This week’s NATO Summit in Warsaw, held in the shadow of the United Kingdom’s sobering “Brexit” vote to exit the European Union, the highly charged American presidential campaign, and continuing Russian provocations in Ukraine and the Baltic, highlights both the importance of NATO as the vehicle for transatlantic collective security and the chronic disconnect between missions and resources facing the alliance.

As NATO confronts a range of dynamic threats from the east and south, as well as those that defy borders, the need for a cohesive transatlantic coalition to address these complex and difficult challenges is greater than at any time since the end of the Cold War. In the aftermath of Brexit, NATO members, including the UK, likely will seek to show their solidarity by shaping a strong collective approach on these matters.

However, the resources and capabilities that NATO’s European member states can bring to these tasks remain anemic, and the resulting inequality of burden sharing with the United States poses challenges—beyond the current U.S. election—for the long-term sustainability of an alliance.

Nevertheless, it is unlikely that anything new will be done this week to meaningfully address the mismatch between ends and means. The Warsaw Summit necessarily will be focused on the cohesion of the alliance and Europe itself, in light of the Brexit vote and important operational matters, such as shoring up its eastern front through enhanced troop deployments and rotations.

Thus, on issues of budgets and capabilities, this twenty-seventh NATO Summit will likely resemble the iconic movie Groundhog Day, where the same events are repeated again and again. President Obama, like other American leaders before him, will probably admonish European allies to spend more and better money on defense, and the summit communiqué will probably reaffirm the recent allied commitment to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense, and note that in 2016 they have increased their cumulative spending for the first time in years.

While any spending increase is constructive, European NATO funding and capability gaps remain problematic and threaten to worsen in years ahead.

The challenge is how to meaningfully and realistically address this entrenched problem—not just on paper at summits, but on a sustained and measurable basis between summits—in the context of a Europe with limited appetite for defense spending, fueled by powerful long-term secular trends. Rather than continuing the thankless Sisyphean task of rolling stones uphill, the alliance needs solutions that are consistent with evolving European culture.

1. The Sustained Need for and U.S. Commitment to a NATO Evolving to Meet New and Complex Challenges

Contrary to Donald Trump's assertion that NATO is obsolete, NATO is our most important security alliance—not only historically, but for the future as well.

The historical record is clear. NATO has been an enduring alliance—perhaps the most successful in history—that has adapted flexibly to provide for the collective defense of its members in the face of ever changing threats. Sixty-seven years after its founding, NATO has successfully helped to keep the peace and foster integration in Europe, sustained the strong transatlantic security relationship, and offered the type of security reassurance that has allowed our European allies to prosper and focus together with us on a range of common challenges.

Significantly, our European NATO allies answered the call after 9/11 and invoked their commitment to collective defense under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty to support the U.S. effort in Afghanistan—a strong sign of the ties that bind us. Other examples abound of NATO Europe’s participation in combined operations for our common security.

The current security and political environment puts more, not less, of a premium on working effectively in a coalition. The alliance must adapt to address a revanchist Russia to NATO’s east, the rise of ISIS, the Syrian Civil War and the resulting migration crisis to NATO's south, as well as security challenges unbounded by geography, including terrorism and cybersecurity. And, as history teaches, our NATO allies are the ones that have time and again come to the table and the battlefield with us and who can be expected to do so again in the future.

The Possible Effects of Brexit at Warsaw. Particularly in light of the Brexit vote, we should expect a strong show of Allied cohesion at Warsaw in support of new measures against the full range of threats we face. The UK government, a leading contributor to European defense, immediately reaffirmed its full commitment to the NATO alliance in the aftermath of the Brexit vote. The UK also is boosting its military defense of NATO Baltic allies, and from 2017 will lead NATO’s new “spearhead” rapid reaction force.

The implications of Brexit for the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy are more uncertain; various options are possible, and the UK may choose to remain engaged in some fashion.

