By Cassell Bryan-Low
LONDON, June 26 (Reuters) – European allies need to overhaul their war-fighting capabilities for a new era of combat, senior military officials from the region said, while warning of the potential threat Russia poses.
Speaking at a defence conference in London this week, NATO’s deputy supreme allied commander in Europe, Air Chief Marshal Sir Johnny Stringer, underlined the need to shift to using mass-produced, low-cost equipment such as drones and interceptors, while becoming less dependent on high-end, expensive platforms that can take years to produce.
Among other priorities was the ability to conduct deep precision strikes and electromagnetic warfare while also bolstering air defences, including to defend against weapons with ranges of thousands of kilometers, he said, addressing the conference hosted by the Royal United Services Institute, a UK-based defence and security think tank.
“The threat we face is at 360 degrees,” the air chief marshal told the audience of military and industry representatives. “We need to be looking much further north now in terms of the ranges where we’re needing to deal with Russian long-range aviation and with a potent surface and subsurface threat, most obviously from the [Russian navy’s] Northern Fleet.”
Some senior European officials have said Russia could rebuild its military sufficiently to threaten NATO territory within the next few years.
President Donald Trump’s administration has repeatedly accused European governments of underinvesting in their militaries and relying too heavily on U.S. protection. Washington announced plans in May to pull 5,000 troops out of Germany, and Trump has threatened to pull out of NATO. A pivotal NATO leaders’ summit is due to take place in July in Ankara.
The grinding war in Ukraine and conflict in the Middle East have driven home the need for a sweeping overhaul of defense strategy, military officials said.
Current conflicts show that land warfare is “fundamentally changing,” the commander of the German army, Lieutenant General Christian Freuding, said during a presentation on Tuesday. In addition to increasing military spending and speeding up procurement processes, “we must fundamentally adapt how we will fight,” he said.
In terms of procurement, Freuding said the German army is focusing on interim solutions that are available now to address its most critical capability gaps, rather than waiting for “what might be possible in five years’ time but won’t be delivered for another 10 years.”
Artificial intelligence is also having a transformative impact in processing battlefield data, military leaders said. “A corps planning cycle that once took 72 hours can now take one,” said the British Army’s chief of the general staff, General Sir Roly Walker. “A corps that once prosecuted 24 targets a day, because that was the speed with which they moved, can 10x that now.”
(Cassell Bryan-Low; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
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