POLICY DOSSIER

Summer 2007

by Edgar Buckley

Fresh thinking and a tough-minded political package is needed to get European defence moving in the right direction, says Edgar Buckley

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European defence is stuck. We are not delivering the new capabilities promised a decade ago at St Malo, or in the Helsinki Headline Goal. NATO and the European Union are not cooperating fully to address new security issues, with ideological barriers often standing in the way of commonsense. NATO itself is in a slow-motion crisis, with weak transatlantic cohesion and urgent operational challenges in Afghanistan not being met. Deterrence risks being undermined as a result. Security consumers – our citizens on both sides of the Atlantic – are being short-changed.

To make progress, we need new thinking. We must put aside the traditional institutional rivalry between NATO and the EU; defence and security contributions from both are essential, and it is intolerable that they do not help each other to the maximum. Arguments about who should do what are counter-productive for us all.

Here is a recipe for a new concordat that once fleshed out and negotiated in detail could be formalised at a EU-NATO summit:
• Drop the traditional objections in NATO to the establishment of an EU Operations Headquarters and planning staff. Some may still see this as unnecessary duplication of existing facilities in NATO, but few could seriously argue that such a headquarters and staff would not strengthen European capability, even if indirectly. Besides, it is part of the political price for progress on NATO-EU cooperation.

• Allow better EU representation in NATO and vice versa. Why not a permanent EU seat on NATO’s North Atlantic Council (NAC)? Why not sufficient European caucusing to support such representation and coordinate European views, particularly if this helps unlock better NATO-EU cooperation in the field?

• Open the way to increased French participation in NATO structures. It’s hard to believe, but such moves have been opposed in the past on grounds of “dining à la carte”.

• Open the way for joint bodies, reporting equally to both institutions, to address shared issues.

• Invite EU leadership of political and humanitarian actions in Afghanistan
A package along these lines, brought forward at the right time and with the right political support, could provide the necessary compromise between the competing world views of the leading NATO allies, which continues to be the major political log-jam in the way of full NATO-EU cooperation. Other difficulties, such as the security clearance stand-off between Turkey and Cyprus, could then be addressed with greater determination.

Along with much improved NATO-EU cooperation in Afghanistan and elsewhere, we need a reappraisal of burden-sharing throughout the security domain. Too many European countries are taking a free ride at the expense of their allies, and the time has come for some straight talking on this. Failure in Afghanistan risks destroying NATO, so any country’s failure to support the NATO effort amounts to a vote to leave the alliance. We need to increase the political stakes on the burden-sharing issue. Countries cannot expect to have it both ways – vote for military action and then not commit the forces needed for it to succeed.

The same holds true for European countries’ military capabilities; we need a new agreement on the national resources to be allocated to defence. Why should one country pay disproportionately for European security when another invests disproportionately in social benefits? A better consensus on equitable minimum input and output contributions must be negotiated.

So far as European capabilities themselves are concerned, we have probably reached the limit of what can be done to foster cooperation between European countries at the level of all or even most of the EU member states. As shown by the limited budget and ad hoc contributions provided so far to the EU’s new European Defence Agency, any significant budgetary sharing at European level is both outside the Union’s acquis and fundamentally inequitable, since member states’ defence spending is neither equal nor proportionate. The next step in building stronger cooperation and eliminating duplication will therefore have to be achieved between groups of countries that do invest broadly equivalent resources and have capabilities that they might be prepared to share in some domains.

There is wide scope for improving efficiency through this sort of approach. Pooling is open to most European countries with limited military resources, and can be implemented at the level of forces, equipment, industry and technology. Cooperation based on pooling is like baking a fruit cake instead of a sponge – the taste is good even though the consistency is not uniform.

Transatlantic defence trade is another issue which is crying out for new thinking. Controls are essential but the forest of overlapping regulations is now a real constraint on capabilities and conceals a growing protectionism that has no place between allies. We need formally to recognise that strong defence industries and technology bases are essential on both sides of the Atlantic, and as a consequence of that to put in place facilitation mechanisms that will speed regulatory approvals for defence trade between allies. Within Europe, as a short term measure at least, we need to create free-trade clusters between the major defence industrial countries.

Missile defence also needs a new approach. NATO has acted commendably quickly to take forward theatre missile defence for deployed forces, but it has largely stood aside from the debate about territorial missile defence. But as we saw from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stance, Europe has real equities at stake. This is not a subject that can be left to the US alone. It is time for a proper debate in NATO on the strategic implications, and a proper assessment of all the options for ensuring adequate security. One of these will surely be for NATO to build an integration capability based on its own multi-layer architecture, which would have significant advantages in being multilateral, designed to cope with all threats (not just ICBMs), and responsive to common needs. NATO needs to put further intellectual effort into these issues, identifying the real issues and choices and addressing also the concerns of countries like Russia and China; and it needs to do so to a clear timetable aimed at the next NATO summit.

We also need new thinking on NATO’s and Europe’s partnership policies. Partnership for Peace, together with enlargement and the special relationships developed with Russia and Ukraine, has been NATO’s greatest achievement since the end of the cold war. But we should recognise that it was the combination of NATO’s military power with the EU’s economic and political weight and magnetism that drove forward the transformation of central and eastern Europe over the last 15 years. But this motor is beginning to lose power.

Changed and globalised risks mean that partnership must change and be globalised too. Partners around the world want to engage with the West across the whole range of their security concerns, not just military ones. And we will need to engage new partners in parts of the world where we have not done so before. To take all this forward, a joint NATO-EU approach is essential. A shared Security Sector Reform Centre, as proposed at a recent partnership conference, could provide one framework element for such a joint programme.

Linked to new partnership approaches, we need to clarify our thinking on enlargement, because in both NATO and the EU we have been giving the impression of late that our appetite for sharing security and economic benefits is weakening. Can that be right? How do we expect to manage an inside/outside Europe, and what are our true options and their implications? We need to find ways of satisfying our neighbours’ legitimate aspirations while maintaining our own security and economic progress. Just focusing on the latter is not enough.

Finally, Europe badly needs new thinking about the environmental and population security issues that are already upon us – global warming, mass immigration and ethnic and cultural divides. What should be the role of our international organisations in responding to these longer-term challenges that are already capable of provoking immediate internal and external crises, such as in Darfur? We need to address these issues more directly and try to reach consensus about how to respond to them.

The strong likelihood is that security crises will occur more frequently in the future, even though it is impossible to predict in what form they will emerge. That means we must be better prepared than we are now to conduct comprehensive crisis management operations together, whether for disaster relief, civilian evacuation, inter-ethnic and inter-state conflict or state collapse. We must therefore invest in the appropriate means and technology. The recent EU decision to devote part of its research efforts to security is welcome, but Europe’s governments must increase their national efforts too.

Industry can help by consolidating its capabilities, developing new technologies to facilitate inter-operability and adapting its offers, for instance to provide more services that the armed forces have traditionally provided for themselves. Training is already substantially outsourced; communications, logistics and other critical support services can follow in the same direction.

We face an uncertain future but one we know will impose acute security challenges. Ideological inflexibility is our enemy. Working together, sharing the burdens and investing in needed capabilities is our duty and best insurance.