Regardless, the UK and its European partners undoubtedly want to make it clear that allied unity within NATO will continue. In effect, NATO will again become the central unifying and integrating entity within Europe and help to overcome centrifugal tendencies that are bound to be strengthened in the aftermath of Brexit. Every effort should be made at Warsaw to cement the UK’s role for the future.

The Risks of U.S. Disengagement. Finally, consider the unhappy alternative of a future security environment with little or no U.S. engagement in NATO. Such a scenario, and the removal of U.S. assurances, would increase European insecurities and possibly cause some NATO members to retreat to a more neutral posture or realign themselves to the East. Especially in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, a rollback of U.S. engagement would likely reinforce centrifugal tendencies toward disunity—to the detriment of the United States and Europe.

Indeed, to seriously consider a future without a strong U.S. engagement in NATO would ignore the history of balkanization and conflict in Europe over hundreds of years, and raise the specter of increased tensions and security risks that have drawn the United States multiple times into war, and that NATO was designed to avoid. Is it really in U.S. interests to shake the bonds that have brought peace and prosperity for nearly seventy years?

While there are many contentious issues in national security policy across the political spectrum in the United States today, our participation in NATO has not been and should not be one of them. There is be no place in any serious national discourse for a view that the United States should walk away or substantially diminish its participation in NATO, or somehow use its willingness to participate in NATO as a bargaining chip in some fashion in order to get a “better deal.”

The bottom line is that sustained commitment to the NATO alliance should come before the “art of the deal.”

2. European Spending and Capability Deficit, and Resulting Inequities in Burden Sharing

Even with the expected show of European and transatlantic unity at Warsaw, the challenge is the large and growing gap between the commitments European NATO members have made and the resources—budgets and capabilities—available to perform them.

Contrary to what might have been expected, European defense budgets did not increase significantly after 9/11, and continued to decline throughout that decade, a process accelerated by the financial crisis and subsequent recession of 2008. This map shows European defense expenditures as a percentage of GDP in 2015.

Sustained reductions in defense investment have created significant capability gaps, including declining readiness, deactivation of active duty forces (particularly ground combat units), reduced deployability and sustainability, drawdown of stockpiles of munitions and spare parts, delayed or postponed procurement of major defense items, and a general absence of plans to reconstitute forces should the strategic outlook change. The extent of U.S. engagement needed during NATO’s operations in Libya only reinforces the very real limitations of our European allies.

This burden-sharing problem is not new. For more than two decades, NATO has launched a series of efforts to encourage its members to maintain sufficient levels of ready forces and defense investment. Unfortunately, all of them have largely fallen short. From the Defense Capability Initiative in the late 1990s to the Prague Capability Commitment, one measure after another has simply not moved the needle.

In an effort to reverse the trend, NATO leaders agreed at the 2014 Wales Summit to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense (itself a step back from the seldom-reached 3 percent commitment of the 1980s). Those few nations that were spending 2 percent or more of GDP agreed to maintain that spending level, while those spending less than 2 percent agreed to halt any further declines and to reach the 2 percent guideline within a decade. Nations also pledged within a decade to spend at least 20 percent of their annual defense budgets on major new equipment, including related research and development.

The pledge has had some limited but salutary effects. By the Warsaw Summit, twenty-one of NATO’s twenty-eight members will have honored the first element of the pledge—namely, to halt the reduction in their defense spending. Sixteen allies have increased their defense spending since the Wales Summit, with eastern Europe taking the lead.

Moreover, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg recently stated that the defense spending of NATO members registered a small increase in 2015 for the first time following a long decline. Estimates for 2016 show a further increase, he said: a total uptick of roughly $3 billion (a small percentage of NATO’s total spending).

Nonetheless, only four European member states clearly meet the 2 percent threshold: Estonia, Greece, the United Kingdom and, most recently Poland, which announced plans to double the size of its army. (Turkey is somewhat near or at the 2 percent figure, depending on which data source is utilized.) Relatively low expenditures by Germany (1.18 percent) and Italy (1.31 percent) are significant burdens on the alliance.

