Federal government shifts military priority towards Nato

Federal government budget cuts are forcing Belgium’s defence minister Steven Vandeput to make critical choices about the Belgian army’s priorities, according to De Morgen.

As a result, the army is increasingly called upon to carry out missions for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) and less and less for the United Nations (UN), according to budget statistics provided by Vandeput.

The federal government will this year invest €66.6 million in foreign missions, considerably less than last year. Due to the budget cuts, humanitarian missions are the first to get scrapped or see their subsidies reduced. A Belgian mine clearance mission in Lebanon, for example, will bear the brunt of the cuts, and not surprisingly, since the budget for conflict prevention and preventive diplomacy was slashed from €16.5 million in 2014 to €5 million this year.

The statistics show that the government is using its increasingly sparse budget to fund missions for Nato, and in particular the ‘Coalition of the willing’, the multinational force led by the United States. Nearly 40% of the Belgian defence budget goes to the Coalition, in support of the military operation against IS in Iraq, where Belgium already has stationed a fleet of F-16 fighter jets. The second largest part of the budget, 29%, is set aside for Nato operations.

The military is working less and less under the UN mandate. Last year, Belgium invested one-quarter of its budget in UN operations, and this year only 1.56%.