EU defense commissioner may face turf wars

The first shots Sylvie Goulard is likely to take will come from the European Union’s closest allies.

By putting the former French defense minister in charge of a new directorate general for defense industries and space, incoming European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has flagged her ambition for Europe to take more responsibility for its own defense.

That’s likely to trigger turf wars with EU national governments, NATO and the United States over who should be in charge of European military cooperation and the West’s lucrative defense industry.

Goulard, a close ally of French President Emmanuel Macron, has been put forward as the next commissioner for industrial policy and the single market. But she will also be in charge of coordinating the EU’s fragmented defense industry on research and development projects to help plug the bloc’s many military capability gaps and make it less reliant on U.S. technology.

By connecting the defense and space remit with wider industrial policy and putting a former French defense minister in the driver’s seat, the nomination suggests a determination to promote “European champions” capable of competing eye-to-eye with the giants of the U.S. military industrial complex.

As a result, Goulard is likely to come under friendly fire from several directions: member states jealous of their control over national defense budgets, armed forces and defense policy; NATO officials concerned that non-EU allies will be excluded from military R&D projects; and a U.S. administration that wants to sell more weapons to Europe and accuses Brussels of discriminating against its companies.

For almost six decades, the EU has done butter, not guns. Spending EU resources on military hardware or even defense research was taboo. That changed after Russia’s seizure of Crimea and the destabilization of Ukraine in 2014 revived the specter of a military threat from the east, and Britain’s 2016 vote to leave the EU removed a long-standing brake on closer European defense integration.

All EU countries except Britain, Denmark and Malta agreed in 2017 to move forward with so-called permanent structured cooperation in defense, signing up to commitments to spend more and work together to plug gaps in areas such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, drones, airlift, cyberwarfare, space-based information and communications.

Provided national governments and the European Parliament agree, the draft seven-year EU budget from 2021 allocates €13 billion to a European Defense Fund (EDF) to promote cross-border collaboration on defense research and technology projects, plus another €6.5 billion to upgrade roads, bridges, rail lines, ports and airports for so-called military mobility, and €16 billion on space programs.

Outgoing Internal Market Commissioner Elżbieta Bieńkowska, who had defense industries and space as part of her beat, stressed that the Commission is not making a power grab for defense policy or creating an EU army — despite occasional loose talk by Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Member states would continue to set their own military requirements, pick their suppliers and determine their own arms export rules.

“Of course, we see and discuss the bigger picture, but we are just starting from zero,” she said. “I don’t think the ambition will be much bigger for the next five years. We need to get established on the ground.”

Bieńkowska had hoped that skirmishes over participation by companies from third countries such as NATO allies Norway, Turkey, the U.S. and Canada — as well as post-Brexit Britain — had ended in April when EU governments and the European Parliament reached a provisional agreement on the rules governing the functioning of the EDF and the accompanying European Defense Industrial Development Program.

But conflict erupted again in May when Washington fired a thunderbolt accusing Brussels of “a dramatic reversal” of three decades of transatlantic defense integration and inserting “poison pills” to restrict U.S. companies from participating in European projects, and threatening retaliation.

The undersecretaries of state and defense warned that the EU plan would produce duplication, non-interoperable military systems, divert scarce defense resources and create unnecessary competition between the EU and NATO. The tone, timing and content of the U.S. letter caused surprise at both EU and NATO headquarters, since the two organizations have been working more closely together in the last two years than at any time in their history.

The issue has dropped out of the headlines but it will be prominent in Goulard’s in-tray, along with persistent suspicions of protectionism and favoritism among non-EU European nations.

Goulard was armed forces minister for just five weeks but that was long enough to get a whiff of the ingrained resistance in the French military-industrial complex to European cooperation. Historic enmities run deep among European arms makers and within individual countries — such as between aerospace companies Dassault Aviation and Airbus in France, or armored vehicle makers Rheinmetall and KMW (formerly Krauss Maffei) in Germany.

Other member states, notably the Nordic and Baltic countries, the Netherlands, and Poland, are suspicious of Franco-German efforts to press EU countries to buy European rather than U.S. equipment.

The Dutch and Nordics say they simply want the best value for money and quality for their limited defense budgets. Swedish aircraft maker Saab is heavily integrated into the U.S. defense supply chain. The Poles and Balts believe they get an unspoken extra level of bilateral defense insurance if they buy U.S. equipment beyond NATO’s mutual defense clause.

Many defense experts doubt whether the EDF seed money will be sufficient to trigger bottom-up pan-European integration, given the urge to preserve defense jobs, know-how and military autonomy in member states. Perhaps only a top-down industrial restructuring, driven by Paris and a post-Merkel government in Berlin, can break the logjam.

Either way, Goulard will need a strong flak jacket as she sets out to make Europe’s defense industry more effective, more rational and more autonomous.

Paul Taylor, contributing editor at POLITICO, writes the Europe At Large column. 

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to correct which EU countries did not sign up to so-called permanent structured cooperation in defense.

Click Here: Cheap FIJI Rugby Jersey