And now, the consequences of Brexit for UK defense spending need to be considered. While it is still early, the potential economic consequences of withdrawal from the EU will probably put downward pressure on the UK’s GDP and fiscal posture. Hence, the UK’s ability to maintain even its current level of defense spending will likely be under stress.

Under the circumstances, European NATO’s defense spending will probably not change materially in the near term. First, the pledge to reach the 2 percent level in ten years affords considerable flexibility; countries need not rush to meet the deadline. Second, experiences with similar financial obligations in the EU suggest that countries are likely to honor this commitment in the breach.

Perhaps most significant, the sustained period of decline in NATO European defense spending reflects a long-term, secular trend toward debellicization—after centuries of warfare, Europe has turned its swords into plowshares. For reasons of history, culture and the like, most Europeans hold a more sanguine view of potential security threats. They are more comfortable with the use of the nonmilitary tools of statecraft to solve serious problems than with high-intensity military force (a position that effectively assumes the role of the United States as ultimate guarantor of the security of Europe).

If anything, Europeans also prefer their engagement in so-called Petersberg tasks—ranging from low-intensity war fighting to humanitarian assistance to stabilization and reconstruction—to high-intensity warfare. Only the eastern European countries contiguous to Russia are focused on rebuilding conventional military capabilities.

Moreover, even the renewed threats that Europe has faced in recent years—terrorist incidents such as the Paris bombings, massive migration and a resurgent Russia—do not appear to have materially changed attitudes toward defense spending or the use of force (except in eastern Europe).

Notably, a June 2016 Pew survey conducted in the ten large European NATO countries continues to reflect a strong public preference to solve problems through approaches other than the use of hard power. Indeed, despite governmental commitments, there is little appetite among European publics for increased defense spending. Specifically, public opinion in eight of the ten countries surveyed opposed increased defense spending, with only the people of Poland and the Netherlands favoring a boost. A majority of the public surveyed favor maintaining the same level of defense spending in France (52 percent) and Spain (52 percent), with strong pluralities having the same view in Germany (47 percent), Greece (47 percent) and Italy (45 percent).

The Consequences: Europe’s Likely Capability Trajectory. Even with a significant budget increase (which for the reasons stated is unlikely), Europe’s capability gaps will take years to address—it will take significant development work, substantial procurements and integration of new capabilities into its forces to meaningfully address its capability shortfalls.

Unfortunately, on a more realistic and less robust spending trajectory (even assuming some modest budget growth), Europe will not be able, in all likelihood, to sustain full spectrum military capabilities and will continue to atrophy as a collective force. As one study found, “NATO Europe will have neither the will nor the capability to maintain a multi-brigade expeditionary force over a long distance from Europe for a multiyear peace-enforcement mission.” Even the continued joint training and live exercises central to the credibility of NATO's reassurance and deterrence measures will become difficult to continue.

The wide disparity in U.S. and NATO European spending is even more stark when research and development spending is considered separately: the United States spends nearly eight times more on R & D than European NATO members (roughly $70 billion versus $9 billion), and has largely maintained its level of R & D spending through the sequestration period. The result is a significant and growing wedge in the technological capability of fielded forces over time, as the United States develops and deploys new, transformational capabilities utilized in tandem with new organizational constructs and operational approaches.

Of course, all of this is exacerbated by the fact that Europe has multiple militaries, each with its own acquisition systems and customers. The redundancies and other inefficiencies inherent in this situation mean that there is little ability for any increases in funding that do occur to be allocated rationally for the best uses.

