There’s never been a better chance to beef up European defense. This is how it could be done.

© REUTERS/Jon Nazca

When the European Union published its first security strategy for Europe back in 2003, the common bloc appeared to be a picture of confidence: “Europe has never been so prosperous, so secure nor so free,” the authors noted, rejoicing over the progressive spread of the rule of law and democracy.

There was overwhelming confidence that “successive enlargements are making a reality

of the vision of a united and peaceful continent.” At the same time, member states set themselves the task of promoting “a ring of well governed countries to the East of the European Union and on the borders of the Mediterranean with whom we can enjoy close and cooperative relations.” The heads of state and government of NATO member states noted that the Euro-Atlantic area was at peace and the threat of a conventional attack on NATO territory was very low. They saw Russia as a partner, albeit a difficult one.

Little of that rosy-cheeked optimism remains today. Europe’s security environment has darkened dramatically since 2014: Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine have severely strained ties with the Kremlin. Various crises and conflicts in the Middle East have borne real and present consequences for Europe, in particular the refugee crisis. The looming threat of cyber attacks has also presented a new and unique test. And these challenges have all come at a time where the US appears to be retreating from the global stage and reducing its commitment to European security.

The situation becomes even more dire when cast against the appallingly bad condition of European defense forces. Following the Cold War, a number of national defense budgets were slashed in a haphazard, uncoordinated fashion, and that trend was continued in the wake of the global financial crisis. A number of protracted missions abroad have further diminished Europe’s already weak military capabilities.

In some countries, nearly half of all helicopters or armored infantry vehicles are not even operational. Some weapon systems, such as the tornado aircraft strikers or the CH-53G transport helicopters, have been deployed for much longer than planned, while some key defense projects, such as the A400M turboprop military transport aircraft, have been crippled by delays and technical flaws.

Other countries, meanwhile, are investing heavily in military capabilities and technological innovation, including Anti-access/Area-denial (A2/AD) devices to prevent enemy military movement on land, sea, or air. These systems will make it much more difficult for European forces to move freely in the future.

A Splintered Industry

In the face of these challenges, Europeans have put forth a heavily splintered defense and procurement industry. In 2016, the Europeans deployed six times as many weapons systems as the US Americans; while the US feature one type of battle tank, the Europeans presented no less than 17 models. Acquiring and maintaining this hardware is costly. The highly fragmented nature of European defense hampers the possibility of joint operations.

This all leads to some uncomfortable but necessary questions: what would the Europeans say if the UN Security Council asked them to contribute to a military peacekeeping mission in the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine? What if Libya required a greater European presence to stabilize the country? Would Europe be prepared to expand its contribution to NATO’s mission in Poland and the Baltic States to other countries along Europe’s eastern flank? And in the long-term, when would Europe be ready to lead and execute a peace enforcement plan like the 2011 Operation Unified Protector mission in Libya, without US involvement?

A Brave New World

There has been movement in the debate on European defense, particularly since 2014. NATO’s two percent target—the minimum percentage of GDP member states are expected to spend on defense—is certainly not a new requirement. But ever since member states reaffirmed this goal at the 2014 NATO summit in Wales, there appears to be fresh traction behind it. During that summit, where NATO members agreed to reach the two percent target by 2024, an important revelation emerged: Many European member states invested significantly more in defense until the early 2000s, when that spending started to dwindle rapidly.

Critics of the two percent target point out it is neither a good nor sufficient measure of a country’s actual contribution to common defense. After all, some NATO members already spend more than two percent of GDP on defense but hardly contribute to operations. Others spend significantly less but play an important role in the alliance’s missions. The spending target also detracts from significant non-military contributions to basic pillars of security, including humanitarian aid, development cooperation, crisis prevention, and diplomacy. This is why Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference, has proposed a new three percent target that also includes such expenditures.

Even so, despite justified criticism, the two percent target remains an important measuring stick. Without more defense spending, it will be impossible to improve the capabilities of Europe’s armed forces. It is unlikely that all NATO member states will reach the minimum target by 2024, but the Wales summit and its resolutions provide a strategic starting point to calculate what gaps exist, and what it would cost to fill them.

