US Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke bluntly to America's NATO allies on Friday. They needed to hear it. America's key strategic alliance throughout the cold war is in far deeper trouble than most members admit. The Atlantic allies face a host of new and old dangers. Without more and wiser European military spending — on equipment, training, surveillance and reconnaissance — NATO faces, as Mr. Gates rightly warned, “a dim if not dismal future” and even “irrelevance”, writes The New York Times in its editorial. Excerpts: The secretary is retiring at the end of this month, which is likely one of the reasons he jettisoned the diplomatic niceties. But not the only one. As he made clear, the US can no longer afford to do a disproportionate share of NATO's fighting and pay a disproportionate share of its bills while Europe slashes its defense budgets and free-rides on the collective security benefits. NATO's shockingly wobbly performance over Libya, after the Pentagon handed off leadership, should leave no doubt about the Europeans' weaknesses. And while America's NATO partners now have 40,000 troops in Afghanistan (compared with about 99,000 from the United States), many have been hemmed in by restrictive rules of engagement and shortages of critical equipment. Too many are scheduled for imminent departure. Libya, a mission much more directly linked to the security of Europe than of the United States, strikingly illustrates the consequences. Fewer than half of NATO's 28 members are taking part in the military mission. Fewer than a third are participating in the all-important airstrikes. British and French aircraft carry the main burden. Canada, Belgium, Norway and Denmark, despite limited resources, have made outsized contributions. Turkey, with the alliance's second-largest military, has remained largely on the sidelines. Germany, NATO's biggest historic beneficiary, has done nothing at all. Even fully participating members have failed to train enough targeting specialists to keep all of their planes flying sorties or to buy enough munitions to sustain a bombing campaign much beyond the present 11 weeks. Mr. Gates was right to speak out. We hope his likely successor, Leon Panetta, will keep pushing hard. A two-tiered military alliance is really no alliance at all. __