The Burden-Sharing Conundrum. The persistent burden-sharing challenge inherent in these statistics cannot be denied. The United States continues to account for the lion’s share of NATO’s defense expenditures. In 2014, the European member states of the EU and NATO spent an average of 1.56 percent of GDP on defense. This amounts to $370 per capita—about €1.1 per person a day at a current exchange rate. In contrast, in 2014, the United States spent 3.5 percent of GDP on defense, or $2,051 per capita. That is about $5.60 (about €5.1) per American per day—about five times every European NATO and/or EU citizen.

To be sure, Europe does make important contributions that are not reflected in defense budgets, including national resilience against hybrid warfare, the soft-power Petersberg tools that the European Union commits to failed-state situations and the fact that some have spent significant resources deploying their troops in sub-Saharan Africa or as part of the anti-ISIS coalition.

Moreover, Europeans can argue that, because the United States is a superpower that has a broader global reach and set of interests than Europe, it is reasonable to expect Americans to bear a larger share of the collective security burden. Of course, Americans could contend that Europe bears some of the benefits of that U.S. defense investment in other regions.

Nonetheless, even accounting for European investments in other types of security and the different roles of Europe and the United States in global affairs, the burden-sharing deficit is a serious issue. The contribution being made to national security per person across Europe is very low and creates an embarrassing transatlantic imbalance—one that European publics and their leaders should seriously consider. As Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter recently stated, the United States is doing “more than our fair share.”

Nobody is seriously arguing that Europe invest the same or similar amount in defense as the United States. But if Europeans could be convinced to spend just an average of just 25 euro cents more per citizen per day, all of Europe would be well over 2 percent of GDP on average for defense (which would still be less than 25 percent of the U.S. level in absolute terms).

In short, this division of labor, with the United States remaining responsible for the bulk of the military burden and Europe not meaningfully addressing this concern, is not politically sustainable. The focus on burden sharing during this year’s U.S. presidential election is not an accident and should be viewed as something of a “shot across the bow.”

Both historically and today, there has been strong public support for U.S. participation in NATO. 77 percent of Americans believe that being a member of NATO is good for the United States, according to a May 2016 Pew survey. However, this political consensus could unravel as Americans increasingly ask why Europe does not pay more of the security bill.

The U.S. concerns over burden sharing have grown and have been raised time and again within NATO in recent years—Secretary Gates complained about this during the NATO operation in Libya. The issue can be expected to continue to strike a political chord and become increasingly central in the future.

The sobering Brexit vote by the UK highlights the degree to which populist impulses from either side of the aisle could seize on this issue. Some may consider that European free riding is draining U.S. resources that could be used for domestic needs, while others who are more fiscally-minded might prefer to reduce the U.S. contribution in order to reign in overall U.S. spending.

Thus, in the absence of strategic action to address the ends-means mismatch, it is not far-fetched to consider that some future U.S. candidate or elected leader might seek a tax on European imports to address the security cost deficit. American political leaders who favor U.S. engagement in NATO may not be able to protect against this logic in the years to come.

3. Building NATO Coalition Capabilities and Interoperability: A Shared Responsibility

In fairness, our NATO European allies do not bear all of the responsibility for the atrophying of their capabilities and, ultimately, our combined NATO capability for coalition warfare.

Certainly, the Obama administration has viewed coalition war as a core element of U.S. national security strategy for a number of well-known reasons. In an era of sequestration and beyond, we simply lack the resources to go it alone; we need to do what we can to share the burden and, in particular, multiply the effects of our coalition partners’ capabilities, getting the most out of what they have across nations with a wide range of capabilities.

In practice, the Obama administration, like its immediate predecessors, has assembled varying coalitions, including NATO and its members, on a variety of issues and for a range of international operations—from Afghanistan to Libya to ISIS. We have worked hard for years to establish and sustain these coalitions.

However, despite the U.S. policy commitment to coalition operations and our engagement in major coalition operations in practice (through NATO and more broadly), in reality, we have put little serious effort—little of our bandwidth—into developing and enhancing true coalition-warfare capabilities of the United States and its allies and ensuring interoperability across civil and military capabilities at very different levels of capability.

