BRUSSELS, Belgium — After years of delay and shrinking budgets, NATO will buy its first ever spy drones later this year. But it’s a tentative entry, at best, into the ranks of the unmanned systems revolution. The five new robotic spies won’t actually join the transatlantic military alliance’s air fleet until the end of the decade.
NATO’s member-states have their own drone fleets, of course: the United States waged a robotic war over Libya when NATO aided the Libyan revolution last year, and American drones are key to the NATO campaign in Afghanistan. But the alliance itself doesn’t own jointly own or operate any drones. And it views the recent round of budget cuts that hack at European members’ defense cash as an opportunity to change that.
So NATO will buy the latest model of Northrop Grumman’s behemoth of a drone, the 32,000-pound Global Hawk, to provide NATO with something it can’t do on its own: the ability view large swaths of territory. “When it comes to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance,” says Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO secretary-general, “we need to invest more.”
Alliance officials believe Libya proved that. Before the war began, NATO put AWACS surveillance planes above Libya for round-the-clock flights. But as it dragged on for eight months, the alliance had to rely on the U.S. for what Euro-crats here remorsefully call the “unique capabilities” of the U.S. — like persistent robotic aerial staring at the carnage below. They don’t want to repeat that situation in future wars — especially as the U.S. signals it’s more concerned with Asia than Europe.
Rasmussen’s big plan to avoid overreliance on the U.S. is called “Smart Defence.” (Yes, the European spelling.) The idea is to turn the recent budgetary austerity measures taken by NATO governments into opportunities to pool defense resources. Some governments can save money by junking, say, their submarine fleet — as Denmark did when Rasmussen was prime minister — if they’re secure in the knowledge that their allies can lend them the subs when necessary.
The Global Hawk purchase is designed to create a similar transatlantic pool. It’s not that the U.S. will slash its own robotic spy plane inventory — far from it; that’s an area of investment, not austerity, in the new U.S. defense budget. It’s to give NATO’s 28 member states their jointly-owned drones, so they neither have to rely on the U.S. or spend individually on spy drones, which might create an expensive, redundant fleet.
It’s also not a new plan. NATO has discussed buying the Global Hawks for years, as part of a program called the Alliance Ground Surveillance program that’s gone a startling 20 years without ever actually producing any such spy system. Various setbacks have plagued the effort since its inception, and the budget crunch prompted by the global financial crisis looked to sink it for good — as did a decision by Canada in June to opt out.
But now NATO think it’s got a solid plan to finally seal the deal. Thirteen member states will chip in to buy the planes, which will be operated by the full 28 member states. And they’re powerful systems. The sensors on the so-called Block 40 Global Hawks, the latest model, are “a ground moving target indicator-based platform,” the Air Force’s chief of staff, Gen. Norton Schwartz, gushed on Friday. Translated from the geek, the plane uses radar to trace the movements of vehicles from 60,000 feet in the sky.
NATO officials hope that the arrival of the Global Hawks whets the member states’ appetite for more unmanned spy tools. “This is a key shortfall in the NATO environment,” says Ludwig Decamps, the alliance’s chief of the Smart Defence program. “The Global Hawk is just a start.”
A very slow start. The alliance won’t actually “operate and maintain” the five Global Hawks until “the end of this decade,” says Ivo Daalder, the U.S. ambassador to NATO. By then, there could very well be spy drones that outclass the Block 40; and it’ll take time to train NATO’s remote pilots to use the system expertly. And that’s if Rasmussen can keep all 28 cash-strapped nations on board with the surveillance plan, something that’s proved difficult for decades.
But if he can, NATO will have crossed a latter-day Rubicon into owning its own flying robots. And it’ll only have taken an alliance that calls itself the most effective military partnership in human history the better part of 30 years to do it.
Photo: Northrop Grumman
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