That is the problem, to maintain a decent reserve requires money that is simply not available. In some situations you can do it on the cheap, the Boneyard comes to mind, but in regards to ships and the like, it gets expensive over time to keep the units ready that they may be reactivated within a short period of time. Plus there's the difficulty of actually attracting people into the reserve forces to begin with, you can draw down standing forces and allocate a large portion of them to the reserves, but when it comes to getting new blood into the system, as Australia is showing, it's not that easy in the modern society where people would rather sit at an office chair than in the back of an APC (and I can't say I blame them), of course in a war time scenario there's always the draft but then you have training problems to deal with as well as a war time economy.
A NATO without the US and Canada is very unlikely though, although the idea of an EU army has been floated time and again, I don't see any of the EU agreeing on something long enough to pass it through, especially when it comes to military sovereignty.
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