NATO breaks defense expenditure into four main categories: equipment, personnel, infrastructure, and other. In addition to the commitment to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense, NATO heads of state pledged at the 2014 Wales Summit to spend 20 percent of their defense budgets on major equipment.
As some allies and partners call for a broader view of the investments that contribute to collective defense, the CSIS study team examined security assistance spending by NATO member states and its select subset of European partners.
The CSIS report compiles NATO member and partner countries’ troop contributions across a range of military operations. Where data was publicly available and reliable, it measures troop contribution as a percentage of the total active duty force to normalize and compare between countries with militaries of different size.
Most measures of security contribution focus on investment. But states also forego economic gains in support of common security. The effect of enforcing agreed upon sanctions against a potential adversary is one metric that could be used to measure this sacrifice.
Conflict and instability to Europe’s south – in North Africa and in Syria – has generated population movements into Europe with which our allies have struggled. Some NATO members are bearing a particularly significant burden from the refugee crisis. Managing the crisis is a significant security investment for them and Europe as a whole.
As the Trump administration has moved into its second year in office, it has laid out its vision for national security. This volume presents CSIS experts’ assessment of the Trump administration’s strategy documents and FY 2019 budgets for defense.
As we enter 2018, the stage for defense is now set. The president has signed the NSS. The secretary of defense has released the NDS and NPR; the MDR is soon to follow. The White House has made its FY 2019 budget request, and posture hearings are close at hand. However, ambition often outpaces resources, and as with the Obama administration, there is reason for concern with the administration’s plans.
CSIS International Security Program experts Kathleen Hicks, Seth Jones, Todd Harrison, Andrew Hunter, Mark Cancian, and Rebecca Hersman discuss the NDS and the resource challenges that may impact its implementation.
Perpetuating the debate over capabilities-based planning versus threat-based planning can only inhibit informed discussion of force planning and needs analysis, writes Kathleen Hicks.
The Defense Department has begun the formulation of a new defense strategy. Amidst the chatter surrounding the security strategy effort, Kathleen Hicks explains why significant change of Defense Department direction is unlikely to emerge from the forthcoming National Defense Strategy and recommends some tools to help manage the mismatch born of ambitious goals and inevitably limited resources.