NATO's Central European Members: A Tale of Shady Deals, Reckless Spending

NATO's new members, including Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, promised to maintain their military spending at 2 percent of GDP and managed to stay true to their word for some time.

"They have been in free-fall since then and currently hover at about 1 percent. Not even Poland is meeting the goal – though the current government, in office until an election this fall, plans to gradually increase spending on defense to 2 percent over the coming years," political analysts Dalibor Rohac and Martin Dubéci argued.

According to the experts, the sheer amount of spending is by far not the only issue. Specific articles of expenditure matter greatly and they provide an even bleaker picture.

Some new NATO members tend to spend more on soldiers than equipment or capital investment. Take Slovakia for instance: Bratislava allocated nearly 70 percent on military personnel, the analysts noted.

"Central Europe's militaries run the risk of becoming collections of bureaucrats in uniform rather than effective fighting forces," Rohac and Dubéci observed in an opinion piece published in the American Interest.

It does not get any better when they do go on an equipment shopping spree, since many fail to take the bigger picture into account. Countries with smaller military budgets have to purchase hardware according to a rigid strategy which has to revolve around complementing the militaries of larger members of the bloc.

If this still does not look like a reason for major concern, then there always are shady contracts. Arms deals in Central Europe are often classified and unavailable for public scrutiny, the experts noted. Hence, they make a perfect breeding ground for unscrupulous interactions.

In 2009, the Czech government signed a $577 million deal for the delivery of over a hundred Pandur armored personnel carriers.

"The purchasing price per carrier was more than three times higher than in Portugal, where the government bought, at around the same time, a different batch of Pandurs with superior features and equipment from the same company," Rohac and Dubéci narrated.

It did not stop there. It later surfaced that Steyr, an Austrian company producing the carriers, "secretly contracted with the Czech lobbyist Jan Vlček to mediate informal talks between the company and Czech politicians, who allegedly diverted some of the profits of the sale to their own political parties," the experts said.

Slovakia and Poland have not been immune to this issue. Both countries, according to Rohac and Dubéci, inked arms deals purchasing hardware for prices exceeding the stated cost.

"Corruption aside, defense capabilities across the region are fragmented, with a low degree of interoperability," the experts also noted, adding that increased military cooperation would be impossible without overcoming "serious bureaucratic hurdles."