SECURITY & DEFENCE
The steps needed to move ESDP from theory to fact
Summer 2008
Financial as well as political solidarity is crucially important if the EU’s military capabilities are to be adequately developed. Henri Bentégeat, the French General who is chairman of the European Union’s Military Committee, sets out the practical steps that have already been taken, and that those still lie ahead
Anyone reflecting on the value of today’s European military forces, on their weight in global affairs and on the relevance of their actions needs to keep two crucial questions in mind: Where do we want to go? What do we want to achieve?
The EU’s ambitions were defined at its Helsinki summit in December 1999, and were later formulated in the European Security Strategy of 2003. The goal is to be a worldwide player with a foreign policy of its own that is shared by the EU’s 27 member states. And a foreign policy clearly needs to be able to rely on military and civil resources that can take action.
That is the objective: To be able to manage crises all over the world, aiming at creating a stable situation where conflict threatens to erupt, and at implementing long-term guarantees of peace and stability.
Does this goal mean that the EU will compete with NATO? Honestly, I don’t think so. NATO is a political-military alliance, the EU endorses the development of a community of national destinies. NATO can pride itself on almost 60 years of joint training of allied forces, while the EU’s common foreign and security policy (CFSP) is not even 10 years old and is still working on fine-tuning its constituents parts so as to make them simpler and more coherent. And of course, NATO has the benefit of the military might of a dominant nation, while the EU must depend on the shared voluntary efforts of its member states. So at what level could they compete? It would be more correct, and more in line with reality, to say that NATO and the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) are complementary, and there are two key reasons for that.
The first reason relates to a political fact: There are certain countries in the world that specifically turn to Europe for help. Whether in sub-Saharan Africa or in the Middle East, their populations and governments are more inclined to request, for political, historical or cultural reasons, European rather than NATO assistance. Likewise, there are certain long-term crises, such as those provoked by latent and organised terrorism, for which NATO is better placed to deal with.
Given the current state of its member states' resources, the European Union would be unable, for example, to assure, alone, a western commitment in Afghanistan. At the same time, the governments of Chad and the Central African Republic would have never accepted NATO’s intervention to help resolve the Darfur crisis.
The second reason is of a more military nature. The European Union is building its crisis management know-how on the basis of a global approach. Military resources are only one tool among many others, and generally speaking their mission is clearly defined, limited in time and coordinated with civil actions. As a result, the EU doesn’t need at present the articulated military structure that NATO has.
This synergy between the civil and military aspects of EU action is quite original. It will for quite some time yet require an effort from all parties concerned to adapt old habits, to open itself to new questions and to synchronise organisations and procedures. But its underlying potential is already being felt. The recent creation in Brussels of the Civilian Planning Conduct Capability (CPCC), based on a system comparable to that of a military command chain, offers a demonstration, and above all a guarantee, of cohesive action. And in the same way, at operational level EUFOR force commanders regularly and frequently exchange information with the heads of such EU civil missions as the EUPOL police mission, the EUSEC security reform mission, the EUJUST justice mission, and so on, including, if present, the European Commission’s own representatives. The coordination of all these dynamics in the field is in the hands of the EU Special Representative (EUSR) of the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, with the collaboration, if applicable, of the Head of the Commission’s delegation. The whole organisational structure will be simplified once the provisions of the Lisbon treaty are implemented, as the post of High Representative for CFSP will be combined with that of vice-President of the Commission, thus bridging the gap between the Commission’s assistance and crisis management.
Being able to act: What does this mean at military level? First, that it is necessary to have solid military forces that are suited and suitable to their mission. This means forces whose essential military tasks in the field should be movement, information gathering and, if necessary, combat. Moreover, their main qualities should be resistance – the ability to hold out – and resilience in the psychological sense, meaning the ability to deal successfully with an “intense” situation and to respond to it by exerting the best possible control.
This implies a high level of cohesion, which in the case of multinational forces is not guaranteed a priori. And yet it doesn’t seem unreasonable to say that our Battlegroups are a first response to this requirement because of the military cohesion they offer. As multinational forces that are built either on regional affiliations, or strong bi-lateral relations, they bestow a “European” label on military resources while guaranteeing efficiency in the field. Where necessary, they can be backed up by air and maritime rapid response assets, and thus constitute a fully-fledged military resource for armed intervention in crises with clear space and time limits.
This attractive-sounding structure can’t, of course, be left as largely theoretical constructs. Although these Battlegroups have been created – two of them out of a pool of 15 are at any time on permanent call for six months – none of them has actually been deployed since the Artemis “prototype” mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2003. Time passes and a concept without real commitment in the field may eventually raise suspicions about its relevance.
The European Union also suffers from a well-known lack of capacity as strategic air transport and in-theatre air transport and combat support. The Airbus A400M transport programme, which is to build 170 heavy-lift aircrafts for a number of EU member states, has already incurred delays. As far as helicopters are concerned, everyone is aware of the difficulties encountered in ensuring the availability of the assets needed to launch the EU’s operation in Chad and in the Central African Republic. NATO has had to deal with the same problem in Afghanistan and the UN in Sudan.
For the procurement of these weapon systems and for the related joint training and long-term maintenance programmes, the role of the European Defence Agency is of the most importance. The Capability Development Plan (CDP), which the EDA is developing in close collaboration with the EU Military Committee, aims at fostering and improving solidarity in capability terms, which is what Europe needs.
There are other areas where we need to make progress if the European Union’s military resources are to be brought into line with its political ambitions. One that needs urgent attention is the simplification of our operational planning tools and the manner in which we conduct operations. Interoperability – in the broadest sense of the term, i.e. beyond the merely military signification – merits sustained attention because it holds the key to the success of military missions in today’s environment where information is overabundant, immediate and volatile.
Finally, as all the 27 member states are now trying to reduce public spending in sustainable ways, the financing of the military operations, without which nothing is possible, requires a new approach. The paradox is that those member states that are most heavily involved in an operation, both in terms of human resources and military equipment, are penalised by the financial burden that their commitment to an operation places on their national budget. If political solidarity exists, it needs to be underpinned by effective financial solidarity. Although the military commitments of the EU’s member states are not limited to an ESDP framework, it is here more than anywhere else that this thought applies, given the global political objective laid down in the Preamble of the European Union Treaty and the ambitions set up in the European Security Strategy.
As an integral part of the CFSP, today’s European Security and Defence Policy and tomorrow’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) will only work if the member states responsible for implementing it also allocate the resources that it needs. This implies a Europe-based approach which would take precedence over national considerations once the national and European-level foreign policies become one and the same. And only then will it be possible to say without any reservation that our newly-created Common Security and Defence Policy reflects Robert Schuman’s vision half a century ago of a Europe built on “concrete realisations, which first generate effective solidarity”.