The Navy’s Aegis Ashore will play a central role in NATO’s commitment to an integrated air and missile defense, the secretary general announced at the alliance’s Washington summit.
The integrated air and missile defense is part of NATO’s commitment to better meet the challenges, particularly on its eastern front posed by an aggressive Russia across all domains, Jens Stoltenberg said at a press conference last week. The summit’s concluding declaration of intent called this a “360-degree approach” to deterrence and defense.
The addition of Aegis Ashore in Poland will complement another land-based Aegis system in Romania, Aegis destroyers based in Spain, as well as Turkey’s land-based systems.
None of this increased readiness in the alliance would have been possible without strong support from members, Stoltenberg said. He repeatedly noted that 23 members are spending at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense.
Poland spends more than 4 percent of its Gross Domestic Product on defense and the United States spends about 3.7 percent. Before and during the summit, Warsaw pushed to boost the threshold of defense spending to 3 percent.
Country leadership at the meeting noted that Europe and Canada are carrying 50 percent of the alliance’s costs. Like German Chancellor Olov Scholz, they said they were closely following the upcoming American presidential election, knowing that former President Donald Trump has been skeptical of NATO’s value.
The idea that the U.S. would leave NATO is unpopular in Congress. At a meeting on Capitol Hill with NATO leaders and congressional Republicans, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said, “there’s not a chance on earth we’re going to leave NATO.” Last year Congress passed a provision in the defense authorization that would bar any president from leaving the alliance without two-thirds senate approval or separate legislation to do so.
Integrating air and missile and defense was but one step in improving NATO’s defenses, Stoltenberg said. The alliance will “go further [in] much of its defense plans with capabilities” now coming from Finland and Norway. With great territories to defend, he specifically cited the importance of logistics and having different corridors of delivery if a member is attacked. He added these hubs and nods are needed now to support Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Sustainment of forces was a key point he and American officials made often in explaining the creation of a new NATO command at Wiesbaden, Germany, that would train Ukrainian soldiers and also act as a distribution hub for donated weapons to Kyiv.
American Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli, as supreme allied commander in Europe, drew up the plan for the command and logistics nodes, Stoltenberg said. He added the shift away from having the United States coordinate and distribute to Ukraine was another example of Europe and Canada sharing alliance costs and responsibilities.
The name of the three-star commander would be announced soon as would the composition of the 700-member force that is to be assigned to the center, the secretary general said.
An agreement was also reached between France, Germany, Poland and Italy to develop a long-range cruise missile. French Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu told reporters Wednesday a missile with a range of more than 300 miles “has value, including on a budgetary level, because it obviously also allows the various costs to be amortized.” He added the United Kingdom’s new Labor government could possibly join the effort.
A number of European countries eliminated intermediate-range cruise missiles from their arsenals after the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987. Poland and Germany were among those to destroy theirs in the 1990s with the break-up of the Soviet Union.
In 2019, the United States withdrew from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty citing Russia’s development of cruise missiles with longer ranges than allowed. The Trump administration also pointed to China’s development of these missiles as another reason to leave. China was not a party to the treaty between Moscow and Washington.
Germany’s Scholz, not waiting for the fielding of the European missile, signed an agreement with the United States to rotate in conventionally-armed but longer-range cruise missiles to Germany. He termed the agreement a part of NATO’s “integrated deterrence” effort.
The package being deployed to Germany includes SM-6 missiles, Tomahawks and developmental hypersonic weapons.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in a statement to international news agencies that Moscow would react with a “military response to the new threat” posed by the agreement between Washington and Berlin. “This is just a link in the chain of a course of escalation.”
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters Thursday “what we are deploying to Germany is a defensive capability. …More Russian saber-rattling is not going to deter us.”
