Europe Reckons With Its Depleted Armies by Julian E. Barnes, Anton Troianovski and Robert Wall, Wall Street Journal

Soldiers in Germany’s Light Infantry Battalion 413 near the Baltic Sea coast complained last year that they didn’t have enough sniper rifles or antitank weapons or the right kind of vehicles.

During exercises, they told a parliamentary ombudsman, their unit didn’t have the munitions to simulate battle. Instead, they were told to imagine the bangs.

Across Europe, similar shortfalls riddle land, sea, air and cyber forces following years of defense cutbacks.

U.S. President Donald Trump last month irked European leaders when he berated them at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s new headquarters for insufficient defense spending and what he called unpaid military bills.

Current and former European officials were quick to point out that NATO members don’t owe dues to the U.S., but they acknowledged Mr. Trump wasn’t wrong: Europe lacks the capabilities to defend itself…

Fighting wars—and preventing them—doesn’t entail just bullets and bombs. Troops and heavy weapons must be moved to the front, requiring fleets of planes, helicopters and trucks. Arsenals must be ready to reload weapons, necessitating stockpiles of munitions. Armies must be ready to defend themselves and to counterattack, which requires specialized systems. In Europe, all are in short supply.

The U.S. has also cut back its troop strength, naval fleet and tank forces from their Cold War highs. But Europe’s offerings are far outmatched by America’s high-end military capabilities, including advanced fighter planes, armed drones, elite special-operation forces and aircraft carriers.

Despite cutbacks in the Pentagon’s budget in recent years, U.S. military spending far exceeds Europe’s, and American conventional forces are generally better trained and equipped than their European counterparts. The U.S. defense budget, $680 billion by NATO calculations, dwarfs the alliance’s European members, which spend a total of $242 billion…

Read on.

How a Real National Security Budget Can Help Keep the Peace by Karl W. Eikenberry, USA Today

As America prioritizes its spending in a dangerous world, the White House has proposed a hard-power budget that emphasizes military investments to deter war. Yet what it first would deter is any cost-effective work to reduce the wars abroad — civil upheaval in weak or failing states — that greatly threaten U.S. interests and global stability. This “national security budget” would dramatically reduce the effectiveness of the State Department, USAID and United Nations peacekeeping operations, and end funding for the small, specialized U.S. Institute of Peace — all vital tools for keeping America safe. We would be left with one massively expensive and blunt instrument — the United States military — to deal with any and all foreign policy challenges.

Viewed from home, the impulse to abandon most stabilization work abroad can seem understandable, if only because the violent collapse of a South Sudan or Somalia may feel too distant to matter. Even where mediation and peacekeeping can resolve wars, the results can be difficult to measure and can take years. For many Americans, it seems better to deal only with the most urgent crises, sending our forces to surgically clean things up and return home. But a budget that cripples low-cost stabilization of weak states is foolish — the national security equivalent of, say, prohibiting maintenance on dams and bridges until they visibly begin to collapse.

New analyses of the world’s roughly 30 civil wars find that they are lengthening, now averaging more than 20 years’ duration. As Syria illustrates, they also are becoming more contagious. With global influence diffusing from its earlier concentration in the hands of superpowers, contending powers in any given region are backing proxy forces and fueling wars in weak states…

Read on.