NATO’s Most Game-Changing Weapons

He described NATO’s military growth as a “good news-bad news situation,” with the bad news being that an intended GDP growth of the alliance’s defense capabilities was intended to be undertaken during the alliance’s 50th anniversary in 1999 but never materialized to hit the 2 percent goal.

“That obviously didn’t happen, and it took the 2 percent goal in 2014 to start to move the ball,” he said. “So, the process of improving defensive capabilities has been historically a little bit behind where U.S. administrations have wanted it to be.

“But the good news is that it is happening now, in particular since 2018 or so and especially since the current phase of the war in Ukraine began. That was a real wake-up call for a lot of Europeans.”

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“With regard to specific technologies, there’s the U.S. and there’s everybody else,” Erath said. “You can say that, on a one-for-one basis, European countries can build tanks that are quite similar to Abrams. They can build helicopters, Apache; they can build a cruise missile that performs somewhat relatively to a Tomahawk. But the U.S. has a vast advantage on everyone else because we integrate all of these systems.”