The plight of NATO’s navies

On April 4, Denmark’s defense minister fired Gen. Flemming Lentfer, the country’s chief of defense staff. Lentfer had failed to report problems with the frigate Iver Huitfeldt’s active phased array radar and combat management system during the ship’s deployment to the Red Sea the previous month. The firing resulted from a classified message that the ship’s commanding officer, Cmdr. Sune Lund, had sent to the Ministry of Defense, the Naval Command and other defense authorities; the message had been leaked to Olfi, a Danish defense media outlet.

The commander had complained that, as a result of the system malfunctions, the frigate was unable to launch its upgraded Sea Sparrow missiles for about a half hour, and two of the ship’s 76mm guns failed to operate a number of times due to ammunition problems.

The Danish warship was finally able to operate effectively, and subsequently shot down four drones, but as the Olfi report put it, “the ship and crew were in direct danger because vital defense systems failed.” Olfi also asserted that the Danish Navy had suffered from equipment challenges for some time without them being resolved or even fully addressed.

The Danish Navy encountered a second problem last week when the crew of the frigate Niels Juel was unable to deactivate the booster of a Harpoon missile during a test. As a result, Copenhagen was forced to bar marine and air traffic in the area around the Korsar naval base, where the ship was docked.

The German Navy likewise encountered problems of its own while operating in the Red Sea last month. The Hessen, a German frigate, reportedly fired at an American Reaper drone, luckily failing to hit its inadvertent target. Apparently, the frigate’s crew received no Identification Friend-or-Foe (IFF) signal, and proceeded to open fire, erroneously assuming the drone had been fired by the Houthis. While the commander of the German Navy, Adm. Jan Christian Kaack, defended the crew for what he termed a “textbook” operation, he apparently did not address the question of why there had been no IFF signal in the first place.

Equipment and operational failures are but a symptom of the challenges facing not only the Danish and German navies but those of other NATO navies as well. Years of underspending on defense generally and on naval forces in particular have left many NATO navies short of both personnel and funding for operations and maintenance. While several countries, notably Germany, have committed to boost their defense spending in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it will take years before their fleets could be termed fully capable of carrying out their missions.

The plight of the German Navy is an example of the specific challenges other navies also face. In outlining his priorities for 2024, Kaack assigned primacy to readiness, which he linked to difficulties in recruiting and retaining personnel. As he put it, “staff readiness will be the crucial task in the coming years. It had been extremely unsatisfactory for years and is putting out people under a lot of stress.”

In order to attract more personnel, however, the German military, which is an all-volunteer force, will have to increase both pay and benefits. In so doing, it will cut into the availability of funds for weapons modernization and badly needed upgrades. Moreover, in order to avoid the sort of pitfalls described above, the Germany Navy, like the Danish Navy and other NATO fleets, will have to expend more funds on operations and maintenance, especially for training and more realistic exercises. Again, procurement is likely to suffer as a result.

The problems that NATO navies face are not unique to them. Years of budgetary decline have affected land and air forces as well. Naval forces are especially stressed, however. And with America’s naval forces unable to meet their own growth targets, there is an urgent need for other NATO states to increase their own contributions to the alliance’s maritime deterrent.

It is therefore crucial that European NATO members recognize that even their projected increases in defense spending for the remainder of this decade may not enable their naval forces to recover fully from the many years of neglect since the end of the Cold War. The Russian threat, and most notably the ongoing battles in the Black Sea, should spur the NATO allies to go beyond just fulfilling their current commitments to increase spending on maritime forces. They should also give serious consideration to allocating additional resources to their naval forces, in order both to modernize ship systems and to recruit and retain the necessary personnel to operate them effectively.

Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was undersecretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy undersecretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.