Two senior U.S. government officials — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates — have expressed serious concern in the past few days about the planned European defense budget cuts. Speaking on Oct. 13 ahead of the NATO defense ministers' meeting, Gates said he was worried European cuts would mean "more people will look to the United States to cover whatever gaps are created." Clinton, interviewed by the BBC on Oct. 14, expressed concern about British plans to cut defense spending by 10 percent, stating that "each [NATO] country has to be able to make its appropriate contributions." The financing debate is at the heart of NATO's ongoing effort to revise its mission statement, the NATO Strategic Concept. NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen is supposed to present the new mission statement to NATO heads of state at the Nov. 19-20 summit in Lisbon. Underlying the disagreement about funding is a more fundamental disagreement over what poses a threat to NATO in the 21st century. It is no secret the United States spends more on its military than its European NATO allies. Of NATO's 26 European members, only nine — Greece, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Latvia, France, Bulgaria, Estonia, Albania and Poland — spend more than the NATO-recommended 2 percent of GDP on defense, and only Greece spends considerably more, at around 4 percent of GDP — a figure certain to face cuts due to the Greek sovereign debt crisis. The United States already has had to resort to covering the "gaps," as Gates stated, with the operations of other NATO member states in Afghanistan largely bankrolled by Washington, according to STRATFOR sources in the U.S. military. The United States is also pushing European NATO member states to commit to funding new projects at the upcoming Lisbon Summit, such as the continent-wide ballistic missile defense (BMD) system for which the United States wants NATO countries to commit $200 million over the next 10 years. Europeans, however, are feeling the financial crunch at home and are therefore cutting defense spending. Germany is pressuring its fellow EU member states to reduce their budget deficits following the crisis earlier in 2010 caused by the Greek financial meltdown. This is the simple explanation for the U.S.-Europe dispute. However, Europeans would not cut defense spending if they thought such spending was necessary. The real disagreement is not about budget cuts imposed by austerity measures, which the Europeans could steer toward different areas, but rather about threat perceptions and the conflicting national interests of NATO member states. The problem for NATO is that it is made up of three general groups of member states: the U.S. and its Atlanticist European allies, such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Denmark, which generally see the value in concentrating on non-European theaters and novel threats; the Central European new member states such as the Baltic States and Poland, which sit astride the Russian sphere of influence and fear its resurgence; and the Core European states such as France and Germany, which do not want to get sucked into further "American adventurism" in the Middle East and feel no threat from Russia. The three groups disagree on what the main threats to NATO are, and they prioritize threats in largely incompatible ways. The Central Europeans, even though they are committed U.S. allies, do not want NATO's resources focused on non-European theaters when they feel that Russia is still an unreliable neighbor. The United States wants to see Europeans enhance deployability and expeditionary capability while also contributing financially to combating new threats via cyber-security and BMD projects. And France and Germany want to improve relations with Russia and have no interest in increased spending on NATO missions outside of the European theater. Therefore, even without the economic crunch in Europe, the NATO member states would be pulling in different directions on financial commitments. However, the European economic crisis does not necessarily have to be a negative influence on the Continent's militaries. As STRATFOR has argued, there is a silver lining in the economic crisis for European military modernization. Europeans can use the financial crisis to sever expensive military programs and bureaucracies that date back to the Cold War era. By cutting redundant or obsolete weaponry and programs, Europeans could concentrate on building greater interoperability, pooling resources and furthering specialization to avoid duplication — all efforts that are already encouraged by EU treaties. The problem is that there are considerable vested political and economic interests against such an evolution. Continent-wide specialization and interoperability often mean that military industries of one country may become redundant, thereby necessitating cuts. Similarly, cutting bureaucracy and redundant payroll is as politically unpopular with ministries of defense as with any other public sector employment in Europe. The danger is that it may be politically more expedient to simply impose budget cuts across the board, spreading cuts across programs and departments, than to specifically trim the Cold War fat.