A Numbers Game

If all 28 EU member states plus Norway were to spend two percent of their GDP on defense by 2024, they would generate an additional yearly budget of $114 billion—two times the United Kingdom’s defense budget in 2017. Roughly half of the additional expenditures would fall upon Germany, Italy, and Spain, but even if the Europeans achieved the NATO goal, little would change in terms of burden-sharing. America’s zealous defense spending means European NATO states would only be responsible for about 30 percent of total member expenditures. If the US cuts its spending to 2 percent (an admittedly unlikely scenario), it would then be 40 percent.

So just how could the extra funds be distributed wisely? The armed forces of the future must be a European endeavor. Studies show that European citizens are indeed in favor of greater cooperation between EU member states. In the April 2017 EuroBarometer, a public opinion study conducted by the European Commission, 75 percent of those polled favored a common EU defense policy while only 20 percent were against.

And according to a joint survey conducted by the polling institute YouGov for the Munich Security Conference and McKinsey in November of last year, respondents from six major European countries favored closer cooperation between national armies; 41 percent even supported cooperation to such an extent that national forces could be deployed on their own only to a limited extent. Only six percent rejected cooperation. Given that interest and willingness among a majority of citizens, European governments must begin preparing for cooperation in the field with the following steps:

First, invest in equipment to upgrade Europe’s armed forces. It is crucial to close the approximately $120 to $140 billion investment gap in interconnectedness and digitization by modernizing existing systems. Europe’s cyber capabilities should be significantly expanded as well. In the future, Europeans should spend significantly more than NATO’s recommended 20 percent of the defense budget for equipment to navigate these particular challenges.

This point would be easy to communicate, as well: The survey we commissioned also asked citizens to rate the most important priorities for defense spending. Some 46 percent of those polled in Germany and 65 percent in Italy were in favor of investing more in cybersecurity. Next, respondents believed the modernization of existing weapons systems was another major priority, not purchasing new weapons systems or increasing personnel.

Secondly, it is crucial to cooperate on the availability and capability of our armed forces. Boosting the average availability of European armies by one percentage point would yield the same results as investing $10 billion. And if we consider that maintenance accounts for 30 to 70 percent of the total cost of a defense system, joint maintenance should be at the core of any future European cooperation.

Third, member states should move toward joint planning and procurement. Harmonizing requirements are the key to more “pooling and sharing.” By harmonizing user requirements and co-sourcing identical products, member states could slash costs by 30 percent—some $15 billion a year—and even facilitate joint deployment and maintenance.

Fourth, Europe needs to take a top-down approach to industry planning. Consolidating the European defense industry is needed to foster cooperation, and politics must set out a clear framework to do so. In other words, member states have to stop favoring national arms companies at the expense of cooperation and Europe-wide security.

Finally and fifth, European countries should significantly expand their research and development to ensure that Europe remains competitive. EU countries must engage innovative companies in the process, even if they have little to do with defense. It could be useful to create a European version of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as well. The US agency’s investments have led to the development of various new technologies for both civilian and military use.

With growing budgets at their disposal, policymakers will be able to build defenses adequately equipped to face ever changing threats and adversaries in the coming years. If European countries can overcome regional interests and fragmented organization to build a common, well-connected network of armed forces, they can acquire the military capabilities needed to make Europe a global strategic and capable actor.

This article was written by David Bachmann, McKinsey & Company; Tobias Bunde, Munich Security Conference and Hertie School of Governance; Quirin Maderspacher, Munich Security Conference; Adrian Oroz, Munich Security Conference; Kai Wittek, McKinsey & Company.

It is based on the study “More European, More Connected, and More Capable. Building the European Armed Forces of the Future,” a joint project by the Munich Security Conference and the Hertie School of Governance with quantitative analysis provided by McKinsey & Company. The original version is available here: https://www.securityconference.de/de/debatte/european-defence-report/.

The post Now or Never appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Axel Schmidt

The specter of an attack on Germany’s critical infrastructure has long been a deep concern for security services – power plants and electricity networks offer prime targets for cyberattacks, and authorities have redoubled their efforts to make sure they are protected.

This hardware is without doubt a central piece of Germany’s basic security. But the country is now facing a larger, more menacing threat to its software. Liberal democracy – the cornerstone of our society – is at risk. And the events of 2016 have shown that we urgently need to confront this threat before it erodes the foundations of enlightened debate.

At first glance, the hacking of the Democratic Party in the US, the proliferation of fake news and propaganda on social media, the rapid rise of nationalist populist movements and parties, and increasingly aggressive Russian secret service operations do not seem to have much in common. But these phenomena are very much connected. And we as a society have taken far too little action to protect our liberal democratic order from dangerous forces.

