regards-citoyens

Executive summary (without footnotes)

Ten years after the launch of the EU’s defence effort at a Franco-British summit in St Malo, the European Security and Defence Policy badly needs a shot in the arm. Procrastination, weak coordination, and persistent absenteeism by some Member States have hobbled the Union’s ability to tackle the real threats to its citizens’ security, and to make a significant contribution to maintaining international peace.

Europe’s leaders have agreed what is needed, in the 2003 European Security Strategy. They have acknowledged that security for Europeans today lies not in manning the ramparts or preparing to resist invasion, but in tackling crises abroad before they become breeding-grounds for terrorism, international trafficking, and unmanageable immigration flows.

Yet EU members have done too little to modernise their militaries for this role. Nearly two decades after the end of the Cold War, most European armies are still geared towards all-out warfare on the inner-German border rather than keeping the peace in Chad, or supporting security and development in Afghanistan. European defence resources still pay for a total of 10,000 tanks, 2,500 combat aircraft, and nearly two million men and women in uniform -- more than half a million more than the US hyper-power. Yet 70% of Europe’s land forces are simply unable to operate outside national territory – and transport aircraft, communications, surveillance drones and helicopters (not to mention policemen and experts in civil administration) remain in chronically short supply. This failure to modernise means that much of the €200 billion that Europe spends on defence each year is simply wasted.

As this report will argue, this situation demands a concerted effort to revitalise the European Union’s Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). The EU’s individual Member States, even France and Britain, have lost and will never regain the ability to finance all the necessary new capabilities by themselves. Today, only cooperation amongst Europeans can eliminate the massive waste associated with the duplication of resources by Member States, and help transform Europe’s armed forces into modern militaries capable of contributing to global security.

The Irish “No” vote to the Lisbon Treaty has opened up a period of new uncertainty about the prospects for the EU’s institutional reform. But European defence is essentially a matter of voluntary cooperation between Member States.

The political environment offers important encouraging elements :
• France, one of the Union’s two strongest military powers alongside Britain, has designated “l’Europe de la Défense” as a key priority for its Presidency of the Union in the second half of 2008.
• The United States is now calling for an ESDP with teeth, contradicting the argument that a stronger European defence means a weakened Atlantic alliance. “Europe needs, the United States needs, NATO needs, the democratic world needs -- a stronger, more capable European defence capacity. An ESDP with only ‘soft power’ is not enough,” said the US Ambassador to NATO Victoria Nuland earlier this year. Reflecting this crucial shift, the April Bucharest Summit followed up with NATO’s first explicit statement of support for European defence.
• Finally, a growing number of close US allies in Europe have come to recognise that the security alliance with the Washington can no longer be the sole significant provider of European security.
So the basis has improved for a major new effort in European defence.
One particular feature of the Lisbon Treaty, the provisions for “permanent structured cooperation” in defence, would be a particular help. In essence, this is about implementing a “pioneer group” approach – the idea that, just as no Member State should be compelled to do things in defence that it does not want, none should stand in the way of others who wish to develop their cooperation. This report will argue that, even if the new Treaty fails, elements of this approach can and should be imported into the existing workings of ESDP.
Any re-launch of ESDP must be based on an honest appraisal of the policy failures in the decade since St Malo. This report will show how Member States and Brussels institutions have ignored the need for coherent strategies, improvised important operations, and taken refuge in process as an easier option than delivering real-world change. It will highlight the strategic weaknesses that have arisen out of a lack of resolve to pool resources, modernise armed forces and deploy them. And it proposes practical, politically doable steps that can and should be taken to put the venture back on the rails.

