A U.S. Marine instructs a Romanian gendarme on the use of an M240B machine gun during small arms marks- manship training in Bucharest, Romania, in February.

EUROPE [CONTINUED FROM PAGE 59]

as often if U.S. forces must conduct assurance exercises, Breedlove ex- plains, “which means more soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines of America have to go to the fight.” He adds, “When F-15s need to rap-

idly take on air-policing missions in the Baltic, we get a real mission, and that’s not a bad thing. But by doing that mission, we are unable to con- tinue training with other NATO allies or unable to continue internal training that we need for our own proficiency.”

Capable allies In March, likely in response to NATO actions, Putin brought his Northern Fleet, airborne troops, and units of his Western Military District to full alert. The snap exercise reportedly involved

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76 MILITARY OFFICER JUNE 2015

38,000 troops, 3,360 vehicles, 110 air- craft, 41 ships, and 15 submarines. The size of the exercise, Breedlove

says, “frankly surprised us. We do need, I think, to begin to look at do we have the appropriate force on the Eu- ropean land mass to respond at speed to these new issues being posed?” In September 2014 at a NATO summit in Wales, the 28 member na- tions recommitted to defending all territories and populations. As set down in Article 5 of the treaty, an at- tack on one is an attack on all. The al- liance also vowed to beef up its NATO Response Force and shape a “spear- head” force of 5,000 from that so air, land, maritime, and special forces components can respond to threats at the periphery of NATO territory within 48 hours. That’s significant, says Stavridis, because the spearhead force truly is European, with com- mand to rotate among British, French, Italian, German, and Polish leaders and be rotationally supported by those nations.

Defense spending by NATO allies,

however, is a mixed picture, he says. While the U.S. spends 4 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on de- fense, the average among other NATO allies is about 1.5 percent of GDP, short of their pledge to spend 2 percent.

That’s not encouraging, says

Stavridis. “But if we had not had the Russian activities in Ukraine, I think it would have fallen even lower.” Relative strength of NATO and

Russia also is important to note. The U.S. and Europe together spend $900 billion annually on defense, more than 10 times Russia’s military budget. NATO has 3.5 million ac- tive forces, plus 4.3 million reserve component personnel, almost all of them volunteers. Russia has 1 mil- lion troops on active duty, almost all conscripts. Russia also can’t match NATO’s 24,000 military aircraft, 800 ships, and 50 airborne warning and control system aircraft. And the U.S. now bases V-22 Osprey aircraft in Europe as part of an enhanced spe- cial operation forces capability. A positive development that out- shines mere numbers, says Breedlove, is the alliance is “more interactive … interoperable, and intermingled.” The chief of staff of U.S. Army Eu-

rope, for example, is a German gener- al. The nations are more intertwined than in the past on intelligence, force structure, command and con- trol, and use of English as a common language. This homogenization is a strength deepened by NATO’s role in Afghanistan.

[CONTINUES ON PAGE 78] PHOTO: SGT. ESDRAS RUANO, USMC