Lacks Discipline, Must Try Harder

You don't meet the requirements. You don't do what you are supposed to." These tough words — from NATO Secretary-General George Robertson, no less — greeted Hungarian Defense Minister Ferenc Juhász during his second week in the job. On a visit to the alliance's Brussels headquarters fresh from his Hungarian Socialist Party's general election victory last April, Juhász was shocked: "I was expecting more cooperative language. All the other countries were unfriendly. They questioned our seriousness in the fight against terrorism. They questioned our trustworthiness as an ally."

What went wrong? When Hungary was admitted to NATO in 1999, the country was regarded as one of the alliance's new stars. During the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, which came only two weeks after the country joined the alliance, Hungarians opened their airspace and air bases to NATO planes. The decision wasn't easy; Hungary was at that time the only NATO member bordering Yugoslavia, and a large population of ethnic Hungarians live in that country's Vojvodina region. "That was a big tick on the positive side of the ledger," says a Western diplomat in Budapest.

But then Hungary's brilliance began to fade. Among the criticisms: the sorry state of the country's troops and matériel, the lack of transparency in the way military contracts were doled out, and Hungary's lukewarm contribution to the war on terror. "We wasted three valuable years," says András Simonyi, Hungary's former ambassador to NATO and its current ambassador to the U.S. "We failed to speed up — much less to achieve — the much-touted reform of our military. Hungary today is not better equipped to contribute to the alliance than it was the day we joined."

The Hungarian military remains, in the words of one observer, a "mini-mass army" with almost as many tanks as France and a fleet of vehicles that is decades out of date — few of which are readily deployable. When the U.S. asked allies to contribute to the war on terror, all Hungary could offer was a team of medical specialists, but without any equipment or means to get them to Afghanistan.

Part of the problem is that the army is not highly regarded at home. "It comes from Hungarian history," says another Western diplomat in Budapest. "When you have a military that during the Warsaw Pact period was considered the instrument of an oppressive regime, there is not a lot of public support for it." And once Hungary was inside the alliance, politicians balked at the cost of the necessary military reforms. Competing projects, particularly expensive preparations for E.U. accession, took priority. "Of the three new members, Hungary has done the least," says Thomas S. Szayna, a security analyst at rand, a public-policy think tank in Santa Monica, Calif. "It continues to spend very little, has not lived up to its commitments, and is not taken all that seriously."

Criticisms like these are "completely groundless," according to István Simicskó, vice chairman of the Hungarian parliament's Defense Committee and a member of the opposition Fidesz Party. He ticks off the achievements of the previous government, which was led by Fidesz: it increased defense spending by .1% of GDP during each of the past three years; fielded troops for multinational peacekeeping operations in Kosovo and Bosnia; passed a strategic defense-reform plan that promises to professionalize the army, improve language skills and upgrade equipment. The new government has vowed to press ahead with these reforms, and pledged a 19% increase in the defense budget for next year, bringing it to $1.3 billion. The military will need all the money it can get, but willingness to change is even more important, according to Juhász. "The soldiers are not more stupid than they were four years ago," he says. "What was lacking was strong political leadership." Will NATO see that leadership now?