Phil
Pennington, Reporter
Analysis: The
2 percent GDP spend on the military that New Zealand is
being urged to match has had its share of detractors
recently.
RAND, the corporation that defined the term
“think tank”, went so far as to give the US government a
whole new way of measuring if countries were pulling their
military weight – the “burden-sharing index”.
“The
world will not suddenly become a safer place if every ally
hits that magic number,” it said in January, as it promoted
the index.
Weeks later, at the
February Munich security conference, the Trump
administration staged its turnabout on Europe and laid down
the GDP spending law: 2 percent was now no longer enough,
and at least 3 and even 5 percent was the goal, Donald Trump
declared.
But RAND pointed
out: “Asking them, ‘How much do you spend?’ is a poor
substitute for asking, ‘How much are you
doing?'”
Other analysts have been here before. In
2020, the Atlantic Council, another leading US think tank,
ran an article headlined: Rethink and replace 2
percent.’
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“Trump uses the fact that most member states
have not yet met the 2 percent target as proof that the
United States is being taken advantage of by its allies,” it
said
towards the end of his first term.
“Beyond the
political challenges, the metric remains an arbitrary and
inefficient tool for defence planning. It does little to
indicate … effectiveness.”
After NATO set the 2
percent target in 2014, it became the proxy “indicator of
the political resolve of individual allies”.
The
closest New Zealand’s resolve got in the ensuing decade was
1.34 percent of GDP in 2020. It was particularly low before
2016.
The spend had to rise, said Dr Juhn Espia – a
research fellow at Christchurch’s Institute for Indo-Pacific
Affairs – but 2 percent was beyond reach for now.
“I
don’t think that this [is] realistic in the short-term,” he
told RNZ on Friday. “Prime Minister [Christopher] Luxon was
wise in the choice of words here – ‘as close to 2 percent as
we possibly can’ – because he realises how small the pie
is.”
How the pie will be sliced will become clearer
when the
defence capability plan is released. But 2 percent
poorly spent would not help much.
“Imagine two
countries,” RAND said. “One spends 2.1 percent of its GDP on
defence, mostly to maintain aging equipment and pay pensions
to military retirees.
“The other spends just 1.9
percent, but it has a well-trained army, modern equipment,
and a top-of-the-line military drone industry. The first
country satisfies the 2 percenters, but no commander in the
world would prefer it as an ally over the second
country.”
Greece has beaten the 2 percent all decade,
peaking at over 4 percent of GDP spent on defence in 2022.
But its spending on personnel was so inefficient that Greece
scored near the bottom for efficiency, in a
135-page report for the European Parliament just last
November about improving the quality of the defence
spending, which ballooned on the continent by almost 12
percent last year.
Greece was around 0.2 on several
efficiency measures, versus France on 1.0.
The
International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said
when it came to quality, the 2 percent fixation was not
helping.
“It masks actual capabilities, contributions,
sustainability and effectiveness of spending while also
incentivising states to adopt broader definitions of defence
spending.”
The Atlantic Council said examples “abound
of allies that spend relatively little but spend it
efficiently and for necessary purposes”.
It mattered,
too, where a country shopped for weapons. Russia supplied
itself in large part, said IISS, so while its military spend
last year was less than a third of Europe in actual dollars,
it got fractionally more bang for its buck because Europe increasingly
relied on higher-priced US imports.
The 2 percent
was labelled “arbitrary” by Canada’s Ploughshares peace
research institute. It was not “was not evidence-based
policymaking”, it said in December.
Canada has been in
the gun for spending almost as little as New Zealand – 1.3
percent of GDP in 2023. But the institute said Canada’s
non-military contribution to collective security through
diplomacy, development and disaster aid, and peacekeeping should
count for something.
RAND came up with something
similar in its burden-sharing index, in a 2017 report for
the Office of the US Secretary of Defence. It updated the
index figures in 2023.
The index counts the cost to a
nation of peacekeeping and enforcing economic sanctions,
along with total defence spending. Any score above 1.0 meant
a country was pulling its weight: The US on 1.07 trailed
NATO as a whole, on 1.10.
About 20 countries scored
below 1.0, but RAND did not name them.
The index
showed the US taking less of the burden for NATO and other
partners, down from 53 percent in 1990 to 39 percent in
2023.
“That’s not a small number – but it’s also not a
flashing red sign that we’re being taken to the cleaners,”
RAND researcher King Mallory said in January.
Asian
countries, including Oceania, were calculated as taking 13
percent of the burden. Singapore helped with that – it was a
small state that New Zealand should look to, said Espia, who
is based in the Philippines.
“The contrasts are
astounding – New Zealand currently has one of the smallest
navies in the world, consisting of nine vessels – frigates,
patrol vessels, and logistical support vessels. Singapore,
on the other hand, with one of the smallest EEZs and
shortest coastlines in the world, has 40
warships.”
Manning the navy was becoming a problem, so
conventional weaponry was now being mixed with emerging
tech.
“In its latest set of 10 new surface warships
and two new submarines, Singapore has opted to equip these
platforms with uncrewed and automated systems,” Espia
said.
An 8000-tonne ship could be crewed by 80
sailors. New Zealand’s Te Kaha is half that tonnage and has
over twice the crew.
This came at a price: Singapore
spends about four times more in dollar terms than New
Zealand on defence.
How much New Zealand chose to
spend, and on what, depended on it “fully opting into the
Western alliance (including AUKUS)
or retaining a more middle-ground participation that will
allow the country to cooperate on an issue-based, contingent
basis”, Espia said.
But 2 percent, whatever its
detractors have said, will still be the measure. In
February, round figures – and not indexes – were all Trump
was
talking
about.
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