In Europe today discussion about security and defense is a two-track exercise. On the one hand, European NATO allies and partners speak of their commitment to the alliance, responding on balance positively to Washington’s call to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense. On the other hand, Brexit and the political churning, confusion, and at times barely concealed disdain that has defined how many a European capital has seen the White House since the arrival of the Trump Administration have revived the idea of a European Security and Defense Union as the second rail of the Continent’s security. Increasingly today one hears of a European Defense Minister speaking in an open forum about the need to revisit the original French idea from the 1950s, or of someone from the European Commission calling for resources to shore up EU security and defense. The Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), once dormant, is preoccupying EU leadership once again, with three initiatives in the making: the Coordinated Annual Review on Defense (CARD), the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), and the European Defense Fund (EDF). CARD is already in play, PESCO was just signed on November 13 by 23 countries at a ceremony in Brussels, and EDF is supposed to be initiated before the end of this year, with the Capability Development Plan slated for Spring 2018. So much for the current state of play. But if the past is any guide, one ought not to be too easily taken in by the interwoven institutional matrix that is, yet again, in development.1
The reality of European defense is much simpler, and frankly harsher, than the current round of institutional adjustments and organizational initiatives seems to suggest. What is once again missing is a discussion of the type of investment strategy Europe’s militaries will need going forward in order to meet the morphing security and defense criteria. Left unaddressed is the fundamental lack of capacity and coherence that has marred practically all good planning intentions since the end of the Cold War. Taken separately, European states have retained, albeit to varying degrees, some elements of core military capabilities, though Britain’s departure will deal this overall picture a serious blow. Yet even with such selective elements of military capabilities in place, Europe lacks the larger architectural vision it needs to coalesce individual states around a coherent EU approach. Without it, national military planning processes will remain a serious impediment to delivering meaningful capabilities for European defense.
The defense ministries are aware that if the European Union is to actually build a larger capability that is more than the sum of its national militaries, national long-term planning can no longer be done in isolation. And yet domestic political constraints continue to rule, especially when it comes to the funding of acquisition programs. Even here, new weapons and systems designs that ought to eventually produce the much talked about “system-of-systems” solutions lag behind because of national procurement policies and the conflicting spending priorities of individual states. In the end, plans for EU defense seem always to follow a familiar pattern whereby a lack of leadership and, most importantly, political will and political risk avoidance reign supreme
There is another important issue that the current round of European debates over defense capabilities needs to address, namely how in an extreme situation the Continent’s militaries would move beyond performing various limited crisis management tasks to ensure that in an all-out war scenario the Europeans and the Americans could work together. Here no country’s defense plans and financial commitments will play a greater role than Germany’s when it comes to affecting Europe’s ability to work with the United States. Germany remains the most important entry point for the U.S. Army into continental Europe, and yet the country has seen an approximately 40 percent overall reduction in the size of its military. These cuts have been accompanied by significant infrastructure reductions, which in turn continue to pose a significant obstacle to the U.S. Army’s prepositioning of stocks. If the U.S. military is to be able to work with its European counterparts, there is an urgent need to ensure guaranteed access to transport infrastructure, plus freedom of movement, as it currently can take up to two weeks to get the requisite permissions and documentation for U.S. forces to move across Europe to position themselves along the eastern flank.
It is a positive sign that Europe appears to be getting serious about addressing the capabilities deficits that have perennially plagued the ever-increasing number of its armed forces. But rather than offering up another permutation of de Gaulle’s chimeric vision of a pan-European security and defense system, the Europeans need to make not just a series of declarations, but also (and most importantly) make their investments in European defense closely aligned with American planning for multiple contingencies in Europe, including the extreme scenario of an all-out war. And as things stand today, there is no better alternative structure available to the Europeans than the NATO alliance, which also badly needs more European resources to remain credible.
1Editor’s note: For more on this topic, see Camille Pecastaing’s “Euromacht: Brussells Über Alles?”