Europe must ‘wake up’ to win arms race, warns NATO commander 

BRUSSELS — Europe needs to take more risks, spend more, be faster and cut bureaucracy to win the new global arms race, a top NATO commander told POLITICO.  

“Europe can’t win the future arms battle with the rules they’ve imposed on themselves today,” NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation (SACT) Admiral Pierre Vandier said in his first press interview since taking command in late September. 

The hurdles facing Europe’s weapons-makers and procurement agencies “can be summed up as over-compliance,” he said. “You have to demonstrate that everything is perfect in the [equipment] you’re going to deliver in 15 years’ time, that not a bolt will be missing.”

The French admiral hoped that next year’s NATO summit in The Hague would send a message to the EU: “If you want to stay in the arms race, change your rules.”

Vandier’s comments come as Europe is looking to rearm in response to Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. EU countries are working to boost weapons production but are still lagging far behind Russia in ammunition output.

Earlier this month, Léo Péria-Peigné, a researcher at the Paris-based IFRI think tank, told the French parliament that current rules and regulations are designed for peacetime. In one case, the front of Griffon armored personnel carriers — manufactured by KNDS France, Thales and Arquus — had to be redesigned because the headlights were too high and not compliant with road standards, he said.

The flurry of regulations sits in the wider context of Europe’s risk-averse mentality, especially compared with the United States, Vandier said. Arms programs are also too slow and not flexible enough, he said, adding that, for example, French frigates have to wait years for proper combat mode updates, while some American war vessels can be modernized on a daily basis.

The lack of speed and flexibility is “a matter of psychology. Lots of people say it can’t be done, the legal rules are like that, the contract rules are like that,” he complained.

NATO’s SACT hopes Europe can learn from America’s approach to tech and innovation. “Their enthusiasm and ability to take risks is fundamental. In Europe, we don’t take risks.”

“Given the scale of what’s happening in Asia,” Washington will need a strong European defense industry, he said, adding that he’s confident European firms can be much more than “just a subcontractor” to American companies.

“I’m optimistic and I have a message: It’s time to wake up. We can actually do great things, which means we have to use money well, take more risks, try more things,” he said.

Space, IT, logistics 

NATO’s Allied Command Transformation was created in 2003 to prepare the alliance for the future of warfare. It’s headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia.

Since Paris rejoined NATO’s integrated military organization back in 2009, the rule is that the post of Supreme Allied Commander Transformation comes from France. Before joining NATO, Vandier was the deputy chief of France’s defense staff.

One of the main challenges, he told POLITICO, is that designing military operations increasingly requires synchronizing between different environments — land, air and sea, but also space, cyber and the information sphere.

That’s why his priority for the next few years is to “create the conditions for the emergence of a multi-environment command system: it’s all about IT, Command & Control systems, the cloudification of our networks.”

He also warned that current weak spots are space, IT and logistics.

“In space, we really need to make a major effort. Overall, we’ve been spending our money on a small number of high-performance, long-life geostationary satellites,” Vandier said.

In the meantime, Elon Musk’s company SpaceX can launch batches of small satellites on a single rocket — slashing the unit cost of a satellite.

Another area that needs improving is IT. “We’ve had a hard time getting into the cloud,” he conceded.

One of the reasons is concern over the U.S. Cloud Act — a Trump-era law that gives Washington extraterritorial power over data stored abroad by U.S. companies. “Today, the real issue is cloudification,” which is a precondition for mass data processing and AI, the NATO commander said.

The third area for improvement is moving troops and equipment around the Continent, something that was neglected after the end of the Cold War.

“There is a considerable logistics deficit in Europe, particularly in terms of all the means of crossing rivers” and fuel logistics, he said.

More money

Rearming, boosting production and improving military mobility are hugely expensive —which is why Vandier and others, including NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and EU Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius, are calling for an increase in defense spending beyond NATO’s current target of at least 2 percent of member country GDP.

“You have to pay more. Those who believe that with tech, war will be cheaper and less painful are kidding themselves,” the French admiral said, adding that 3 percent of GDP “is going to be the objective put on the table within the next 18 months.” Military expenditure amounted to 4 percent or 5 percent of GDP during the Cold War, he pointed out.

Adding to the costs is the war in Ukraine, which has upended pre-war planning. Its mix of World War I-style trench warfare and intense artillery barrages mated with high-tech drone, missile and cyber combat is forcing European militaries to update their plans.

“The paradox is that you can’t say that one thing will replace the others … It costs money,” Vandier said.

Asked whether European governments are ready to invest more in their armed forces, he replied: “This is the big question.”

“Europe represents 10 percent of the world’s population and 50 percent of the world’s social spending,” the SACT said. “There comes a time when we’ll have to tell ourselves that if we have to defend ourselves, we’ll need to do a little balancing.”