“Odds are rising that France and other European nations could end up in a Middle East ground war. That’s worrisome in itself, but there are also concerns that years of cutbacks in European defense budgets could leave the continent’s militaries unprepared for a wily battlefield foe like the Islamic State terror group that recently killed 129 people in a spate of Paris attacks.
…These are countries that have enormous shared responsibility with the United States and their NATO partners,” says Jeff Rathke, deputy director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We all agree they need to redress their low defense spending.
…NATO’s defense spending as whole has dropped sharply, even as the alliance itself has admitted new members and grown more expansive. NATO’s membership has nearly doubled since 1990, for instance, but European defense spending fell by nearly 30% during the same time. That has made the alliance even more dependant upon the United States than it was during the Cold War. U.S. defense spending has risen from 55% of NATO’s total in 1995 to about 70% today, according to Carnegie Europe.”
(H/T: Yahoo Finance)
