14 October 2008: Europe's World
EU countries’ armed forces have made some significant strides in reforming and streamlining themselves since Cold War days, says Alexander Nicoll. But he also charts the distance they have still to travel
With more than 70,000 troops now deployed operationally in theatres around the world, the armed forces of European countries have clearly made significant strides in reforming to meet post-Cold War demands. Fifteen years ago, it was scarcely conceivable that so many EU members would sustain so many military personnel on such a variety of deployments. For all that, the number deployed is still a tiny fraction of those European troops technically on "active" service – last year only 2.7%.
Defence reform is a slow process. The Cold War spanned some 45 years, yet nearly 20 years on the nations of Europe are still struggling to change the force structures that had become so deeply entrenched. There are good reasons why this doesn’t happen quickly; you don’t change threat perceptions, doctrines and cultures overnight. Nor can you easily abandon long-running and expensive equipment programmes in which there are many vested interests, and suddenly decide to buy something else instead.
But it is vital that the pressure should be kept up to make armed forces across Europe fitter and more available for operations. There are no signs of any let-up in the demand for Europe military deployments, and equally there is no likelihood that more money will be available. The requirement will be, therefore, for the military to develop greater capabilities and give better value to the taxpayer.
How should we assess a nation’s progress towards these goals? In the Cold War, when crisis management operations and overseas deployments rarely figured, military capabilities were measured by numbers of, say, fighter aircraft, submarines or soldiers, with relatively little attention paid to their practical usefulness. It could now be argued, by contrast, that nothing can be called a capability unless it is usable.
This means that we now need new ways to assess capabilities.
This was the thinking behind a project that the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London has been working on for more than three years. The results of our work so far can be seen in a just-published IISS Strategic Dossier called “European Military Capabilities: Building Armed Forces for Modern Operations.”
The study looked at 41 European countries as the only means to assess capabilities is still to consider each of them nation-by-nation, just as is done in the annual IISS publication, “The Military Balance”. This is because although almost all military operations are multinational, key decisions about them still reside with national governments: on the funding and configuration of the forces that might take part, on whether to participate, and the activities their forces might undertake when deployed. For the foreseeable future, multinational forces will continue to be made up of national building blocks.
Another key assumption was that the main (although not the sole) purpose of European armed forces is to take part in multinational operations. Many European countries no longer perceive direct threats to their sovereignty, and organise their armed forces to deal with a wide range of contingencies, at home and abroad. Some countries still see possible territorial threats, but they nevertheless all take part in multinational operations abroad, and are reforming their forces to do so more effectively. The main thrust of defence reforms across Europe has been to make forces more deployable, more capable and more flexible.
The reforms of the past two decades have also been driven by governments’ strong desire to make defence less expensive. As the number of operations has risen, defence budgets have been falling steadily and significantly. Armed forces are having to do much more with much less. The 41 countries in the study nevertheless spent a total of $283bn on defence in 2006 and last year had 2.6m people in military uniform. Europe’s potential for influencing international security through its military power remains significant, and there are now plenty of military assets to draw on.
It is often said, especially in the United States, that Europe’s military capabilities should be far more robust, and that the nations of Europe have fallen irretrievably behind the US in terms of military power and technology. Yet it is far from self-evident that Europeans’ military capabilities today fall well below what they perceive as their strategic needs. European countries must make their own separate assessments of what they need from their militaries; the United States is not their benchmark. At a European Defence Agency conference last year, a former Nokia executive suggested that European countries still clearly spent too much on defence because they had not yet been forced into the sort of tough decisions that would really save money and increase efficiency.
Each European country has its own threat assessment, and each has its own idea of the role that it wants to play in helping to solve the world’s problems. The key is for each nation to have military capabilities that match its idea of the role it should play. Each will therefore configure its armed forces differently, but if the main purpose of its forces is to take part in multinational operations, then they must be usable. Because the uses to which they are put will probably vary, from providing humanitarian assistance to undertaking combat operations, a very wide range of capabilities is required. Each country needs to create forces with the right mix of skills, training, equipment, doctrine and support systems, as well as being able to deploy rapidly far afield and sustain its troop commitment over extended periods of time.
The IISS Strategic Dossier aims to establish useful yardsticks for analysing national capabilities, and thus considers the defence reforms so far undertaken in each country and the levels of military ambition they set as their defence targets. It also analyses Europe’s defence industry and technology base, because a key element of a nation’s military capability is its access to a supplier base and to advanced technologies. It records nations’ track records on deployments and rapid reaction commitments and it examines the constitutional and legal processes each country has to go through before deploying its armed forces.