In truth, existing U.S. efforts with our NATO allies in the coalition warfare arena are underplanned, underfunded and not well organized—with little in the way of planning road maps, long-term investments, serious or sustained training, or information sharing needed to empower our allies and get the most of their capabilities while limiting our own burdens.

Most tellingly, the efforts underway are relatively fractured, with no single Pentagon official in charge of advancing the capabilities of, and U.S. interoperability with, coalition forces.            

In fact, the United States expends most of its energy on putting together the ad hoc coalition of the moment, as if we are engaged in a game of pickup basketball. Our focus is typically on seeking out other NATO members with our cup out for contributions to today’s coalition—to be sure, a legitimate approach and need. But it leaves us without the time or energy for deeper, long-term efforts to build, sustain, and render more effective other NATO members’ capabilities for future coalition efforts.

There are three areas where U.S. efforts to develop NATO countries’ coalition capabilities are seriously undernourished:

a. Planning. The United States, for all its rhetoric, has not sufficiently built coalition warfare in our military planning across the range of threats and scenarios we may face. Our national military-force planning largely focuses on going it alone today, rather than examining what our NATO allies can bring to the table in each scenario and how to incentivize them to enhance and better utilize those capabilities.

The United States does not systematically examine each military scenario, identify areas where the United States have limitations or could use augmented capabilities, and work with specific allies (within NATO or otherwise) on a sustained basis to fill those gaps.

While NATO does have parallel force planning and generation efforts, where countries pledge to contribute what they already have or have planned, they have not meaningfully addressed the capabilities gap. NATO’s force-generation system needs serious reform.

b. Capabilities. Since the Defense Capabilities Initiative of the late 1990s, the United States has not spent meaningful time to press our NATO allies in a realistic fashion to add specific, meaningful capacity that can fill our shortfalls, potentially multiply the effects of European capabilities, and maximize our overall coalition efforts.

Rather, we have largely been in the role of a cheerleader that has become more vocally forceful over time, plaintively asking at summits and ministerials that Europe spend more and better. However, we have not done much between diplomatic meetings to incentivize the realistic development of coalition forces that can shift the burden off our own forces.

Even the most recent 2 percent pledge puts the entire burden of effort on the European side of the house. With the commitment enshrined in writing, the United States waits and watches for its European allies to act rather than incentivize them to take specific steps to meet the pledge.

Truth be told, no American exhortations are likely to cause our European allies to roll stones uphill and undertake unnatural acts in terms of their heritage, culture and evolving mores. While the United States has encouraged our allies to spend more on defense, and should continue to do so, ultimately this will be a matter of national choice informed by the Europeans’ sense of threats, budgets, and other cultural and societal considerations.

The central point is that the United States must go beyond exhortation to engage with Europe in cooperative efforts on capabilities and incentivize our allies to augment their capabilities in modest and realistic ways that will allow greater burden sharing and enhance our overall capabilities.

c. Interoperability. Third, the United States should do more to ensure greater interoperability with European forces at very different levels of capability. If we do not, we jeopardize our ability to work effectively with the very allies with whom we wish to share burdens.

In the context of twenty-first-century coalition warfare, interoperability is not about having the same platforms or precision strike weapons or using similar ammunition. In this era, interoperability is about U.S. and allied war fighters having connected information systems, in order to communicate and share information so as to achieve the best possible war-fighting effects (from combinations of platforms and capabilities).

Achieving this take years of planning, information sharing, training, cooperative development, creating interoperability bridges and shaping plug-and-play architecture to develop true coalition war-fighting capabilities.

Another dimension of this challenge concerns the growing role of national civil capabilities in security matters—at home, in protecting open societies against terrorist and other threats, and abroad, in stabilization and reconstruction operations. There is a pressing need for greater interoperability between the military and civil forces of NATO countries, which would promote resilience at home (making it hard for adversaries to present disruptive challenges) and enhance the conduct of operations abroad. Clear lines of command and standard operating procedures across the civil-military boundary have to be established.

