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“Libya is the precursor to the future. In another 10 years, Europe will be unable to support military operations in any sort of far-flung place. Their armies are going away. There is no other way to describe it.”Even under NATO command, the U.S. military will do the bulk of the fighting in Libya — even as the Obama administration argues that this is Europe’s conflict to lead, not America’s. The number of U.S. warplanes and ships deployed to fight Libya’s regime underscores that NATO’s other 27 members do not have the firepower and high-tech targeting capability to go solo or with little U.S. help. Even though Europe pressed the White House to enter the war, it provided only a few of the 110 ship-launched cruise missiles fired in the first days and has flown only about 40 percent of all sorties. To some military analysts, the European performance is the result of two decades of cutting defense spending and relying on the United States to do the heavy lifting. “The European countries have made a strategic-level decision to disarm essentially, particularly in their armies and air forces,” said James Russell, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School.