THE WAY FORWARD FOR EUROPEAN DEFENCE by Daniel Keohane
August/September
2003 - CER BULLETIN, ISSUE 31
THE WAY FORWARD FOR EUROPEAN DEFENCE By Daniel Keohane
The EU has lost
its military virginity. At the request of the UN, the EU sent 1,500 troops to
Congo at the beginning of June 2003. The Congo mission is significant for two
reasons: it is both the first autonomous EU mission - one that does not rely
on NATO's help - and the EU's first military operation outside Europe.
Moreover, since the US showed no enthusiasm to participate, NATO was not even
asked to conduct the mission. This establishes a precedent: NATO will not always
have a 'right of first refusal' over a military mission that either
the alliance or the EU could manage.
However, in other respects the dispatch of peacekeepers to the Congolese town
of Bunia is nothing new. Fifteen EU member-states have approximately 50,000
peacekeepers deployed in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Africa, and Iraq. What the
EU has not yet undertaken is a more ambitious 'peacemaking' operation,
for example the separation of two sides in a civil war, which would mean committing
European troops to a dangerous battle-zone.
The EU is likely to manage more military missions in the future. The US priorities
are North Korea, Iran and Iraq. America will not often want to become involved
in conflicts in the band of instability that runs around the EU's eastern
and southern flanks, and stretches down to sub-Saharan Africa. For example,
the EU is considering deploying peacekeepers to replace Russian troops in the
Transdnistria region of Moldova.
In addition, the EU could play a useful role in giving the UN the rapid reaction
capability that it currently lacks. The UN can usually raise enough peacekeepers.
What it cannot do so easily is find troops for an intervention force, to fly
into a crisis zone as soon as bloodshed starts. For example, the UN was unable
to intervene quickly enough in East Timor in 1999. The Bush administration is
unlikely to provide the UN with US forces. But the EU could be willing to help
the UN: countries such as Britain and France have elite forces which can move
into a war-zone at short notice.
However, most EU states have too many immobile conscript troops and too few
elite forces. If the Europeans are going to succeed as peacekeepers and peacemakers
they need to make a big investment in professionalisation (some countries like
Britain, France, Ireland, Spain and the Netherlands already have professional
forces), in training and in equipment. The new EU member-states have only a
very limited capacity to engage in high intensity warfare.
Future EU missions need to deploy rapidly, and when they get there they are
more likely to face a problem from guerillas than from conventional tanks and
aircraft. The Europeans therefore need more professional troops that can move
at short notice, plus special forces which are skilled at using intelligence.
That is why, when Jacques Chirac and Tony Blair met at Le Touquet in February
this year, they agreed that the EU should be able to deploy air, sea, and land
forces within 5-10 days. That would be a great improvement on the EU's
current plan for a so-called reaction force that should be able to move at 60
days' notice. EU leaders should support this initiative, and beef up the
numbers of elite and special operations forces that are available for EU missions.
This effort should reinforce NATO's own plan for a rapid reaction force:
the same troops would be available to the EU and NATO.
The Europeans need not invest in all the things that the Americans do. They
do not have the same global priorities, and do not intend to 'shock and
awe' their opponents. Furthermore, European governments are not willing
to spend comparable amounts of money on defence, which limits their choices
further - Europeans spend roughly 2 per cent of GDP on defence whereas the US
spends close to 3.5 per cent. So the Europeans cannot afford to invest in many
cutting-edge technologies such as unmanned aerial combat vehicles and miniature
robots for intelligence gathering. Instead the Europeans should place more emphasis
on pooling existing military equipment. For example, countries could share the
costs of maintaining and operating aircraft, since they often buy the same type.
The recent decision by France and Germany to set up a joint 'top gun'
school for their attack helicopter pilots and mechanics is a small step in the
right direction.
EU leaders should also assess what additional capabilities the Union needs to
counter new security threats. In June 2003 EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana
presented the first draft of an EU security strategy to member-state governments.
The document contains surprisingly tough language that rightly focuses on threats
like terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and
failed states.
The EU cannot tackle these new priorities without improving its record of intelligence
co-operation. European governments ended up so divided in Iraq, partly because
they did not share their threat assessments. Now that the EU itself is running
military operations, it needs its own intelligence-pooling arrangements. A certain
amount of national intelligence is fed into Javier Solana's situation centre
in the Council of Ministers. And the member-states are making tentative moves
to share internal security intelligence assessments at the EU level through
Europol (the European police body). But they need to step up the quantity and
quality of the political and military assessments that they share with their
EU partners.
As a start, member-states should create a European intelligence committee, working
for Javier Solana. The committee would bring together senior intelligence officers
seconded from national agencies, and filter various national assessments to
produce common assessments for the foreign ministers and Javier Solana. The
EU will contribute more effectively to global security if it can develop stronger
elite forces and better intelligence assessment capabilities.
Daniel Keohane is the CER's research fellow
for security and defence policy.