Across a series of recent conflicts, from the Balkans to Iraq to Afghanistan, the cold reality is that the United States and its allies have had only limited capabilities to fight together. NATO’s years of efforts to achieve interoperability—Standardization Agreements (“STANAGs”) and various partial architectures—unfortunately have not solved these problems, even though they have made advances. While we patch together efforts at the moment in particular operations on an ad hoc basis, we have not developed approaches that we can work and for which we can train on a sustained basis.

Moreover, our civil-military interoperability is limited in nature. In the United States and most other nations, the civil components of low-intensity war fighting are underdeveloped, with insufficient thought given to the interoperability of civil and military capabilities.

One of the primary issues with achieving higher-level interoperability has been the longstanding reluctance of the United States to share with allies on a sustained basis (i.e., outside the context of a particular operation) the technical outputs from existing U.S. C4ISR systems, and technical data related to new U.S. C4ISR systems under development.

Our national disclosure and export control policies have contributed to a “dumbed-down” form of interoperability with our allies.

d. Limited Cooperation on Defense Innovation. Finally, the U.S. Defense Innovation Initiative, designed to develop new “offsets” or overmatches to secure our military advantage for the future, has not to date established an avenue for meaningful participation by our NATO allies. NATO's Allied Command Transformation (ACT), based in Norfolk, Virginia, is working separately to develop innovations to transform the ways allies work together. It would make sense to develop a means of cooperation between these initiatives.

Historically, there has been very limited NATO and other foreign participation in U.S. R & D activities, especially with respect to cutting-edge technologies. In recent years, the only primary engagement beyond the F-35 program is missile defense, small funding for coalition warfare (roughly $10 million per annum), and much smaller amounts for joint science and technology programs funded jointly with foreign partners.

There are several reasons for this limited cooperation. First, disparities in spending levels on R&D between the United States and European NATO firms make collaboration difficult. Other considerations include legitimate security concerns over exchanging sensitive information with foreign scientists and engineers, and protectionist impulses by parts of the Defense Department community—a “not-invented-here” syndrome and desire to work with longstanding, indeed favored, U.S. partners.

In a world where innovation is not a U.S. monopoly, and much innovation is occurring abroad and in the commercial sector, this approach limits the ability of the United States to access and gain the benefit of innovative efforts by the private sectors of our NATO partners.

Ironically, the United States has an entire infrastructure of defense laboratories with offices in select NATO countries abroad that identify and study foreign innovative technologies. However, we are not getting a sufficient return on this infrastructure, because we only provide limited funding for accessing the foreign innovation that is identified.

4. The Path Ahead: At Warsaw and Beyond

What should we do to move beyond the Groundhog Day continuous loop on these issues and make meaningful progress? Here are some ideas for consideration, at the Warsaw Summit and beyond, on the ends-means disconnect.

• Reinforce the Two Percent Budget Pledge. Building on the recent defense-budget increases, NATO countries should reaffirm the 2 percent pledge and confirm that there is considerable work to be done. Short-term measures also should be considered to facilitate, to the extent possible, realistic and immediate progress toward the 2 percent pledge. Specifically, at Warsaw, NATO should:

a. Devise an annual “stair step” plan to demonstrate how nations will achieve their pledge within the allotted decade; otherwise, the ten-year plan to get to 2 percent is a recipe for deferring action and doing very little.

b. Encourage frontline nations to adopt more ambitious spending goals consistent with Article 3 of the Washington Treaty, which stresses national self-help and individual capacity; and

c. Reinforce the current goal of having no single NATO nation provide more than 50 percent of the capabilities needed for any one mission.

