The military-spending announcements out of Washington and Ottawa have revealed that there are two distinct concepts of defence at play today: one grounded in the ideas of warfare of previous centuries, and one attuned to the tragic needs of the 2020s.
That’s because we have taken two lessons from the handful of really big conflicts, current and potential, that are threatening the world’s democracies today.
One lesson – the important one – is that military spending is now primarily a matter of buying arms and munitions to supply other countries engaged in wars we will not join, rather than building up domestic forces for our own defence.
That was the logic behind the important and long-delayed decision by the U.S. Congress this week to immediately spend US$61-billion on military support for Ukraine.
That money, which will be directed to purchasing weapons and material, including crucial air-defence systems and long-range missiles, joins the approximately US$170-billion that European countries are spending on military aid to Ukraine (plus about $4-billion from Canada). It is similar to what Ukraine currently spends on its own defence (US$64.8-billion last year, representing 37 per cent of its GDP).
The bill also includes US$8-billion to provide weapons for Taiwan and its neighbours to defend against a potential attack by China’s regime, and, controversially, a politically necessary US$26-billion in support to Israel’s Netanyahu government (with US$9-billion of that for aid to Palestinians and other civilian war victims).
This is the reality of military threats today. None of them, either current or conceivable, involve situations where NATO countries themselves would be directly threatened or militarily involved. But these conflicts all involve situations where the democratic and pluralist world order would be severely threatened by a successful invasion of authoritarian forces.
Which brings us to the second lesson Western countries have taken from current military threats.
When Vladimir Putin’s invasion began in 2014, many NATO countries and analysts concluded that he had successfully modernized and expanded his military to the point that Russia was capable of overtaking all of Ukraine and seizing parts of adjoining European Union countries. This assumption led NATO that year to turn its 2006 napkin-scribble spending guideline – that its member states should devote 2 per cent of their GDP to their own militaries – into a requirement.
In its budget announcement last week, the Trudeau government pledged to spend $8.1-billion more on its armed forces over the next five years. While this includes badly needed investments in such things as submarines and surveillance equipment, much of it will be spent on labour costs: According to Canada’s military commander General Wayne Eyre, the new defence commitments will require 30,000 more troops, at a time when Canada is having such a hard time finding recruits that it has allowed immigrants to join the military before they have full citizenship. That is, in part, because Canada has agreed to try to meet the 2-per-cent target, and at least part of that spending is intended to meet NATO expectations rather than Canadian material needs.
Now, it is possible that Canada, given its huge geography and mid-sized economy, does indeed have domestic defence needs (including submarines and breakers to properly oversee its Arctic limits) that approach 2 per cent of GDP. But the target itself is unnecessary and excessive.
Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion made that clear. The late security analyst Anthony Cordesman referred to the target that year as “probably one of the stupidest exercises in defence planning in modern military history.” Since 2022, Russia has chosen to devote its entire economy to war and has accrued a horrifying 300,000 casualties – forcing it to import tens of thousands of soldiers from Nepal, Cuba and elsewhere – just to hold a tiny, preconquered strip of Donbas and Crimea for two years in an unsuccessful effort to keep Ukraine out of the EU. That does show that Mr. Putin is a threat to the democratic world – but not one that’s capable of seizing even all of Ukraine, to say nothing of any EU country.
Even before 2022, the NATO forces of European countries alone were four times better funded and had vastly more troops and weapons than Russia’s – and that was before major European countries greatly increased their military spending and Russia faced massive losses.
The current spending of NATO’s member states, then, is more than adequate. What needs to improve is investment in, and co-ordination of, industrial production of supplies for export.
And yet we and our allies continue to cling to the obsolete guideline of spending 2 per cent of GDP on national defence, rather than on capital to support other countries’ defence. We NATO members have learned since 2022 that our system of collective defence is well-enough funded for any threat within our borders – and perhaps, in the case of other members, overfunded. What needs support, instead, are the wars that we are never going to enter.
Doug Saunders