Across Eastern Europe, Military Spending Lags - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
Across Eastern Europe, Military Spending Lags
-
After years in which a combination of fiscal pressures and a complacent trust in the alliance’s protection may have led them to drop their guard,
-
many countries are building from a very limited ability and remain years away from fielding anything resembling a formidable force against a military as large as Russia’s.
- ...6 more annotations...
-
NATO asks member states to spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on their armed forces, yet only a handful of them actually do. Estonia, the small Baltic state at the alliance’s far eastern edge, is one of them, and Poland, by far the largest and richest country on that flank, is at 1.95 percent.
-
Latvia and Lithuania are spending less than 1 percent, though both have indicated they intend to ratchet up to 2 percent by 2020
-
But it will be a decade before the full impact of this modernization is felt in the field, he said.
-
The plan NATO has agreed on — to set up forward supply bases on the alliance’s eastern front in which 4,000 or so troops could be deployed within 48 hours — might be useful in combating a small, stealth insurgency, like the masked gunmen who arrived in Ukraine to set off that crisis, but would be useless in the face of an invasion. “What is required is to be able to hold off any aggression for at least a couple of weeks, to buy some time and provide some sort of sanctuary for reinforcements”
-
In recent years, Russia has massed tens of thousands of troops for exercises just across their borders.
-
When the Baltic states entered NATO a decade ago, they were urged not to spend their limited resources on building large standing armies, but to depend on others in the alliance to come to their aid in an emergency. Instead, the Baltic countries and other former Soviet satellite states focused their military spending on building specialties that they could offer the alliance, such as Estonia’s focus on cybersecurity
