Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep. We hope everyone at the NATO summit is surviving the sweltering Washington heat wave. Maybe overcooked allied leaders can take the hint and do something about climate change while they’re here?
Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: NATO looks to boost defense industries, allies plan to rebuke Russia-North Korea ties, Ukraine gets more fighter jets from Western countries, and more.
NATO countries collectively spend about $1.2 trillion on defense annually. But do the allies feel like they’re really getting $1.2 trillion worth of protection? That’s a question that we’ve posed to around a dozen NATO and member country officials this week on the sidelines of the summit in Washington.
To varying degrees, every official has basically said “no.” There’s a major push for all NATO allies to get to the alliance benchmark of each nation spending at least 2 percent of its GDP on defense, and member countries have made big strides toward this goal in the past decade.
But it’s not just the dollar amount—it’s also how it’s spent. “Strategic commanders will not take a chart with percents once they are confronted with a situation,” said Czech President Petr Pavel at the NATO Public Forum. “They will count aircraft, ships, combat units at required readiness. This is what we should focus on beyond this 2 percent line, because we have serious gaps in meeting our capability targets,” added Pavel, a retired general who served for three years as the chair of the NATO Military Committee.
Estonia’s defense minister, Hanno Pevkur, said that his government estimates that Russia is spending around 7 to 9 percent of its GDP on defense this year. (Russia’s GDP is around $5.8 trillion, so that would amount to around $400 billion to $520 billion on defense per year.)
NATO officials expect that Russia can sustain its war economy for at least another three to four years. To outpace it, the alliance must wake up its own trans-Atlantic defense industry, which has atrophied for decades since the end of the Cold War.
U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks warned in a speech at the Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday of “the possibility of protracted war, which every ally must prepare for.” (She didn’t specify whether that meant the current war in Ukraine or future wars.)
“We must accelerate the growth of our collective defense-industrial capacity,” Hicks added. “Adding more shifts on current production lines is not enough. We need to add more lines, build more factories and facilities, and bring more producers into the fold.”
Flexing procurement muscles. The NATO summit communique—the official document that outlines all allies’ priorities for the coming year—will include a new pledge to invest in defense industries, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said at the Chamber of Commerce. It’s meant as a signal to a defense industry that’s waiting for longer-term contracts that it needs to start up those production lines that Hicks said the alliance so desperately needs.
NATO plans to spend much of the fall pushing member countries to up their military capabilities, including logistics, enablement, and long-term planning to rebuild their defense industries, a senior NATO official told SitRep, speaking on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak on the record to media.
In the meantime, NATO has used multinational procurement efforts to get the ball rolling, including collaborative contracts among members for the production of Patriot air defense missiles and multiple launch rocket systems as well as deals to extend the lifetime of current air force assets.
But Europe still needs more of everything—especially artillery ammunition and air defense—and a lot of it is going out the door to Ukraine.
“We have been taking a lot of measures in regard to strengthening our production capacity when it comes to 155 [mm artillery],” said Pal Jonson, the Swedish defense minister, in an interview with SitRep. “But [on] air defense, we’re lagging behind more than the Americans.”
Part of the answer, Jonson said, is making sure that NATO nations are undertaking joint procurement initiatives for big weapons programs “so we can send the signals to the defense industrial base that we’re going to be putting in orders for a long time to come.”
Closing the back door. Meanwhile, alliance officials are also debating how to tighten Western sanctions against Moscow and its partners to help choke off Russia’s own industrial base.
Ukrainian officials have pushed the United States to consider new sweeping sanctions on Russian banks to dry up their lines of credit to buy more weapons as well as stronger export controls to shut down Russia’s access to critical military components. Tobias Billstrom, Sweden’s top diplomat, told SitRep in an interview that allies should consider applying punishing secondary sanctions to try to hit back-channel suppliers for Russia’s war machine in China and Central Asia.
“The Russians are very cleverly adapting technologically and procedurally to many of the challenges that they run into in Ukraine,” said Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the top NATO military chief and the head of U.S. European Command.
Northern pressure. Despite being NATO’s newest members, both Finland and Sweden are pushing other allies to invest more in defense, Finnish Defense Minister Antti Häkkänen said at a Tuesday event in Washington, D.C., on the sidelines of the summit. Apparently having Russia as your next door neighbor really clarifies things. “We are investing heavily in defense for decades, not just during this Ukraine war,” Häkkänen said, “because we have always seen through our intelligence what the Russians are doing.”
Australian Gen. Angus Campbell has left his role as the chief of the Australian Defense Force after six years. Adm. David Johnston is set to be Australia’s new military chief.
Jung Pak has resigned from her role as the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs focused on North Korea. Daniel Kritenbrink, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, will now oversee the State Department’s North Korea policy, agency spokesman Matthew Miller confirmed.
Former Senate Armed Services Chairman Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma died on Tuesday at the age of 89.
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
Unholy alliance. The NATO summit’s final document is expected to include sharp language condemning Russia’s growing military partnership with North Korea, multiple officials told SitRep while speaking on condition of anonymity, as they weren’t authorized to discuss the matters publicly. That language reflects growing alarm among all allies over not just the prospect of Russia using North Korean munitions in Ukraine, but also about what North Korea could get from Russia in exchange. The White House estimated that between September 2023 and February 2024, North Korea had supplied Moscow with around 10,000 containers of munitions and equipment to feed its war machine in Ukraine.
Fly on. Denmark and the Netherlands have begun to transfer F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement with the leaders of the two European countries on Wednesday. “The transfer process for these F-16s is now underway, and Ukraine will be flying operational F-16s this summer,” he said. Additionally, Poland is eyeing plans to send an additional batch of 14 MiG-29 fighters from its own stock to Ukraine.
Tokyo time. NATO members are bringing back the idea of putting an office in Tokyo to give the alliance its first-ever permanent footprint in the Indo-Pacific region after France shot down the possible move last year. “We have to move forward with a liaison office in Tokyo,” Billstrom, the Swedish foreign minister, told Jack and Robbie on Tuesday. “I think it stands to reason that if you want your partners to be concerned with your problems, you have to be concerned with their problems.”
U.S. officials said that it’s not on the agenda for the Washington summit, however. The United States is instead focused on joint initiatives between NATO and Indo-Pacific nations to support Ukraine, bolster cybersecurity, and counter disinformation efforts.
Modi in Moscow. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made his first trip to Russia in five years and hugged Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday—the same day that Russia bombed a children’s hospital in Kyiv. The hug elicited a furious response from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“It is a huge disappointment and a devastating blow to peace efforts to see the leader of the world’s largest democracy hug the world’s most bloody criminal in Moscow on such a day,” Zelensky wrote on X. Modi has tried to strike a balance between India’s long-standing relationship with Russia on the one hand and growing ties with the West on the other. Modi told Putin during his visit that “peace is of the utmost importance.”
“I’m more than happy to tend to my farm (dacha) – made up mostly of tomatoes and strawberries, but sadly without any help from the FSB.”
—Anna Belkina, deputy editor in chief of the Kremlin-owned media outlet RT, responds to questions from FP’s Amy Mackinnon after the U.S. Justice Department announced that it had taken action to disrupt what it said was a social media bot farm run by RT and the FSB, Russia’s top security agency. The person described as running the bot farm in court documents appeared to match Belkina’s job description.
Undercooked. At the United Nations Security Council, Russia served “Chicken Kiev” at a lunch as it took over the council’s rotating presidency, just one day after the Russian military bombed a children’s hospital in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, killing dozens of people.
The post NATO’s Arms Race Against Russia Heats Up appeared first on Foreign Policy.
