In my view, we're not spending enough to keep up with what we need to do. We have caught up a good deal in filling the holes in the military, but we still have too few personnel. We still are remarkably short of equipment in certain areas.
And of course we are effectively out of NATO except when we choose to participate. We have staff officers there. We've withdrawn from some small but key programs in NATO that we'd had people committed to until recently.
We did, of course, participate with NATO in Afghanistan and in Libya, but those were in effect “wars of choice”, if I might use that term. We went with NATO because it served our interests, as we believed, to do so.
I think that's now where we are, effectively, with NATO. We're in a wars of choice situation. We're distant from it, but we will, if it serves our interests, participate in further military operations or further alliance operations of some kind. But it will be choice.
Now, that assumes that an article 5 conflict arises and NATO's solidarity is called into question; then, yes, I believe we would participate. We should realize, of course, that this could occur again fairly soon.
There's been some suggestion that Turkey might find itself in a situation where, because of the Syrian situation, it calls on NATO to act, to defend Turkey. We would, I assume, respond. How we would respond is another question. I can see us dispatching a ship, but it seems to me unlikely that we would be providing substantial ground troops at this point.