Don’t Get All Surprised

Even in an effort “done on the cheap”, NATO could not have pulled off the Libya operation without the US, not even in the “non-hardware-and-brute-force” areas of intelligence and assessment, for which the Europeans have always argued was their actual contribution to the alliance.

Last year's Nato operation in Libya, code named Unified Protector, is unlikely to have succeeded without US military support.

Nato major-general Marcel Druart, addressing the European Parliament committee on security and defence on Tuesday (20 March), said Nato relied heavily on US military expertise on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities.

I guess that you get what you pay for. It’s also made much worse by the Europeans’ typical internal pre-occupations and inability to form priorities that makes them cause their usual chaos:

"There is the military machine on one hand and the political-military machine in Brussels," he said, explaining that to achieve a consensus among 28 nations is not always easy and takes a relatively long time.

How convenient.