Will Putin call Nato’s bluff? European militaries are a paper tiger

“Paper tiger”. That is how Donald Trump described Russia during his UN speech on Tuesday, but judging by their performance, that put-down could equally be applied to most of America’s own allies. That became clear enough earlier this month, when 21 Russian drones flew into Polish airspace, triggering a Nato air-intrusion alert, the closure of Polish airports, the scrambling of fighters to intercept them — and a hard look at combat readiness right across the alliance.

Dutch F-35 fighters bagged four of the drones, and the others went down by themselves: they were not bombardment drones, just plastic decoys without explosive warheads. Debris aside, in fact, the only damage was the destruction of a house near Lublin, caused not by the Russians, but by a sophisticated $1.9 million US air-to-air missile. It had been launched by a Polish F-16 fighter at a drone — and missed.

Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, was quick to use the Russian incursion to call for more defence spending, urging Nato members to spend 5% of their GDPs on defence. This week’s latest apparent drone incursion, this time over Denmark, has raised the pressure even further: especially now that Scott Bessent, the US Secretary of the Treasury, is warning that Trump has no plans to send more troops to help out his European allies.

But simply raising defence spending will not turn Europe’s states into genuinely effective military powers. For one thing, the GDP criterion is much too vague to mean much. Finland, for instance, spends only 2.4% of its GDP on defence and yet can mobilise some 250,000 determined soldiers. Other Nato members, which spend much more than the Finns, obtain far less for their money.

Moreover, focusing on GDP instead of force requirements — so many battalions, artillery regiments, fighter squadrons — is nothing but an invitation to cheat, an opportunity lustily taken up across the continent. The latest Spanish submarine, for instance, is not imported for €1 billion or so from Thyssen-Krupp, which supplies navies around the world with competent, well-proven submarines. Instead, it was proudly designed and built at the Navantia state-owned Spanish shipyard: for €3.8 billion, roughly the cost of a much bigger French nuclear-powered submarine. As a feeble justification for that absurdly high cost, Spain’s defence minister cited a supposedly advanced air-recirculation system — so greatly advanced, in fact, that it is not actually ready, and will not be installed even in the submarine’s next iteration.

Soon, though, Italy will outdo Spain’s platinum submarine: by including a new bridge to Sicily, set to cost some €13.5 billion, into its 2% of GDP Nato spending quota. The government’s excuse is that some 3,000 Italian troops may need to cross the Strait of Messina were the Italian army ever to be fully mobilised. But it would be much cheaper to fly them individually, each trooper in his own luxurious private jet. Even without the bridge, meanwhile, Italy’s cheating on the 2% target is bad enough. Most notably, much of the Italian Navy’s spending goes towards warships made by Italy’s state-owned Fincantieri shipyard. But there is not enough money for the fuel and maintenance expenses to operate more than half of them, meaning another industrial subsidy is camouflaged as defence spending. All the while, Italy refuses to increase its defence budget beyond the very modest target of 2% — which it has yet to meet.

As for Germany, three and half years since the start of the Ukraine war, with ever more ambitious rearmament plans loudly promised, the total number of personnel in uniform has actually slightly decreased. And, aside from beginning a multi-billion euro purchase on an Israeli missile-defence system, nothing much has happened. Despite its high demand in Ukraine, even the battle tank, that German specialty, is being produced in very, very small numbers: so low that the annual output could be lost in a morning of combat. In May 2023, indeed, a meagre 18 Leopard tanks were ordered to replace older models lost in Ukraine. The expected delivery date? Between 2025 and 2026! Then, in July, Germany purchased a further 105 advanced Leopard 2A8s. That is the number needed to equip a single brigade, the German force stationed in Lithuania — and they are expected to arrive in 2030!