So how close are Europe’s military capabilities to meeting present and future demands? The evidence shows clearly that European countries are making advances in shaping their armed forces for multinational operations with each country having given thought to the level and nature of military activity it is willing to undertake. All of Europe’s national governments are making serious efforts to restructure their militaries, and most have steadily increased their overseas troop deployments and committed military assets to multinational rapid deployment forces. To date, the picture is one of qualified progress, and if European countries meet their targets, their collective capabilities will by 2015 be significantly greater than today.
But it is also clear that much more could be done to modernise Europe’s armed forces and make them better equipped to inter-operate with other nations’ troops, and to give better value to their taxpayers.
The most pressing need is to make forces more usable. In 2007, the 41 countries had some 71,000 military personnel deployed abroad on crisis management missions. Indeed, in every year since 1999, the European countries have sustained between 55,000 and 79,000 troops abroad. However, the number deployed in 2007 still represented only 2.7% of all active service personnel, and most European armed forces still fail to live up to their own targets for availability. The NATO goal – that 40% of land forces should be deployable – in any case seems much too low. Why should it be acceptable to taxpayers that any part of a nation’s armed forces cannot be put to use?
Targets should be much higher, and they should also be clearer in spelling out the number and types of forces a country wishes to be able to deploy, and the desired concurrency and sustainability of operations.
Clearer targets would better guide decisions on defence budgets, force structures, equipment programmes and training. In short, they would greatly help to decide what’s needed, and what’s not.
When governments take such decisions, the potential is clearly there for getting better value out of existing defence budgets. There is an in-built imbalance in most countries’ defence spending, with too much spent on maintaining infrastructure and on personnel costs, and too little invested in modern equipment and research into new technologies.
Taxpayers could get far better value from improved management of equipment procurement. Money is wasted by the sheer slowness of acquisition programmes, and this slowness also inhibits the transition to newer technologies. More often than not, European governments fail to coordinate their equipment requirements, even though by doing so the industrial supplier base in Europe could structure itself much more effectively.
Fragmented demand ensures that the European defence industry is fragmented too. Of 41 current procurement projects in Europe with a value of €1bn or more, 30 are projects with only one country as the customer. Just as worrying, Europe’s defence industry has seen no significant new entrants in the past 30 years – in marked contrast to the United States. It should be of serious concern to the governments that are the defence companies’ customers and that demand from them ground-breaking new technologies that no new competitors think it worthwhile to enter the defence business.
The most important determinant of a country’s military capabilities is arguably its willingness to use them. That requires political will, which of course cannot be precisely measured and is also susceptible to change. All countries have constitutional and legal processes that govern the use of armed forces, and this raises the emotive issue of caveats – government restrictions on military activities – which have become particularly controversial in Afghanistan.
The cohesiveness and effectiveness of any multinational force can be seriously undermined if risks and burdens are not hared equitably and it is unacceptable for allies to refuse to come to each others’ assistance on the battlefield. But it must also be recognised that among sovereign states there will be differences of view about the diagnosis of and solutions to international problems.
Sometimes caveats may be the price that has to be paid to obtain the commitment of a country’s military forces. Their ability to impose constraints provides governments with sovereign control over the forces that send into action, and this degree of control is necessary to achieve a domestic political consensus in support of deployment. Even military commanders from countries that have no caveats find they must consider the possible domestic reactions to what they do.
How then should Europe move forward? One important avenue is to improve cooperation between NATO and the EU. European countries should more effectively use the organisational tools they have. NATO and the EU have 21 members in common that should act to align the two organisations’ force development and mission-planning processes. Viewing the organisations simply as tools would leave behind the baggage of the Cold War and of a more ideological view of NATO. It is up to their political leaders to choose the most appropriate tool to undertake a particular mission. Both are available, and both are useful.
There are encouraging signs that cooperation between the two organisations could be strengthened. France has made it clear that it wishes to reinvigorate EU defence efforts, and in its recent defence and security White Paper said it would encourage other EU members to set more ambitious targets for intervention capabilities, along the lines of the original EU Headline Goals. France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy has also indicated that he would like to return France to NATO’s integrated military structure. Progress will depend on how other countries – and particularly Britain – respond to these new French initiatives. But France’s approach – and also that of the United States, which now argues that the world needs a strong European Security and Defence Policy – are welcome in that they seem to be taking the dogma and the fruitless posturing out of the NATO-EU debate.
The policy orientations of the UK and France will, above all else, determine Europe’s ability to have strong and coherent defence capabilities. By any measure, these two countries stand out in Europe as strategic powers capable of significant individual action. Just as they launched the EU into the defence realm with their 1998 St Malo accord, they have it within their power strongly to influence Europe’s future choices. With a Franco-British impetus, Europe could develop capabilities that would enable it to play a much more effective role in addressing international crises while at the same time delivering much better value to the taxpayer.