A new, illiberal order has risen on the back of populist protest movements in the US and Europe. Russia and other anti-democratic actors have aided them, using the very framework of our open societies to their advantage. And Russia’s propaganda campaign has played a central role. It is true that there have long been illiberal movements in liberal societies, and democratic institutions bear some responsibility for the loss of trust and confidence among certain social groups. But ignoring or concealing the role that anti-democratic foreign governments have played in order to avoid confrontation (in this case with Moscow) is foolish. We have to recognize this attack as such, despite lingering reluctance to do so.

Guardians of the West

Most German lawmakers have until now shied away from calling the current turmoil a “new Cold War,” and there are indeed good reasons not to do so. Still, we should not be fooled by the fact that we are no longer embroiled in the same great-power conflicts of a bygone era. Even if it is not immediately clear what Vladimir Putin’s alternative to liberal democracy actually is, he embodies the forces seeking to dismantle our hard-fought liberties, from gender mainstreaming to gay marriage, multiculturalism, immigration, and perceived political correctness. Putin has in fact fashioned himself to be a guardian of the West, a defender against Islamization, foreign infiltration, and rising feminine influence.

It is no coincidence that Russian broadcasters like RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik have become central sources of information for the new populist movements. Even if these movements do not always align with the Kremlin’s agenda, they offer cheap and easy platforms for propaganda. From the Brexiteers in the UK to Donald Trump in the US, the Five Star movement in Italy, the Front National in France, and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, populist movements are peddling Kremlin-friendly reports or even replicating Russian propaganda with zeal.

The links between the illiberal movements and their almost symbiotic proximity to the Kremlin are now well documented. The Five Star movement in Italy, for example, has an entire media network that disseminates Kremlin-induced fake news. One platform called TzeTze belongs to a founding member of Five Star and has amassed 1.2 million followers on Facebook alone. It beams out stories like Sputnik’s assertion that refugees and smugglers from North Africa are really financed by the US.

The propaganda does not have to be convincing – it just has to succeed in sowing doubt and calling into question the system of values behind our open societies. And as skepticism towards liberal democracy and the established political order grows, disruptive forces are finding fertile ground. In Germany, a recent poll conducted by the survey institute Forsa with the national weekly DIE ZEIT on August 31, 2016, showed that 31 percent of AfD supporters and 30 percent of left-wing voters trust Vladimir Putin more than Angela Merkel.

Western societies are now turning to the same tools wielded so effectively by Russia. In Peter Pomerantsev’s startling book on Russia’s media landscape, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia, he describes the mechanisms of political technology in a world where it matters little whether something is true or not.

What is true today can be obsolete tomorrow: one day, Putin can claim there are no Russian soldiers in Crimea; the next day, he can casually admit that Russian soldiers had been active on the Black Sea peninsula all along. If the truth is blurred, twisted, and distorted long enough, the standards by which we orient right and wrong disappear. Propaganda does not have to be consistent. As the influential political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote more than sixty years ago, the best subject of totalitarian rule was neither the convinced Nazi nor the convinced communist, but the man who could no longer distinguish between true and false, between facts and fiction.

The “Post-Truth” Era

The relativization of truth is not just a tool employed by Russia. The Oxford Dictionary word of the year in 2016 was “post-truth.” According to an analysis on Buzzfeed, in the last three months of the US election campaign the twenty most influential fake news stories generated more response on Facebook than the twenty most influential real news stories produced by traditional media.

In the lead-up to the Brexit vote, it was the seemingly farcical stories on British payments to Brussels and the economic consequences of leaving the EU that proved more powerful than facts from economic groups or the Bank of England. “People in this country have had enough of experts,” declared conservative Justice Secretary and Brexiteer Michael Gove, when he was questioned on why no economists supported Brexit.

In the US, meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s confidential emails were leaked to the public. Dmitri Alperovitch of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike warned back in July that the hacker collectives Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear were responsible. Experts said the style and approach showed all the hallmarks of Russian intelligence services.

In September, at the Munich Security Conference’s special Cyber Security Series at Stanford University, US intelligence representatives and cyber experts raised the alarm over the growing influence of foreign intelligence services on American elections. Nearly a month later, the Office of Homeland Security and the CIA announced they were certain that the Russian government were behind the hacks; the scale and sensitivity of the operation indicated involvement at the highest level.

