Certainly, the Obama administration has viewed coalition war as a core element of U.S. national security strategy for a number of well-known reasons. In an era of sequestration and beyond, we simply lack the resources to go it alone; we need to do what we can to share the burden and, in particular, multiply the effects of our coalition partners’ capabilities, getting the most out of what they have across nations with a wide range of capabilities.

In practice, the Obama administration, like its immediate predecessors, has assembled varying coalitions, including NATO and its members, on a variety of issues and for a range of international operations—from Afghanistan to Libya to ISIS. We have worked hard for years to establish and sustain these coalitions.

However, despite the U.S. policy commitment to coalition operations and our engagement in major coalition operations in practice (through NATO and more broadly), in reality, we have put little serious effort—little of our bandwidth—into developing and enhancing true coalition-warfare capabilities of the United States and its allies and ensuring interoperability across civil and military capabilities at very different levels of capability.

In truth, existing U.S. efforts with our NATO allies in the coalition warfare arena are underplanned, underfunded and not well organized—with little in the way of planning road maps, long-term investments, serious or sustained training, or information sharing needed to empower our allies and get the most of their capabilities while limiting our own burdens.

Most tellingly, the efforts underway are relatively fractured, with no single Pentagon official in charge of advancing the capabilities of, and U.S. interoperability with, coalition forces.            

In fact, the United States expends most of its energy on putting together the ad hoc coalition of the moment, as if we are engaged in a game of pickup basketball. Our focus is typically on seeking out other NATO members with our cup out for contributions to today’s coalition—to be sure, a legitimate approach and need. But it leaves us without the time or energy for deeper, long-term efforts to build, sustain, and render more effective other NATO members’ capabilities for future coalition efforts.

There are three areas where U.S. efforts to develop NATO countries’ coalition capabilities are seriously undernourished:

a. Planning. The United States, for all its rhetoric, has not sufficiently built coalition warfare in our military planning across the range of threats and scenarios we may face. Our national military-force planning largely focuses on going it alone today, rather than examining what our NATO allies can bring to the table in each scenario and how to incentivize them to enhance and better utilize those capabilities.

The United States does not systematically examine each military scenario, identify areas where the United States have limitations or could use augmented capabilities, and work with specific allies (within NATO or otherwise) on a sustained basis to fill those gaps.

While NATO does have parallel force planning and generation efforts, where countries pledge to contribute what they already have or have planned, they have not meaningfully addressed the capabilities gap. NATO’s force-generation system needs serious reform.

b. Capabilities. Since the Defense Capabilities Initiative of the late 1990s, the United States has not spent meaningful time to press our NATO allies in a realistic fashion to add specific, meaningful capacity that can fill our shortfalls, potentially multiply the effects of European capabilities, and maximize our overall coalition efforts.

Rather, we have largely been in the role of a cheerleader that has become more vocally forceful over time, plaintively asking at summits and ministerials that Europe spend more and better. However, we have not done much between diplomatic meetings to incentivize the realistic development of coalition forces that can shift the burden off our own forces.

Even the most recent 2 percent pledge puts the entire burden of effort on the European side of the house. With the commitment enshrined in writing, the United States waits and watches for its European allies to act rather than incentivize them to take specific steps to meet the pledge.

Truth be told, no American exhortations are likely to cause our European allies to roll stones uphill and undertake unnatural acts in terms of their heritage, culture and evolving mores. While the United States has encouraged our allies to spend more on defense, and should continue to do so, ultimately this will be a matter of national choice informed by the Europeans’ sense of threats, budgets, and other cultural and societal considerations.

The central point is that the United States must go beyond exhortation to engage with Europe in cooperative efforts on capabilities and incentivize our allies to augment their capabilities in modest and realistic ways that will allow greater burden sharing and enhance our overall capabilities.

c. Interoperability. Third, the United States should do more to ensure greater interoperability with European forces at very different levels of capability. If we do not, we jeopardize our ability to work effectively with the very allies with whom we wish to share burdens.

In the context of twenty-first-century coalition warfare, interoperability is not about having the same platforms or precision strike weapons or using similar ammunition. In this era, interoperability is about U.S. and allied war fighters having connected information systems, in order to communicate and share information so as to achieve the best possible war-fighting effects (from combinations of platforms and capabilities).

Achieving this take years of planning, information sharing, training, cooperative development, creating interoperability bridges and shaping plug-and-play architecture to develop true coalition war-fighting capabilities.

Another dimension of this challenge concerns the growing role of national civil capabilities in security matters—at home, in protecting open societies against terrorist and other threats, and abroad, in stabilization and reconstruction operations. There is a pressing need for greater interoperability between the military and civil forces of NATO countries, which would promote resilience at home (making it hard for adversaries to present disruptive challenges) and enhance the conduct of operations abroad. Clear lines of command and standard operating procedures across the civil-military boundary have to be established.

Across a series of recent conflicts, from the Balkans to Iraq to Afghanistan, the cold reality is that the United States and its allies have had only limited capabilities to fight together. NATO’s years of efforts to achieve interoperability—Standardization Agreements (“STANAGs”) and various partial architectures—unfortunately have not solved these problems, even though they have made advances. While we patch together efforts at the moment in particular operations on an ad hoc basis, we have not developed approaches that we can work and for which we can train on a sustained basis.

Moreover, our civil-military interoperability is limited in nature. In the United States and most other nations, the civil components of low-intensity war fighting are underdeveloped, with insufficient thought given to the interoperability of civil and military capabilities.

One of the primary issues with achieving higher-level interoperability has been the longstanding reluctance of the United States to share with allies on a sustained basis (i.e., outside the context of a particular operation) the technical outputs from existing U.S. C4ISR systems, and technical data related to new U.S. C4ISR systems under development.

Our national disclosure and export control policies have contributed to a “dumbed-down” form of interoperability with our allies.

d. Limited Cooperation on Defense Innovation. Finally, the U.S. Defense Innovation Initiative, designed to develop new “offsets” or overmatches to secure our military advantage for the future, has not to date established an avenue for meaningful participation by our NATO allies. NATO's Allied Command Transformation (ACT), based in Norfolk, Virginia, is working separately to develop innovations to transform the ways allies work together. It would make sense to develop a means of cooperation between these initiatives.

Historically, there has been very limited NATO and other foreign participation in U.S. R & D activities, especially with respect to cutting-edge technologies. In recent years, the only primary engagement beyond the F-35 program is missile defense, small funding for coalition warfare (roughly $10 million per annum), and much smaller amounts for joint science and technology programs funded jointly with foreign partners.

There are several reasons for this limited cooperation. First, disparities in spending levels on R&D between the United States and European NATO firms make collaboration difficult. Other considerations include legitimate security concerns over exchanging sensitive information with foreign scientists and engineers, and protectionist impulses by parts of the Defense Department community—a “not-invented-here” syndrome and desire to work with longstanding, indeed favored, U.S. partners.

In a world where innovation is not a U.S. monopoly, and much innovation is occurring abroad and in the commercial sector, this approach limits the ability of the United States to access and gain the benefit of innovative efforts by the private sectors of our NATO partners.

Ironically, the United States has an entire infrastructure of defense laboratories with offices in select NATO countries abroad that identify and study foreign innovative technologies. However, we are not getting a sufficient return on this infrastructure, because we only provide limited funding for accessing the foreign innovation that is identified.