Panetta Exhorts European NATO Members to Share Defense Spending

I think that the alliance is already hollow...

By some measures, he said, European defense spending had dropped 2 percent a year for the last decade while Europeans were engaged in Kosovo, Libya and Afghanistan, meaning that the savings had come from budgets for modernization. At the least, he said, NATO members must coordinate spending cuts so that their allies are not surprised.


“We are at a critical moment for our defense partnership,” he warned. “While these warnings have been acknowledged, growing fiscal pressures on both sides of the Atlantic, I fear, have eroded the political will to do something about them.”