…While all of the above has been happening during the last days, weeks, months and years, western states have been continuing on their transformational approach to military forces combined with the willingness to continue effectuating military savings and formulating austerity measures strangling western militaries and their capabilities. Particularly in Europe military forces are becoming dysfunctional – vis-à-vis the international security environment. Small professional forces – the size of few battalions, two brigades at the most – are not well equipped to deal with the rising tide of large-scale military risks and threats that are not only in the horizon, but already here.
Possibilities to develop sufficient, credible and real military capability with the preferred western transformational approach would require much more economic resources than European defence establishments have received during the post-Cold War era. What in the late 1990s was called a “capability gap” between the United States and Europe has during the last 15 years grown even wider. Only the US has been able to finance its military transformation with sufficient R&D and procurement allocations in order to replace lost platforms and soldiers with high-tech capabilities. The only problem is that Iraq and Afghanistan have consumed American strategic thinking for the last 15 years and the notion of large-scale high-end warfighting has not received required attention – on the policy, doctrinal or procurement levels. Läs artikel