also include climate change. If carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions continue to rise at the current rate, they are likely to drive temperature changes that have significant environmental and health consequences: rising sea levels, storms that are more frequent and more severe, increased flooding and drought, and other dramatic changes in weather patterns. These changes in turn could result in an increase in water- and insect-borne diseases as well as in the loss of biodiversity and, due to floods or droughts, the loss of human lives and livelihoods….

Finally, there are other economic, political, and national security risks associated with current domestic energy policies. Oil still plays an important role in the American economy: it powers most of our transportation sector and is an important input in many industries. Continuing turmoil in the Middle East has raised the profile of energy security and the geopolitical implications of reliance on oil. In part to protect major oil supplies, the United States has maintained a military presence in the Middle East for more than 50 years. On several occasions, it has become mired in military interventions in part to prevent oil supply disruptions, among other objectives.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c17582d3c09198ecaf949cbea2df8116

Memo from Europe: Europe’s Shrinking Military Budgets Scrutinized

Economix: The True Cost of Carbon

Recent News

Partners