NATO showcases 'engagement without embroilment'

Aboard the Italian air craft carrier Cavour, Mediterranean Sea (CNN) -- The top brass from the NATO military alliance roared in aboard five marine helicopters flying in tight formation, evoking memories of Francis Ford Coppola's famous "Flight of the Valkyries" scene from the film "Apocalypse Now."

They landed on the windswept deck of an Italian aircraft carrier to inspect an armada of warships.

Twenty-three ships -- including two submarines -- as well as thousands of sailors and airmen from a dozen countries assembled here off the coast of Sardinia to perform a series of joint naval exercises.

But before ships, helicopters and fighter jets performed their maneuvers, commanders made the case to policy-makers for why European governments should maintain expensive navies in an era of economic austerity.

NATO's military commander, U.S. General Philip Breedlove, spoke of cost efficiency when he addressed a hanger full of fellow officers and diplomats from the 28-nation alliance.

Warships, Breedlove argued, gave NATO the ability to practice "engagement without embroilment."

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The implication was that war weary members of the alliance could use their navies to strike enemies without necessarily placing ground troops in harm's way.

NATO forces have spent the last decade fighting Taliban militants in the arid mountains and deserts of Afghanistan.

NATO's deputy secretary general conceded that these were tough times to maintain costly fleets of warships.

"What we're hoping to see as the financial crisis begins to improve is to see members of NATO collaborate more in developing military capabilities, to get more bang for the euro, more bang for the buck," said Alexander Vershbow.

Vershbow noted that the total number of ships in national navies -- including the U.S. Navy -- was shrinking. But he argued that retrenchment was due in part to efforts to modernize fleets in the 64-year-old alliance. The key, he and other NATO officials said, was to make warships "multi-mission" vessels.

The hosts of the exercises were keen to promote their aircraft carrier Cavour as an example of this versatility.

The carrier first went out to sea in 2009. It was designed to be dual purpose, able to function as a weapon of war the could be converted into a floating hospital. The Cavour fulfilled that humanitarian function in January 2010, when it was dispatched to Haiti to treat victims of the earthquake that shattered Port-au-Prince.

On a brilliant autumnal day in the Mediterranean Sea, however, it was combat capabilities that were on display.

Harrier fighter jets demonstrated their abilities to vertically take off and land on the carrier. A team of Spanish special forces troops rappelled down a rope of off a hovering helicopter onto the deck of a ship simulating the rescue of hijacked merchant vessel. The Turkish frigate Salihrais lobbed shells from the cannon on its bow into the sea hundreds of meters away.

Deterrence 'necessary'

In addition to operations in Afghanistan and missions to stop Somali piracy in the Indian Ocean, NATO forces led the bombing campaign to overthrow Moammar Gadhafi in Libya in 2011.

Two years later, the alliance clearly does not have the political will to intervene directly in the most urgent crisis threatening the region, the civil war in Syria.

"The situation in Syria has not generated the same kind of consensus that we saw in Libya two years ago in favor of international intervention," said deputy secretary general Vershbow.

Thus far, NATO has confined its efforts to deploying Patriot missile battalions from the Netherlands, Germany and the U.S. to member country Turkey.

Since last January, the battalions have been poised near the Syrian border with the mission of protecting Turkish cities from the possible threat of Syrian ballistic missile attacks.

But Vershbow and other military commanders insisted that the West's military deterrent is what ultimately forced the Syrian government to announce it would give up its stockpile of chemical weapons.

"Deterrence was necessary to force what we hope is a small solution to the problem," said Italy's chief of defense, Luigi Binelli Mantelli.

More than 30 years after the end of the Cold War, Italy's top defense official argued "today's challenges call for a new role of military deterrence."