• Encourage European Force Integration, Specialization, and Cooperation. The EU is considering a shift toward closer defense cooperation and integration (making it a “norm”), with small, gradual steps today that would potentially facilitate the eventual, long-term goal of a joint European military force, as outlined in the Lisbon treaty. As the UK has largely been a skeptic of such closer cooperation, the Brexit paradoxically could accelerate this effort in the short term—and over time, the UK may elect to participate in the security dimension of the EU.

For its part, the United States should encourage this type of resource pooling and integration as an organizing principle for action (preferably with UK engagement), and encourage a series of short- and medium-term steps that would, over time, help to shape and incentivize such evolution.

Certainly, NATO European countries can achieve substantial efficiencies through efforts to pool their defense resources, including the gradual integration of military units, capabilities and procurements; selective specialization; and more joint and enhanced interoperability and cooperation. Recent collaboration between German and Dutch forces is a nascent step in this direction; the Dutch, having given up their tanks, have formed a Mechanized Brigade that will serve as part of the German First Tank Division. In particular, as smaller countries find it increasingly challenging from an economic and military standpoint to maintain their own standing forces, this type of force integration may increasingly occur. The Framework Nation concepts already underway and other, new and stronger such arrangements can serve as focal points for this type of activity.

• A Strong Focus on Roles and Missions: NATO Europe to Take Broader Responsibility for Ground Forces on the Eastern Front. To redress the burden-sharing gap and encourage the development of a European force, the United States should identify and encourage clear roles for European NATO members and offer more information sharing and other forms of partnerships as part of the equation with our allies willing to coalesce and enhance their capabilities in select mission areas.

One approach to consider is for the United States to ask its European partners to gradually take over more responsibility with respect to the deployment of ground forces role on NATO’s eastern flank over a transitional period. The recent U.S.-led multinational Anakonda exercise and others like it also could help to encourage the leadership of central European countries in building this capability. This type of approach could build on the Framework Nation concept already in use at NATO, with groupings of countries under one or more larger ones with both the political will and relevant capabilities to take the lead in this effort and other smaller countries offering capabilities to fill gaps. Subregional groupings such as the Nordic Cooperation Group and the nascent group in the east (Poland, Romania and Ukraine) also could be useful vehicles for this type of effort. A similar approach led by the UK could be utilized for establishing a European NATO expeditionary capability.

• Selective Capability Enhancement: Coalition Forces Planning Roadmaps and Selective Capability Enhancement by Allies. We should better integrate coalition warfare into U.S. national force planning, and also work with our NATO allies to identify, across a range of scenarios, where modest investments by coalition partners can yield significant returns and potential force multipliers. The United States should work with nations in areas of specialization that are consistent with their cultures, attitudes toward the use of force and resources. While some nations may focus on high-intensity capabilities, others may be more willing to further develop low-intensity capabilities suitable for Petersberg tasks. For example, if Country A has a decent UAV capability that could be incrementally augmented and that would be beneficial in a number of threat scenarios, the US should strongly encourage Country A to develop that capability further. This is the type of effort that is realistic, given budget limitations, and can bear fruit, but requires far more bandwidth by the United States. We need to focus and directly engage on this on a sustained, rather than ad hoc, bilateral basis, and seek cooperative approaches that benefit our partner countries in these efforts (e.g., enhanced bilateral training, force interoperability and the like).

• U.S. Steps to Facilitate European NATO Capability Development and Interoperability. Finally, there are a number of steps—in the nature of internal reforms—that the United States needs to take at home to advance this agenda and incentivize change.

a. Leadership Focus: Appoint a Pentagon-Wide Allied Capability Coordinator. The new administration should make it a policy priority to facilitate the development of coalition warfare capabilities by NATO countries and other allies, and enhance our force interoperability with such allies. We should appoint a senior Defense Department official to take “ownership” of this allied capability development and interoperability agenda and bring all relevant components of the Pentagon together. We also need to better develop and nurture the coalitions we create on a sustained basis.

