Europe's '5% military spending', Trump pressures, bridge and railway improvement costs and AI '1.5%'

Europe's '5% military spending', Trump pressures, bridge and railway improvement costs and AI '1.5%'

European Union countries have begun to add 'improvement costs' for military transport bridges and railways and AI technology costs to meet the 1.5% accounting standard in response to Trump's pressure to increase defense spending to '5% of GDP'.
The New York Times reported on the 23rd that some NATO countries have aimed to meet the '5% of GDP by 2032' line demanded by the Trump administration by adjusting the traditional military spending for troops and weapons, which is currently less than 2% of GDP, to 3.5% of GDP and an additional 1.5% for non-traditional 'defense-related' spending.
Non-traditional defense spending includes the costs of building and improving railways and bridges that can withstand the weight of military convoys, strengthening cybersecurity or developing advanced technologies for weapons and communications, and artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing, which have been on the rise recently.

The Italian government is expected to apply this as a basis for its demand to increase defense spending from 2 percent of GDP this year to 5 percent by 2032.

Roberto Chingolani, chief executive of Italian defense company Leonardo, said Italy does not yet strictly consider certain technologies that can be used militarily as defense spending, but that the share of defense spending will increase rapidly, and that cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing are becoming the “new backbone of defense.” It’s not just bullets. It’s bullets and bytes.”

“We need to have all the enablers for defense spending,” NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said after meeting with foreign ministers from allied countries in Turkey last week. “Sometimes when you cross a bridge in Europe, you want to be able to cross it safely in your own car, let alone in a tank,” he said, adding that the cost of renovating Europe’s fragile bridges will be added to the defense budget. Secretary-General Rutte laid out a new approach to achieving the 5 percent of GDP spending target that “combines what many experts believe is the need for European countries to meet Trump’s demands while also spending more on a robust military to meet their conventional deterrence responsibilities,” foreign ministers and European diplomats from NATO told the Times.

Germany’s new Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said in Turkey that day that “the German government supports Rutte’s proposal,” while French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot told reporters that “the 3 percent to 3.5 percent target is the right baseline,” indicating that he would “support a broader plan,” the Times reported.

The New York Times said, “This new approach reflects efforts by allied governments to persuade President Trump, or at least show that Europe is making progress on his demands,” and that “the Trump administration is open to allies increasing their defense spending, as long as the total reaches 5%,” indicating that a “deal is possible.”
“It’s certainly more than missiles, tanks and howitzers,” the new U.S. ambassador to NATO, Matthew G. Whitaker, said in an online briefing on the 13th, “but it also has to be about defense. It’s not a bag that can hold everything,” he said in a press release, referring to “further negotiations.” 

Ambassador Whitaker said in a speech before the NATO Foreign Ministers’ Meeting that “a 5 percent investment is necessary to ensure that our allies have the ability to deter and defend the alliance, and to contribute to our collective defense,” and that “if a capable defense industry cannot produce what our military needs to keep us safe, then that money is really meaningless and will be spent on unnecessary things like inflation.” He called for “increased defense industry investment.” 

He continued, “In the United States, we are increasing defense production, and we are urging our allies and partners to do the same.” “While our two countries are working to strengthen our transatlantic defense industrial base cooperation, defense industry capacity also includes fair treatment of U.S. defense technology companies, and excluding non-EU industries from EU defense plans will undermine NATO interoperability, slow European rearmament, increase costs, and stifle innovation,” and urged the U.S. defense industry to participate. 

The New York Times reported that “At the Lennart Merry Security Conference in Estonia last weekend, Ambassador Whitaker said the U.S. would also pledge to the same spending target of 5 percent,” adding that “the U.S. would spend far more than any other NATO member country, spending nearly $1 trillion on military operations around the world.” 

The Peterson Institute for International Economics’ February 5 report, “Trump’s 5 percent doctrine and NATO defense spending,” said that “Trump’s call for a 5 percent increase in military spending as a share of GDP may not be the best solution,” adding that “cynics might suspect that Trump is giving European allies an excuse to leave the alliance by making demands that he knows most of them cannot or will not meet, and if that is his ultimate goal, European NATO members will have to sharply increase their defense spending, but on their own terms, not on the terms of a U.S. president whose commitment to international agreements is clearly weak.”

The report continued, “In other words, will achieving the 5% target make the United States a more loyal ally? This is a fundamental question facing Europe and all other US allies,” and pointed out that “maintaining alliance relationships” is a fundamental agenda rather than increasing defense spending.
Regarding defense spending, the report stated, “The United States has been the world’s largest defense spender since the 1940s, with military spending reaching $880 billion (3.36% of GDP) in 2023, nearly twice that of China and Russia combined.” “NATO spent $1.28 trillion on defense in 2023, which is about 54% of the world’s total. If all NATO members had spent 5% of their GDP on defense in 2023, the spending would have exceeded the actual total global defense spending,” and stated that the “5%” is unrealistic. 

The report specifically stated that in the case of achieving 5%, <the US share of NATO spending would have actually decreased from 68.7% to 53.8%>.

The Peters Institute's 'report' concluded that <spending on capital-intensive US weapons systems to satisfy Trump's desire to reduce the US trade deficit is clearly not the right direction> and that <Trump's 5% goal may make good politics and line the pockets of US and foreign weapons manufacturers, but a smart NATO defense means investing in resilience rather than increasing spending to satisfy US demands>.
The report cited <the Ukraine war as providing many lessons, including that conventional military power such as air superiority fighters, naval cruisers, and tanks can be offset by using asymmetric tactics and combining some conventional capabilities with relatively inexpensive civilian technology-based drones> as the reason for its negative judgment on 'simple US weapons increases'. The New York Times pointed out that “if the overall spending cap were increased to 5% of GDP, NATO’s collective defense spending would be $2.4 trillion, and the U.S. still pays more than half,” and that “the war in Ukraine has highlighted Europe’s shortcomings in logistics, with tanks and other heavy military equipment being prevented from crossing European borders where roads and bridges are too weak to support their weight, according to a report this year by EU auditors.”

In April, the EU report, under the subtitle <EU military mobility>, pointed out in detail that bridges could not support the weight of new tanks, and that Western European military supplies were delayed in the process of being transferred on narrow tracks and then retransported, as well as the skyrocketing transportation costs.

“Military cargo arriving by train from Western Europe to the Baltics still uses Soviet-sized rails in some places and has to be transferred from one train to another to reach NATO’s eastern flank,” Jannik Hartmann, chairman of the German Council on Foreign Relations, told the Times. 

“In the event of war, we need to have sufficient alternative routes available,” Hartmann said. “Rerouting trains on long detours is not only expensive, it puts lives at risk on the front lines.” He pointed to a railway bridge in Hanover-Alem, Germany, which “was used as a crossroads for European transit and as a route for transporting military equipment to Ukraine,”

Hartmann said. “Because that railway was under construction, there were long detours and the route had to be changed several times.”