Pionneers needed
Any re-design of ESDP must acknowledge two central facts. First, no Member State will allow itself to be forced to enter conflict, or to change how it spends  ts defence budget, by ‘Brussels’ – whether an EU institution, or a majority of its partners. And second, a significant minority of Member States demonstrate, by their reluctance to make any serious investment in defence, or by their tendency to sit on their hands when the call goes out for contributions to crisis-management operations, that they really do not want to be involved.
Such sovereign decisions should be respected. But there is a corollary: nonplayers should not insist on a seat at the table, and on holding the enterprise back to the pace of the slowest. So, in defence, it is time to move on from the traditional ‘convoy’ approach – to accept the reality of a ‘multi-speed’ Europe, and to allow ‘pioneer groups’ of the willing to move things forward when not all are ready to join in.
Debate since the pioneer group concept first appeared in the ‘Constitution’ have helped to clarify four key principles for the approach. First, just as no one should be forced to do more on defence, so no one should be allowed to hold back others who do. Second, the formation of pioneer groups needs to take account of the political willingness of different Member States; but it should be based on transparent and objective criteria, and specific commitments.
Third, the formation of groups and the corresponding distribution of influence need to reflect the multi-faceted nature of European defence and security efforts, and the diversity of the Member States; the aim should be to include as many countries as possible, in any area where they have something worthwhile to offer. Fourth, inclusivity should nonetheless have its limits: non-contributing passengers should not be allowed to slow the enterprise down, and influence should be proportional to the stake each Member State holds in it.
Three criteria are fundamental: to spend enough on defence (measured by percentage of GDP); to take defence modernisation seriously, so as to produce useable armed forces (measured by investment per soldier); and to be prepared to use them (percentage deployed on operations). The construction of a multi-speed ESDP should be based less on past performance than on new commitments Member States are prepared to take on, as consensus develops on what criteria should be agreed, and what targets set for those who wish to be part of pioneer groups. It is important to pursue this debate without interruption -- even if Lisbon falls, elements of the approach should be introduced into existing ways of working.
Three main steps are needed. First, some basic qualifying criteria should be set for securing a seat at the table. A sensible minimum requirement of spending at least 1% of GDP on defence would mean that currently, Austria, Ireland, Luxembourg and Malta would have to bow out. A further basic test could be a minimum level of deployment on operations; if this were set even as low as 1% of military manpower, then Bulgaria, Cyprus and Greece would also fail to qualify.
Second, specialist pioneer groups should be set up for each of the main arenas for boosting Europe’s defence capabilities – military capability development, research and technology, armaments etc. Each such group would have its own qualifying criteria, such as spending a minimum percentage of the national defence budget on R&T, and qualifying commitments (to cooperate more closely, pooling efforts and resources).
Third, from these specialist groups, a core group could be established, embracing those Member States who contribute most to most areas of activity.
This is essentially a model for Lisbon’s “permanent structured cooperation”.
But even without the Treaty, it may be possible to import it into the workings of the European Defence Agency (EDA) as presently constituted. Indeed, the Agency already reflects the concept. Belonging to the Agency is a matter of choice for each Member State (though all except Denmark have chosen to do so). Member States not measuring up to whatever basic criteria are agreed should be invited to withdraw until they do.
Under the EDA’s ‘big tent’, different groups of Member States are able to form cooperations as they wish, with transparency for all but no obligation on the initiators of specific projects to accept additional members if they do not want
to. It should be possible to extend this practice to create the specialist and core groups proposed above. Answering to the main areas of Agency activity, they would act as advisory boards, with a privileged role in setting the EDA’s agendas, and preparing business for the Agency’s Steering Board.
Implementing these steps would require the support, or acquiescence, of all Member States, including the weak performers – but in current circumstances it would be particularly egregious to veto such developments. Little progress in a Europe of 27 will be possible if each Member State feels entitled to block the closer cooperation of others.