The sad truth, then, is that Germany has yet to start working in earnest to correct the extreme neglect inflicted on its armed forces during the long Merkel premiership, when she kept saying that “even if we had the money we would not know how to spend it”. All the while, German helicopters lacked rotors and tanks lacked engines. The exceedingly slow recovery of the German army is especially frustrating because Nato is not actually short of air or naval forces. What it lacks are ground forces, soldiers more simply, or rather soldiers actually willing to fight. Having added Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to the alliance, tiny countries with outsized defence needs, the alliance faces a severe troop deficit across the entire Baltic sector. The troops so far sent by Nato allies, such as visiting Alpini battalions from Italy, cannot improve the maths.

With its 38 million inhabitants, Poland could certainly raise an adequate army to defend its two borders with Russian Kaliningrad and Russian-dominated Belarus. But its governments have persistently chosen not to do so, rejecting conscription followed by reserve service along Finnish or Israeli lines. In November 2021, just four months before Ukraine’s invasion but with every sign that Russia was on the move, Poland had just 42,000 combat-ready soldiers. That is more or less the right number for a country of 38 million — if, that is, Poland were located somewhere between Fiji and Tonga.

And now, even after the drone attack, Prime Minister Tusk still refuses conscription, the only way to generate the large forces Poland needs to defend two fronts. The official explanation is that conscription under communism subjected 18-year-old recruits to humiliation rituals, which all too often slid into torture and even rape. Those are practices which the Poles like to explain are caused by the infiltration of the Red Army’s notorious “dedovshchina” (“reign of old-timers”) system of abuse by older soldiers. But the reputation of Poland’s pre-communist army was no better here, and indeed for Belorussian, Jewish and Ukrainian conscripts things could be much worse.

The truth, then, is simpler: Polish youth are just as post-heroic as their peers across Europe. Unlike their predecessors, they do not feel the urge to prove themselves in combat, let alone to serve as long as it takes to defend their countries. The many young Ukrainians in Poland, who fled their own country to avoid being conscripted to defend it, do nothing to induce patriotic attitudes. Nor does it help that Warsaw constantly talks up the few thousand US combat soldiers foolishly deployed in Poland. As Bessant’s latest comments imply, this is a force that will be evacuated rather than reinforced if there is a major Russian offensive, but which now induces young Poles to say that if “Nato” wants more troops, let them send more Americans.

In Britain, for its part, the post-heroic refusal is irrelevant. His Majesty has only 73,847 full-time soldiers at his disposal, most of whom are recruited from the small subset of British families with strong military traditions. Foreign recruits with similar backgrounds make up the remainder, most notably the 4,127 Gurkhas, but also some from Fiji. The French Foreign Legion has fewer than 9,000 soldiers — self-selected aspiring warriors from everywhere, and whose French officers are just as atypical. But the rest of the French Army is so far gone that even among the 11,000 supposedly elite Troupes de Marine, less than half are willing and able to fight.

As for the other European armies, the less said the better. The Danes and Swedes announced with great fanfare that they were joining Finland in introducing conscription: only to accommodate so many demands for exemptions that in 2024 they enrolled some 10,000 troops between them, as compared to 77,000 Finns 18 year olds drawn from a far smaller population. The Belgians and Dutch, who used to provide three armoured divisions to Nato, might now field a tenth of that: a mere three battalions. The Italian, Spanish, Portuguese armies do not even train in earnest anymore. Their exercises are bored drills, their manoeuvres theatrical displays scripted to look good, instead of being deliberately disrupted by supervisors to test the mental and physical agility of officers and men as in real manoeuvres. As total numbers shrink, moreover, those armies did not reduce the number of officers anywhere near proportionately, meaning many Nato armies have plenty of generals but very few combat-ready troops for them to lead.

All of the above explains why Putin’s motley army — home-grown mercenaries from Russia’s poorest backwaters, convicted criminals and North Korean slave soldiers — can nevertheless frighten European governments into rearming at great expense. As for Donald Tusk and his Poles — they would do well to learn the lessons of another Russian incursion in September. Not in 2025, but in 1939, when the French army did not move, and the Royal Air Force did not bomb. The difference now, of course, is that Poland really could defend itself, if it emulated the Finns across the Baltic and conscripted 18-year-olds, while continuing to add trained soldiers to its reserve units. Fail, however, and Putin will only keep pushing.

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