Rank disappointments

Europe’s member states are moving tentatively towards filling gaps in their military logistics.

This August, about 15 years after design work began, an Airbus A400M military transport plane landed in France. EADS, the European conglomerate that owns Airbus, will deliver another 159 of these planes between now and the early 2020s, which should meet all Europe’s strategic and tactical air-transport needs.

That figure provides one crude way of gauging how much – until those Airbus planes are delivered – the EU will be relying on US support for any major operation over the next decade. However, at least the arrival of the A400M demonstrates that the EU is on its way to filling one of the three major gaps in its defence capabilities identified by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary-general. Reflecting on the Libya campaign, Rasmussen told European Voice: “My conclusion is that Europe should invest more in drones and air-to-air refuelling and, on top of that, transport capacity.”

Recent papers by the European Commission and the European External Action Service (EEAS) also push hard for the development of drones (unmanned aircraft) and for air-to-air refuelling capabilities. In the defence community, drones are viewed as the essential eyes and ears of any future operation. They would not be armed, but the insistence on calling them ‘remotely piloted aircraft systems’ is an indication of the political challenges faced in promoting a technology associated with the US’s remote-controlled killing of terrorists in Afghanistan and Yemen.

Despite that association, Europe’s big three – Germany and, together, France and the UK – have been exploring programmes to develop such craft. They may yet need persuading to make the development project truly European.

The EU has, at least, got off the ground in its efforts to address the problem of air-to-air refuelling. Ten countries may in 2014-15 sign up to buy more tankers, for delivery in 2020; and the European Defence Agency is pushing for the purchase of air-to-air refuelling kits that could turn ordinary planes into tankers.

But who should buy and own these kits? The demand from member states is lower than the projected need, which has given rise to a controversial proposal from the European Commission: that the EU could buy and own some assets for its member states (though the proposal avoided naming what those assets could be). In effect, this is the EU joining one of the main trends in the defence sector: the ‘pooling and sharing’ of assets.

Budget cuts are no longer merely thinning out the armed services; entire capabilities may need to be cut, officials say. But, by and large, national governments are not co-ordinating their cuts with other EU (or NATO) member states. The result is ‘specialisation by default’, rather than ‘specialisation by design’. This is aggravating pre-existing weaknesses: the EU had already repeatedly found itself short of helicopters and field hospitals for missions.

There is, though, a countervailing dynamic towards co-operation. Sven Biscop of the Belgian think-tank Egmont suggests that a recent merger of the Belgian and Dutch navies (they retain separate commands) was the only way for the two countries to retain a significant naval presence. The Scandinavians have a long-standing co-operation in many areas. The Visegrad Four – Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary – have just begun co-ordinating their planning, though Poland’s size and its current radical overhaul of its military mean that debate is inevitably imbalanced.

Most importantly, the French and the British have, since 2010, been
co-ordinating their purchases, development and maintenance of hardware.

This regional co-operation falls short of EU-wide co-operation but is at least a step up from every state for itself. The EEAS suggests that “regional co-operation offers perhaps the best prospect for [the] co-ordinating and sharing of reform processes”.

Beyond the gaps on the front line and logistics may lie more capability gaps with enduring implications. Claude-France Arnould, the head of the European Defence Agency, identifies research and development as the defence area most affected by austerity and budget cutbacks. This view is echoed by the European Commission, which wrote in July, that “apart from a few notable exceptions, no European government alone can launch new programmes”. 

Most of that research is done in the private sector. The future of Europe’s defence is therefore inextricably bound up with the member states’ relationships with their domestic defence industries.

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