Capabilities : the Deep Sleep
The need for a new approach is underlined by the EU’s failure to live up to its defence ambitions and commitments on capabilities. Shamed by their collective inability to prevent Serbia’s ethnic cleansing in Kosovo without American assistance, European leaders decided in 1999 at a Council summit in Helsinki to set themselves the goal of being able to field, by 2003, a fully capable 60,000 strong force. Nine years later, this “rapid reaction force” remains hypothetical and EU governments have in recent years focused on the smaller Battlegroups initiative as something more achievable in the near term. But with the exception of some improvements to long-range transport for men and equipment, most of the deficiencies identified in the follow-up to Helsinki remain. As a result, there are still crippling shortages in such areas as helicopters, protection against nuclear, biological and chemical threats, intelligence and reconnaissance, equipment for air-to-air refuelling, precision munitions, and command-and-control systems.
This is not at bottom a problem of money. In 2006, total defence spending within the EU amounted to almost one quarter of global defence expenditure.
But the money has been spent on Cold War-style militaries, rather than the modern, expeditionary forces that ESDP, and indeed NATO, now needs. And with Member States persisting in trying to “go it alone”, duplication further reduces the yield on investment.
The aim to pool efforts and resources has been widely endorsed, and widely ignored. It should cover joint funding of defence research, armaments co-operations, sharing maintenance of common equipments, creating more multi-national forces and even sharing defence roles. Not everyone should try to maintain a national air force; those who rely on air policing provided by others can offer mine-warfare capabilities in exchange. On the industrial side, decades of protectionism and more recent under-investment have left much of the European defence industry weak and fragmented. There has been some progress towards establishing a fledgling internal market for defence goods and services; but industrial consolidation, successful in the aeronautics and electronics sectors, has stalled.
All this needs to change for the EU to become an effective defence player in the 21st century. EU Defence Ministers must:
• Demand urgent action on the key capability gaps. Since 1999, hundreds of defence staff across Europe have been busy listing the gaps between what Member States can offer and what ESDP operations need. But repeated reports to Chiefs of Staff and Defence Ministers have resulted in calls for further reviews rather than change. It is time to stop the analysis and to agree concrete plans for fixing the most glaring deficiencies.
• Insist that their staffs give real priority to pooling resources and sharing capabilities. As institutions, Defence Ministries prefer to do everything on a national basis. Working together or specialising and sharing are deeply counter-cultural. Ministers should ensure that the cooperative option has always been considered before any major spending decision.
• Exploit the European Defence Agency (EDA). This was set up to work with Member States to get defence budgets spent on the right things, and to promote cooperation from the research lab to the front line. The EDA needs more money to hire more high-quality staff if it is to fulfil its mission.
Military Chiefs of Staff should be told to offer full support the Agency, rather than worry about erosion of their own authority. And Defence Ministers should mandate a systematic dialogue between the Agency and national defence planners, enabling the Agency to challenge spending priorities, and act as “match-maker” for joint efforts between Member States. The business of defence consolidation should itself be consolidated; other now redundant forums should be scrapped. (Disclaimer: the author of this report was Chief Executive of the EDA until 2007.)
• Convene ‘summit’ meetings with industrial leaders to hammer out a plan for defence consolidation, drawing on the example of successful US defence consolidation after a ministerial ultimatum in the early 1990s.
Recognising how hard such changes are to make from inside the system, Heads of State and Government should give their Defence Ministers a helping hand. They should consider ordering fundamental defence reviews – and they should:
• Specify a proportion of national defence budgets that must be spent in common with European partners – or be handed back to the finance ministry.

