--- Richard Baker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In conclusion, I think that around 2010-2015 the > European Union will be > about to deploy globally forces generally comparable > in quality to US > forces and around a third as large in number. There > will be some > weaknesses - heavy strategic airlift, strategic > bombing - but the > situation will be very different to how it looks > today. European forces > outside Europe will be roughly one third British, > one third French with > the balance made up by the other states. Germany > will remain > under-represented. In the nearer term, European > forces overseas will be > dominated by the UK, even if they include > substantial French > contributions. > > Rich, who will update his weblog article with this > information as soon > as he gets time.
Hi Rich. It's a very interesting argument, but I don't think I can agree. Very briefly, for two major reasons: 1. I think you're underestimating the qualitative superiority of American forces. Partly this is because of systemic effects. That is, the M1A2 is probably only slightly better than the Leopard or Challenger viewed in isolation. But, when viewed as part of a system, with the IVIS networks activated, and working with Apache Longbows and so on, it's abilities become vastly multiplied. Military forces are so closely integrated that it's very difficult to assess them part by part. The second thing is training - apart from the British Navy (unit for unit, the best trained naval force in the world) no European country puts the sort of expense and effort into training that the United States does, and that's the real key to American military superiority, far more important than equipment. The 1970s era reinvention of the American military, particularly the Army, that saw the creation of the National Training Center and so on, has no equivalent that I am aware of in Europe. 2. The second is that Europe is aiming at a moving target. I agree that, by 2010-2015, Europe will have qualitative forces similar to (although not, in my opinion, equal to) those _currently possessed_ by the United States. What it won't have are forces similar to those that US will possess in 2010-2015. The extent to which the American military is reinventing itself boggles my mind. Just in the period from Afghanistan to now there have been several significant upgrades in doctrine and equipment. Europe does not, so far as I can tell, even have any plans to "leapfrog" something like three generations of equipment and doctrine to get to where it wants to be. It's not in individual systems where this will show up, but in electronics and the little things that it's easy for people to miss. Over Kosovo, for example, US forces flew something like 90% of combat missions, not because individual American aircraft were all that much better than their European counterparts, but because American ECM and ECCM were multiple generations ahead. That's where the problems will arise. The only way to catch up with the US on those grounds is to spend _more_ money than we do, not less, because we already have fixed assets whose cost we don't have to pay, and the sheer size of our forces makes for significant economies of scale. Given that every European country spends less as a % of GDP than the US does, and that trend seems to be increasing, not decreasing, I would say it's more likely that the gap will actually have become larger, not smaller, by 2015. One other note - as I recall, the Charles de Gaulle has become something of a joke in military circles because of the sequence of disasters and incompetencies that surrounded its construction. Stuff like building the ship too short for French aircraft to take off and land. So I'm not sure that it isn't an example of the opposite - particularly since, even if the De Gaulle was as good as it was meant to be, it still wouldn't even approach a Nimitz class in terms of quality. Gautam __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more http://taxes.yahoo.com/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
