Rising ammunition prices set back NATO efforts to boost security, says official

On Saturday, a top NATO military official cautioned that a sharp increase in ammunition prices meant that members’ increased defence spending does not always translate into increased security, and he asked for more private involvement in defence firms.

“Prices for equipment and ammunition are shooting up. Right now, we are paying more and more for exactly the same,” Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, the chair of NATO’s military committee, said on Saturday after a meeting of the alliance’s chiefs of defence in Oslo.

“That means that we cannot make sure that the increased defence spending actually leads to more security.”

NATO has been pushing for increased military manufacturing to meet a surge in demand for weapons and equipment since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as allies rush supplies to Kyiv while simultaneously stockpiling their own stockpiles.

The lack of 155mm artillery ammunition has been a major source of worry, with Kyiv firing up to 10,000 of these munitions daily.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned Kyiv in February that it was using shells considerably quicker than the West could create them.

Bauer advocated for increased private investment in the defence sector in order to increase manufacturing capacity, encouraging pension funds and banks to avoid branding defence investments as immoral.

“Long term stability needs to prevail over short term profits. As we have seen in Ukraine, war is a whole of society event,” he said, adding such investment was in the private sector’s strategic interest as well.

“Forty per cent of the (Ukrainian) economy evaporated in the first days of the war, that was private money to a large extent, that money is gone,” he noted.

Bauer also pressed business leaders to speed up the expansion of production capacity.

According to Bauer, there was no correlation between a shortage of ammunition and the arduous progress of the counteroffensive in Ukraine.

“The reason why it takes time is because it is extremely dangerous because there’s an enormous amount of mines in a very deep minefield – more than 10 kilometres – with five, six mines per square meter,” he said, noting Ukraine was still advancing 200 or 300 meters per day.

In 2024, NATO will be holding its largest collective defence drills since the Cold War, with over 40,000 troops from across the alliance set to take part in the exercise Steadfast Defender in Germany, Poland and the three Baltic states.