This is not the first attempt to influence public opinion in Western societies. But the ability to disseminate information through social media and online gives illiberal forces new powers and bandwidth. And it comes as social media users are increasingly divided into insular groups that quickly become echo chambers. That trend leads to greater polarization and information tribalism, where each societal group lives its own version of truth and reality. These increasingly isolated groups are especially vulnerable to propaganda and fake news.

That is why protest parties and alternative media gain such traction on social media. With the slogan “We write what others can’t print,” Germany’s far-right magazine Compact has amassed upwards of 90,000 followers on Facebook. The outlet propagates conspiracy theories and stories touting Putin as a champion of balanced dialogue and restraint, unlike the EU.

Whether it’s fake news, leaks, trolls, or automated social media bots, these instruments present a grave challenge to enlightened public debate, the core of a functioning democracy. How do you maintain the principles of balanced, democratic debate when a significant percentage of those taking part are not real people or when they cast doubt on these very principles in the first place?

It Can Happen Here

After the US elections, the German chancellor was celebrated as the “leader of the free world,” and Germany fast became the last bastion of liberal democracy. But German society is not immune to illiberal forces. On the contrary, the fact that Berlin played a central role in rebuking Russian aggression in Ukraine makes it a target for propaganda and disinformation campaigns, especially from those who reject sanctions and strive to protect Russia’s “sphere of influence” in Eastern Europe. The chancellor has already expressed concern that Russia might interfere in this year’s election campaign. And the head of Germany’s intelligence agency, Bruno Kahl, warned, “This kind of pressure on public discourse and on democracy is unacceptable.”

With pressure mounting, the building blocks of our open society must now actively fight to safeguard it. Government institutions have to take every possible step to protect our hardware and shield constitutional bodies from cyberattacks. But the task of maintaining our software is up to society.

Lawmakers and stakeholders need to publicly speak out about our democracy and the myriad ways it can be influenced. They should open up access to free pools of information as a way to discredit fake news campaigns and supplement the efforts of virus scanners that track and report false information – like the European External Action Service (EEAS), which reports on Russian disinformation twice a week. The German government should also consider how to curb websites that regularly violate constitutional laws. But in a society that nourishes and protects freedom of opinion, this will be difficult.

It would be especially helpful to employ independent, non-governmental organizations to monitor the quality and credibility of media coverage, even producing a blacklist with particularly egregious transgressions. Companies that choose to advertise on platforms that consistently disseminate disinformation or propaganda should face consequences. And lawmakers themselves should refuse interviews with questionable sites so as not to legitimize them.

The challenge will be great for television, radio and other news outlets. Populists have revived the Nazi-era smear “Lügenpresse,” or lying press, to blast what they see as biased mainstream media. But it is precisely these established outlets that play such a central role in educating society on how to parse disinformation and fake news.

German media are fortunately far less polarized than in the US; a 2014 poll from the Pew Research Center revealed that 47 percent of conservative American voters turn to Fox News as their chief source of information. Germany’s public broadcasters and national dailies still reach a broad spectrum. But established media have come up short on two fronts.

First, several outlets readily republish large leaks without taking a critical look at who or what is behind them and without differentiating between what is authentic and what is fabricated. During the Cold War, the Stasi and the KGB often tried to leak compromised material to Western media, but they wouldn’t make such information public. Now, close ties between intelligence services and platforms like WikiLeaks have renewed a debate over the ethics of leaks, and journalists can’t afford to ignore the discussion.

Second, there is a growing trend toward feigned objectivity in various talk shows and even mainstream news. Russian propaganda is reproduced without context or challenge. Germany’s popular political talk shows feature guests who are presented as independent experts but clearly hawk the Kremlin’s line. If their statements are not challenged or even disproved, the viewer is left with a sliver of doubt and the impression that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Back to the Facts

That is not to say that we should not challenge the West’s policy on Russia. We can and must examine whether the EU’s sanctions, for example, are actually counterproductive. And an open society must tolerate the wrath of its critics (as long as they remain within the bounds of the law). We need to engage the populists in our discourse, not shut them out. But we also cannot tolerate half-truths or false information, nor can we accept foreign propaganda. In the end, there is nothing more critical than our liberal democracy itself. And it cannot survive without a fact-based, open debate.

Read more in the Berlin Policy Journal App – January/February 2017 issue.

The post Politics by Other Means appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.