The chiefs of defense of NATO members, plus Sweden, met in Oslo yesterday to discuss the executability of the defense plans NATO leaders agreed on at their summit in Vilnius in July. “Never before have NATO and national defense plans been so closely interlinked,” said Dutch Adm. Rob Bauer, the chairman of the NATO military committee, during a press conference after the meeting. Making the plans work included the following steps, Bauer went on: “putting more troops on higher readiness; capability building and development; adaptation of NATO’s command and control structures; creating and sustaining more enablement: logistics, host nation support, maintenance, military mobility, and replenishment and prepositioning of stocks; and crucially: more collective defense exercises and training.”
In this context, Bauer officially announced the plan to hold NATO’s largest exercise since the Cold War, Steadfast Defender. “Over 40,000 troops from across the Alliance will exercise in Germany, Poland and the three Baltic States” early in 2024.
But all is not well in the environment of NATO planning. “Today the Chiefs of Defense expressed their concern that across the Alliance, production capacity is lagging behind, delivery times are moving to the right [further into the future], and prices for equipment and ammunition are shooting up. Right now, we are paying more and more for exactly the same … and that means that we cannot make sure that the increased defense spending actually leads to more security.”
In other words, the trans-Atlantic economy, from which NATO draws its resources, is collapsing. But Bauer put it this way: “Our liberal economies are not apt at creating the prioritization that is so desperately needed right now.”
Does this destruction-minded Dutchman really think that the NATO leaders are prioritizing “liberal,” peaceful economic production instead—butter instead of guns? He must not have checked German, Italian, French or British industrial production recently.
