Slovak Defense Minister Warns of Military Collapse Unless Funding Increases

Slovakia's defense minister, Lubomir Galko, recently warned that unless defense funding receives increased attention, the Slovak armed forces will begin to break down within a few years. Slovakia has underfunded its military for years, and with a year-old center-right government under Prime Minister Iveta Radicova implementing an austerity diet, the likelihood that an uptick in defense spending will be forthcoming is close to zero.
Successive Slovak governments have viewed defense funding as an afterthought, from the center-right Dzurinda government which promised to meet an annual level of 1.85 percent of GDP for defense under its Model 2015 (or Long-Term Development Plan 2015) defense modernization effort to the populist, leftist Fico government, which saw defense as an area to trim in favor of social welfare programs. The Model 2015 plan has since crawled to a standstill and the Slovak armed forces are now in a state of atrophy.
Defense Minister Galko informed the Slovak National Council (parliament) on March 24, 2011, that because of the limited level of funding they have received, the armed forces are now funded on an 86:14 personnel/modernization basis. That ratio, he warned, will widen to 90:10 in 2012 unless the slide of the defense budget is reversed.
Still, defense funding has slipped by nearly 10 percent in 2011, from EUR820 million last year to EUR740 million ($1.199 billion). Some 70 percent of the military equipment used by ground forces has reached the end of its operating life. If it is not modernized or replaced with new matériel, 90 percent of the ground forces' military equipment will be obsolescent by 2014. Moreover, in order to merely maintain the Slovak armed forces in the depleted shape they are in, Galko contends, the government would have to fund defense at a level of 1.56 percent of GDP - far below the 2 percent required of NATO Alliance members.