NEDER-OVER-HEMBEEK, Belgium — Chief Cpl. Rudy Christians, an impeccably coiffed military hairdresser, has been cutting soldiers’ hair for 24 years, and he loves his work.
It is a full-time job, guaranteed until retirement, and until then, the 47-year-old corporal has enough free time to pursue an amateur singing career featuring Elvis and Tom Jones numbers.
When the military does send him on an occasional field exercise, he is amazed by the fellow soldiers lumbering around him.
“All the people are so old,” he says.
Recruits like this help explain why Europe’s military muscle has grown soft, and why the U.S. can’t count on substantial military help from many of its European allies.
Even if every member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were to back a U.S. strike against Iraq, the military impact might not be huge. The 17 European countries in NATO have about 2.3 million active-duty troops, about a million more than the U.S. does.
But many of NATO’s forces are poorly equipped, in part because so much money is spent on pay and benefits that there is less left for the technology, weapons and other gear that modern forces need.
While the U.S. spends 36 percent of its defense budget on pay and benefits, most NATO members in Europe earmark an average of nearly 65 percent. The U.S. military employs support staff, of course, but overall, the share of personnel spending in the U.S. defense budget has decreased by 6 percent since the early 1980s. NATO statistics show that such spending has grown by as much or more in Europe during the same period.
NATO officials acknowledge Europe needs to upgrade its military capabilities. “We could do with fewer troops, but better troops; better trained, better equipped, more mobile,” NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said last month at the World Economic Forum. “The problem in Europe is that there are far too many people in uniform, and too few of them able to go into action at the speeds that conflicts presently demand.”
Belgium, for example, employs hundreds of military barbers, musicians and other personnel who aren’t likely to be called into battle. Yet Belgium doesn’t have the money to replace aging helicopters or conduct regular combat-training exercises. Germany drafts 120,000 people every year but can’t afford to buy all the vital transport planes it wants; last year, budget crunches forced it to slash an order of planes to 60 from 73. German soldiers who went to Afghanistan as peacekeepers crowded into an aging, leased Ukrainian carrier that had to stop to refuel.
In France, one of the few NATO countries to increase its defense budget this year, military-procurement funding fell 14 percent between 1997 and 2002, leaving its forces wanting in such key areas as refueling aircraft and missiles. The French defense ministry says it will address procurement shortfalls in the new defense budget. Europe has 11 troop-transport planes, compared with 250 in the United States, and most European members of NATO don’t have any modern precision-guided munitions at all.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the United States has stepped up calls for Europe to put more emphasis on smart bombs, secure communications, special-forces units and long-haul planes to take them to battle. U.S. officials from President George W. Bush on down have pressed for more investment to offset what U.S. Gen. Joseph Ralston, the former NATO supreme allied commander for Europe, calls European militaries’ “outdated and redundant fat.”
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told European defense ministers meeting in Warsaw this past summer that, unless they start spending more on key defense capabilities, the United States won’t call on them for backing when it goes to war. “The phone just won’t ring,” Rumsfeld said.
In fact, Washington has asked NATO for limited contributions to an Iraqi campaign, for both political and military reasons. Its requests to NATO have focused mainly on the defense of Turkey and a reconstruction of Iraq if war occurs. France, Germany and Belgium say it is too early to plan for war, and hope the Iraq crisis can be resolved peacefully.
European leaders say they want to streamline and modernize their armed forces, and some have started. Outfitting their militaries to be nimble and high-tech is vital if Europeans want to influence the U.S. policies with which Europe so frequently disagrees. The United States wants Europe to modernize so it can depend on other countries to share the job — and cost — of playing global cop.
But swift reform isn’t possible in Europe because of labor laws, influential unions and a widespread conviction that defense spending shouldn’t be a priority. One reason Europe has so many soldiers is military labor unions, which are unheard of in the United States and Britain, but strong in continental Europe. These unions trace their history to the end of the 19th century, when disgruntled Dutch soldiers, unhappy about living conditions, banded together into a group called “Ons Belang” (“Our Interests”). Similar groups soon sprang up throughout Western Europe. In the 1970s, European military unions gained sweeping collective-bargaining rights, though they stay out of war-planning and deployment issues.
In Belgium, military unions are as powerful as anywhere on the continent. On King Albert’s birthday last June, a holiday for the Belgian military, unions deployed thousands of soldiers to Brussels to demand a raise in vacation pay. Soldiers chanted, drank beer and banged their aluminum mess bowls. “Show me the money,” one officer shouted to a passing police van. The protest grew so rowdy that police cooled demonstrators off with a water cannon. But it was a success: An emergency session of the Belgian Cabinet agreed to give soldiers — already eligible for six weeks annual vacation — a raise in holiday benefits valued at about 500 euros ($537) each.
“We must be honest with ourselves,” says Warrant Officer Emmanuel Jacob, secretary-general of Centrale Generale du Personnel Militaire, which represents 6,000 active-duty and 2,500 retired personnel. “Either we have a smaller number of people who are well-trained and equipped or we continue to defend a bigger army and it won’t work in the future.”
The average age of a Belgian soldier is 40 — compared to 28 in the United States and 29 in the United Kingdom. Most Belgian military personnel can retire at 56 with full pension benefits. The Defense Ministry acknowledges that too many of its soldiers are too old, and says it is trying to recruit younger people. But Gerard Harveng, a spokesman for Defense Minister Andre Flahaut, says, “I’m not sure that the mission of the Belgian military is to fight.”
