The problem can be as basic as transportation. A country as rich as Germany is still unable to deliver more than a third of the troops it promised for peacekeeping in Kabul on schedule because it must rent Russian or Ukrainian transport planes on the commercial market. One country, which NATO officials refused to identify, discussed moving troops to Kabul by railroad.
Yet a European troop transport plane, the A-400 M, a variant of the European-owned Airbus, is stuck in a financing dispute in Germany. Even worse, the plane will take 8 to 10 years to deliver.
Europe spends about $140 billion a year on the military, but on average only about $7,000 per soldier — compared with $28,000 per American soldier — on research and development.
Some fixes would be simple and not terribly expensive, officials and other experts say. To create a smart bomb out of a dumb one involves slapping on an $18,000 guidance package, said William Schneider Jr., chairman of the Defense Science Board, a Pentagon advisory panel, and providing sophisticated data links that have already been developed. "There is no technology transfer needed in this case," he said. "People just need to do it."
European aircraft would then be able to benefit from American airborne battlefield surveillance. Soldiers could easily have better gear able to communicate with American satellites or Predators.
A Rand Corporation study suggests that the Europeans can do enough to fight effectively alongside the Americans by spending some $25 billion to $56 billion more in the next decade, a senior French official said.
Javier Solana, the European Union's chief of foreign and security policy and before that NATO secretary general, said the Europeans could restore and maintain political credibility only by living up to their promises of increased military strength. "We do not set out to rival the United States as a military power, but where we decide to set goals, we must realize them," he said.
Now, in a phrase that has become almost a cliché, the United States is the power that fights, the United Nations feeds and the European Union finances, while European soldiers, as in Afghanistan and the Balkans, keep the peace. "This kind of complementarity is fine in the short term," the senior French official said. "But George Robertson is right. It must be a partnership or it's not stable in the long run.."
Lord Robertson complains with some bitterness that Germany is the only European country that has increased its military spending at all — $780 million from a special tax to fight terrorism — since Sept. 11. Yet he remains convinced that, in the end, "the European allies will do it — they know they have to do it."
The German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, also seems to recognize that the Europeans must pool more power to remain relevant for America. "We don't have too much America," Mr. Schröder recently told the newspaper Die Zeit. "We have too little Europe."