Ed Arnold
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Expert on European security and defense; former British Army officer
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Claims by Ed Arnold (20 of 33)
European ammunition stockpiles dangerously low
Even with low human casualties, European militaries would quickly run out of ammunition, rockets, and air defense interceptors because wartime consumption is extremely high as Ukraine shows, while European stockpiles are very small and even smaller after donations to Ukraine.
Europe can support its own reinforcement
Transatlantic reinforcement is not solely an American task; Europeans have a large stake because they want US reinforcements on their soil, and capabilities like UK tracking of Russian submarines in the North Atlantic are essential to protect arriving ships, so Europe should argue to the Trump administration that defense is a shared effort rather than the US bailing out Europe.
Article 5 is a vague consultative mechanism
Article 5 of the Washington Treaty is not literally 'an attack on one is an attack on all'; it is a consultative mechanism, deliberately written vaguely by the US after WWII to avoid automatic commitment to another European war, requiring only 'such measures as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force,' so the US could satisfy the letter of Article 5 by sending a single AWACS plane if part of Estonia were annexed, making the guarantee far softer than most policymakers assume.
Russia's performance is hard to predict
Whether European capabilities would suffice depends heavily on how Russia fights, which is hard to gauge: Russia fought very differently in 2022 than expected, and despite the 2008 Georgia war it is arguably worse 14 years later rather than better, making it difficult to assess the European requirement against a moving target.
Ammunition, not launchers, limits long-range strike
Europe is gaining long-range strike capability but the US has far more of it, and the binding constraint is not launchers or artillery systems but ammunition; without the ammo you cannot use the launchers, and Ukraine has shown that striking Russian logistics, ammo dumps, and command-and-control deep in the rear is highly effective at degrading offensive potential.
NATO has never been tested as a single war-fighting entity
NATO is unlikely to fight as well as it thinks it can because it has never been tested as a single organizational entity in this kind of large-scale war; its operational history in Libya, Kosovo, and Afghanistan was very different, so its performance in a major war with Russia would be unprecedented and largely a matter of best efforts.
Reserve recall systems are unprepared in the West
Reserve mobilization systems are unprepared in countries like the UK, where Arnold as a former officer only confirms his address annually and has no idea where he would report or to which unit if recalled, unlike Germany, Sweden, and the Baltic states which are already engaging reservists and veterans on processes and procedures—illustrating that systems must be prepared before they are needed.
NATO should be prescriptive not descriptive about procurement
NATO could organize itself to be far more prescriptive rather than descriptive about what members buy: instead of merely telling Sweden to provide a brigade, it should specify it must be a heavy brigade able to do specific tasks, drawing from a reducing pool of military capabilities so members select complementary, interoperable forces, recognizing that almost all European nations will fight side by side with mixed allied forces in their chosen region.
National service framing better than narrow conscription
Rather than narrow conscription, the more useful frame is broader national service for whole-of-society resilience, since people can contribute in many ways beyond carrying a rifle; reintroduction is easier for countries like Sweden and Germany that recently ended conscription than for the UK which ended it in the 1960s, and because all European nations plus the US and Canada face recruitment and retention problems, the current model is failing and some form of national service may be required.
Small armies cannot absorb high-attrition losses
Small European armies are dangerously fragile in large-scale war because for the Danes or Dutch to have a single brigade declared combat ineffective would effectively wipe out their army; Russia has been losing roughly a battle group a day to killed or wounded since August, a casualty rate no European country has experienced, which would be a severe shock that is politically very hard to manage and could fracture a fragile coalition.
Hyper-specialized regional command makes the task manageable
Europe should abandon NATO's 360-degree all-nations-do-everything ambition (accepted at the 2016 Warsaw summit) because it is nonsense by military logic—Arctic warfare and Mediterranean warfare require completely different specialized training—and instead break the euro-atlantic defense into three interlinked regional plans (north, east, south) under a hyper-specialized command structure, which makes the task far more manageable for Europeans without the US.
Specialization requires giving up some capabilities
Achieving regional specialization requires nations to prioritize and give up doing some things to get really good at others, which is what strategy actually is—making choices—and Europe has been guilty of trying to do everything all at once; in the current defense-and-deterrence climate Europe cannot keep federating capabilities to run Afghanistan- or Sahel-style expeditionary missions.
A unified European army is unrealistic and low-value
A single integrated European army is unrealistic within the next five years and of questionable value because interoperability between certain nations is already very high while basic technical barriers persist—militaries use their own incompatible radios rather than NATO radios, so a UK soldier can only talk to an Estonian by physically sharing a vehicle—and NATO will actually fight as nine separate forward battlegroups; the better approach is deeper integration at the sub-regional level through existing bilateral and multilateral frameworks like UK-Estonia or Dutch-German army integration.
Europe lacks US air defense suppression assets
Europe's most immediate military weakness without the US is the suppression and destruction of enemy air defenses (SEAD/DEAD), since the US holds the majority of those assets in NATO, and without them European NATO states would struggle to gain air supremacy over Russia, which NATO doctrine depends on to give ground and naval forces freedom to maneuver.
US nuclear umbrella may persist despite conventional withdrawal
The current US posture suggests Europeans should be prepared to do conventional defense and deterrence in Europe themselves while the US nuclear element still applies, and Americans may still join the deep strike battle even without forces in Europe, so Europeans need a clearer understanding of US intentions to set their own prioritization.
European logistics slower than US transatlantic movement
Logistics is a major European constraint: the US can move equipment from mainland America into Ukraine faster than France can move its own equipment in, which matters acutely because Europe would need to shift large forces stationed in the west to reinforce the east, and improving roads and bridges to fix this cannot be done quickly.
NATO forward battlegroups fight independently
NATO's nine forward land forces (enhanced forward presence battlegroups) are largely independent and do not link together, and since a Russian war is most likely to start at a single point such as the Suwalki Gap and Kaliningrad rather than everywhere at once, individual commands could actually fight the Russians in front of them quite well with their organic assets; the real problem is follow-on forces, reserves, and the deep strike battle.
European readiness lags paper strength
The bigger European problem is not outright capability gaps but low readiness: many European militaries, most notably Germany's Bundeswehr, look formidable on paper but cannibalize equipment to keep a small high-readiness 'tip of the spear' rotating, so fielding a full army becomes far more challenging, and this is true across almost all European forces though improving from a very low baseline.
US occupying NATO command without commitment is worst case
US disengagement from NATO command would be a problem because intelligence, operations, and planning functions throughout the command structure are generally US- or UK-led, not just at the top; handing the SACEUR post to a European might actually benefit Europeans, whereas the worst case is the US continuing to occupy command positions but not taking them seriously, which would be very difficult for Europeans to manage.
Uncertainty about US role complicates planning
Military planning requires a defined mission from a higher echelon, so not knowing whether the US would be absent, fully disengaged, or providing limited support in specific capabilities makes European planning far harder; the new three regional plans (north, east, south) are the most comprehensive since the Cold War, but all US assets within them are now written in pencil rather than pen, requiring Europe to identify critical gaps the US may vacate.
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