b. Provide Data Outputs from Existing U.S. Enablers to NATO Forces with Appropriate Safeguards. In the short-to-medium term, NATO operations will have to rely on existing U.S. sensors and other ISR capabilities, given the degree of U.S. qualitative superiority in these areas. Thus, the United States should seriously consider making advanced U.S. assets and their outputs available to our NATO allies with appropriate safeguards in order to train for future operations (rather than on an ad hoc basis only during operations).

c. Develop Plug-and-Play Architectures with Allies. In the medium-to-long term, we should seek to foster the development of common network-centric architectures (using open rather than proprietary standards) into which NATO nations can “plug and play,” incorporate their own sensor outputs, and thereby achieve secure communications, similar levels of situational awareness, and other potentially higher-order forms of interoperability as needed.

d. Civil/Military Interoperability: Uncharted Territory. The United States should work with its allies, including the EU, to develop and implement new standards (for example, for software defined radios) that allow civilian aid providers and police to interact effectively with military and constabulary forces. We also should define clear lines of communication and chains of command for these operations, with standard operating procedures, for scenarios such as terrorist attacks and natural disasters (e.g., a biological attack or pandemic). To fully implement these steps, the United States should establish more advanced experiments with NATO and the EU and train together more extensively with allies in the use of advanced architectures and data outputs.

e. Pooling, Sharing, and Cooperative Programs Focused on Enhancing Coalition Capabilities and Interoperability. Consistent with NATO’s focus on smart and cost-effective defense, the United States should consider the pooling and sharing of existing capabilities and engaging in joint cooperative programs. We should also allow NATO countries to participate, where practical, in key U.S. development programs on network-centric warfare (including technology demonstrators and prototyping) in order to facilitate the development of both coalition capabilities and enhanced interoperability. This can include a focus on low-intensity capabilities for those allies for which this is an area of specialization.

Contrary to our current hands-off approach, the United States needs to lead in these areas to incentivize other countries to participate directly in pooling and sharing.

We therefore should considerably strengthen, and expand the limited DoD funding for, our coalition warfare development program in order to seed fund these initiatives. A modest amount of money spent here (in the order of magnitude of $50–100 million per annum) can help us to better share responsibility with our allies and limit our participation in later operations.

f. National Disclosure Policy/Export Control Reforms. Finally, we need to reorient our technology transfer regimes to promote coalition war fighting. The DoD should establish a single, wholesale national disclosure policy for NATO coalition operations that makes holistic decisions up front (i.e., before forces must be committed to conflict) and makes as few distinctions as possible between release policies for different coalition partners. We also need to broaden the release, subject to safeguards, of technologies relevant to coalition warfare in order to enhance our cooperation with NATO allies in this area.

g. Enhanced Collaboration with and Access to European NATO Innovation. The United States should directly engage with NATO’s Allied Command Transformation in order to collaborate on innovation critical to multinational coalition operations. Moreover, to obtain better access to innovation in NATO countries and enhance our collaboration, DoD should increase U.S. funding for science and technology exchanges as well as prototyping. We should better utilize the foreign offices of our defense laboratories by providing them funding to work with foreign innovators and undertake more joint projects on transformational technologies with NATO partners.

We need to meaningfully address NATO’s chronic ends-means mismatch and make burden sharing more equitable in order to combat discordant voices regarding U.S. engagement in NATO. While there is no silver bullet, there are a number of realistic steps that can be taken, which, as discussed above, go beyond the normal admonitions and summit statements. These steps can truly make a difference over time. But the critical issue will be whether there is sufficient will on each side of the Atlantic to adopt some of these measures.

Jeffrey P. Bialos is a partner in the law firm of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan LLP and an adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at John Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He served as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Industrial Affairs and in other senior positions during the Clinton administration. He was awarded the Department of Defense Distinguished Public Service Medal.

Image: U.S. paratroopers conduct joint training with Estonian army partners during Exercise Steadfast Jazz. Flickr/U.S. Army Europe.