Operations: the Triumph of Improvisation
The EU has launched 20 crisis management operations to date. The majority have been successful; they have also been small in scale, improvised in execution and limited in their objectives. Only five of the 20 operations have involved more than one thousand personnel and nine have involved less than one hundred. The total number of troops deployed today, around 6,000, constitutes less than one third of one percent of European military manpower.
Member States’ commitment and capacity have been inadequate, and systemic problems have added to the difficulties. Five structural deficiencies have proved particularly damaging.
First, EU members have operated in a strategic vacuum; there has been little evidence of any coherent plan underlying the EU’s interventions.
Though the European Security Strategy provides a good set of general principles, this does not explain why, for example, five out of the 20 operations have been in Congo.
Second, operations have proved inordinately difficult to stand up, for lack of volunteers. The EU High Representative Javier Solana has often been reduced to phoning Defence Ministers in person to secure a single transport plane or field surgeon. The problems involved in getting enough troop contributions for the 2006 mission in Congo, or enough helicopters for Chad, have been public embarrassments.
Third, this reluctance to match words with deeds has been exacerbated by perverse financial incentives. The same governments that take risks by contributing soldiers or assets are also those required to pick up the tab. The current “costs lie where they fall” principle is inequitable, and a further disincentive to individual Member States to volunteer for operations.
A common-funding mechanism (Athena) was agreed in 2004; but it has been applied to date to less than 10% of the extra costs of operations.
Fourth, planning and direction of EU operations has also been dogged by fragmented command and control. Military command can be farmed out to one of seven different military Headquarters in Europe, meaning dislocation and delay at the outset. Worse, civilian operations – those involving the deployment of police or judicial experts – are handled completely separately.
The EU prides itself on its special ability to combine civilian skills and resources for reconstruction and development with military forces for security. It makes no sense to separate the two in the planning and management of operations.
Finally, ESDP operations suffer from “corporate amnesia” -- a collective reluctance to learn from the weaknesses of one operation and apply these lessons to the next. Some of the more spectacularly amateurish improvisations of the early days, such as financing the operation in Aceh on the personal credit cards of the advance party, have been addressed. But the collective preference for declaring each operation an unqualified success has meant that many persistent failings, such as shortage of transport and inadequate communications, have been repeatedly ignored.
After a decade of launching and running EU operations on a wing and a prayer, it is time to move on to a more systematic and professional approach.
This will require:
• Developing explicit strategies for EU interventions. EU operations must be launched on the basis of coherent and prioritised regional approaches, balancing prevention with intervention and combining aid and trade with diplomacy and crisis-management.
• Increasing the number of units on standby for deployment, particularly those always in short supply, such as helicopters, medics, and logisticians.
• Creating a European corps of civilian reservists (‘EuroAid’) to ensure that crucial personnel such as police and government experts are available.
• Compensating the defence budgets of Member States participating in operations, through more common funding and fairer national arrangements for handling unbudgeted costs.
• Establishing in Brussels an integrated, civilian/military, Operational Headquarters for command of all ESDP operations (except the biggest ones run with the help of NATO).
• Setting up a hand-picked ‘round lessons learned’ unit, with direct access to ministers, to tell the truth about how operations have gone, and what needs fixing for the future.

Political Will
Integration of the EU’s security and defence efforts is essential if Member States truly wish to provide for their citizens’ security, defend their humanitarian values in the wider world, and keep the Atlantic alliance in good repair. For nearly a decade, European defence has bumped along the runway, never quite reaching take-off speed. Beginning with the failure to deliver the 60,000 strong EU force agreed in Helsinki in 1999, the pattern of under-achievement is by now familiar: EU leaders commit to ambitious defence goals and deadlines, celebrate inadequate outcomes, move the goalposts, and authorise a further round of “reviews” and “roadmaps”.
Defence policy is particularly tough to change: political will repeatedly breaks on the rocks of financial, managerial, and operational complexity, cemented in place by vested interests. Few MPs want to argue in front of their constituents why their taxes should be spent on helicopters rather than the local hospital.
Building European defence will require strong leadership from Member States, coming from the top. The EU’s presidents and prime ministers need to get personally involved, both within national administrations and in the European Council.
Agreeing to things in Brussels is rarely enough; in defence above all, it is vital to convince national parliaments, opinion leaders, and electorates. EU leaders will agree an update of the European Security Strategy at a European summit in December. It should be put to good use: 2009 should be the year in which Europe’s leaders remake the case for a more active, capable, and coherent European contribution to global security.

The report, published 29 July 2008 :   Re-energising-ESDP-Witney

For informations about European Council on European Relations and/or Nick Witney profile : http://www.ecfr.eu/content/profile/C29/